Playboy Magazine Has Finally Jumped The Shark



For most men, Playboy -- like Rolling Stone -- jumped the shark into the aqueous, saline realm of total irrelevancy somewhere between the freshman and sophomore years of college. The airbrushed images of the "All-American Girl Next Door" ceased to matter to the fevered adolescent mind. It just no longer mattered. Apparently Playboy, undeterred by it's lack of cultural-sexual lifeforce, has published a list of the 55 most important people in sex in the past 55 years. Not a single African-American, we cannot fail to note, is on that list. WTF? African-Americans are not sexy? Or is it just "African-Americans are not sexy to Palyboy's carefully crafted Long-Island-contractor-aesthetic" (Averted Gaze)? Did not James Brown liberate Elvis' hillbilly pelvis? Were would the sexual liberation of American Rock and Roll be without the dubious influence of Chuck Berry's errant "dingaling"?

If an irrelevant magazine publishes a list and no one reads ... From Daniel Radosh of TheDailyBeast:

"This month, on the occasion of its 55th anniversary, Playboy published a list of the 55 most important people in sex from the past 55 years. Number three on the list is the magazine’s founder, Hugh Hefner. Number eight is Timothy Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web. Both men irrevocably changed the modern experience of sex, one intentionally and meticulously, the other inadvertently and chaotically. The half-century between the two marks a profound cultural shift that has for all intents and purposes doomed Hefner’s magazine—even as Playboy, or an updated version of it, has become more necessary than ever.

"... Without a single black person on it, it makes no recognition of the influence that African-American sexual culture has had on American society at large. The black-power movement of the 1970s was intertwined with a celebration of black male prowess. And hip hop’s sexual (and frequently sexist) swagger has become the erotic lingua franca of young Americans of all races. I proposed to Rowe that these should have been represented by, for instance, Richard Roundtree and LL Cool J. He admitted he should have considered them, but still put them in the gray area of 40 to 100."

How about Pam Grier? How about Prince? How about Wilt Chamberlain? How about -- for that matter -- Latoya Jackson, whose pictorial estranged her from the kooky Jackson family and became the best-selling issue of the magazine at that time? What about the romantic crooning efforts of Luther Vandross and Al Green who are probably, between them, responsible for a significant percentage of North American births between 1975-2000?