Playboy has relaunched. Apparently it did so last month, but I didn’t know about it until a few days ago when I saw a copy of the new – quarterly, I’m told – magazine, with Cara Delevingne in a latex corset with a hand covering her lower frontage, on a male friend’s coffee table.
I greeted this news with a mixture of weary resignation and utter bafflement. The former element derives from the fact that at this particular time and place in my life and in our dismal history, I have largely given up on the very concept of good news. Of hearing anything that suggests progress, enlightenment, intelligent and/or joined-up thinking (particularly of the governmental kind).
And I feel this especially whenever it comes to women and their rights. Why am I mystified by the decision to relaunch a jazz mag? Well, imagine me gesturing at the internet as I say, “Because of this.”
We live in a world – and I’m back to weary resignation at this point – in which any possible taste in matters of the flesh is catered for. There is nothing men can’t find out there. No desire, however mild or sickening, is going unmet in this year of our Lord 2026, I assure you.
It’s into this world that the new team, headed by Anna Wintour’s former protégé Phillip Picardi, has resurrected Playboy. Now, obviously – they say – it won’t be like the old Playboy. This magazine is, according to the accompanying publicity, “respectful”, “modern”, “artistic”, “sensual” and a whole lot of other words designed to obscure the fact that women’s naked bodies are on display for the purpose of separating men from their money and giving them more material over which to expel bodily fluids.
The publicity also often mentions that Picardi is gay, as if to reassure people that the point really is art and not lucratively sating heterosexual male appetites, but I remain unconvinced.
If any of that sounds crass, reductive or unnecessarily cynical, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you’ve been conditioned to think that such images are ever anything but what I’ve described. Because that’s the problem with the porn-saturated culture we’ve become. We have normalised the servicing of men’s not-needs-but-wants to a lunatic degree.
We live in a world in which, for example, Harry Potter star Jessie Cave has made more money in a year from her OnlyFans account than she did from acting. In which she uses her very long hair to appeal to fetishists, though she has had a boob job she describes as “a business decision” and says that, although she doesn’t want to go naked, “I don’t know how long I can last if I don’t start giving more”,
We live in a world in which an industry, as recently investigated and reported by the BBC, has grown up around “agents” coercing women into producing content on OnlyFans and viciously threatening them if they resist or try to stop. (An OnlyFans spokesperson said: “OnlyFans’ relationship is with our creators and fans and we are not connected with, and do not endorse, any third parties including management agencies.”)
We live in a world where many people will call me a prude and a killjoy for thinking like this or for pointing these things out.
But I like to keep things simple. Women’s rights are being eroded. We are being increasingly treated as second-class citizens because we exist in this increasingly, and apparently unstoppably, pornified climate. And vice versa.
Women are bodies, not people. They are servants of desire, not autonomous beings. And so porn becomes easier than ever to justify, ever more lucrative for the people who join in, whether as direct creators like Cave or as creators’ “agents”, or pimps. And so the dehumanising cycle continues.
Those who are able to break it, the people in power, are usually men and don’t have the collective will. And those who have the will – usually women, who are usually not in positions of enough power – are not able.
I took that Playboy magazine and told my friend to keep it out of my and others’ sight. Keep it private. I don’t doubt that he reads the articles as well. That’s really, really not the point.
His bewilderment told its own story and I was too overwhelmed to put my thoughts into words at the time. I’ll send this column to him in the hope that at least one individual will understand.
Hence then, the article about playboy s comeback is not sexy it s depressing was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Playboy’s comeback is not sexy. It’s depressing )
Also on site :