Guess it was a thing.
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…I never thought this kind of thing really happened, until one night I was walking down 28th Street and…
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I used to find Penthouse and other nude magazines when GIs were ready to ship off from the nearby Army base. Every so often there would be a box with a few dozen (or hundred!) near the dumpster of the nearby apartments. Lots of other magazines too, such as Penthouse’s sibling publication “Omni”. And even “Dragon”!
It was my introduction to the strange and disillusioning world of softcore not-porn. How and why is/was Penthouse considered “pornography” by most people if there was never any actual sex in it? It’s not unlike the whole Skinemax / grindhouse phenomenon of movies which lured people with an interest in seeing sex - yet had no intention of showing any. This has always perplexed me. Sure, show erotica, show not-erotica, but why the deliberate grey-area in between? It puzzled me then and still puzzles me now. I still suspect that it’s a symptom of living in a culture with schizoid attitudes about sexuality.
That said, Penthouse was an OK magazine, text content-wise, at least until the mid-80s. I haven’t read it since I was a kid.
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GuyFi? Strikes me as unnecessarily gendered for no particular reason. Why market it only to men?
What I want to know is, which offshore crime lords are buying them?
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It’s an AI running on an abandoned communications satellite.
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THANK YOU! How did we get this far in this thread without that joke in don’t eve know@
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Some time in the 90s, they switched to publishing actual pornography. I think it was gradual: they had women engaging in heavy petting, then they introduced hetero situations, then it was just flat-out bringing in porn stars for photoshoots, all in a vain attempt to boost circulation. They switched back to softcore after they went under.
As far as the rest, well, the reason they consider nudity to be pornography can range from everything from religious objections to people who take just about any combination of objectification and sexism etc. to be pornography. Me, I married into a family where it’s a little from column A, and a little from column B; my wife is so extreme that she has described some broadcast TV situations as being “pornographic.”
Unique, too. Better get on that while they can.
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As a motel ‘maid,’ I would find Playboy or Penthouse left behind in a room I was cleaning often enough that I didn’t need to pay for any. Later on — circa 1980 — I knew one day that I had reached adulthood when I went to the drugstore near my house to buy Penthouse. I’d been buying it for years by then anyway, but that day, the woman behind the counter asked how Mom was doing. “Oh, she’s just fine,” I said as I handed over the cash.
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