Playboy puts a man in lingerie on its cover and the MAGA crowd loses it, as they do

…are going to be RHEEEEEEEEE-ing all over the interwebs.

Gosh, thanks for the side order of ableism!

(Also: Playboy is still available in paper?)

Say what you will about Playboy, at least the term “Playboy Playmate” could be construed as suggesting a relationship of equals. Unlike, notably, “Penthouse Pet”.

A man dressed as a bunny on a nearly defunct magazine is no less ridiculous than all the years of women dressed as furry animals. Does anyone even read this relic anymore, even for the articles? I thought we were all getting our porn from the net. If boys want spank material it’s free and at their fingertips (pun intended).

Their lips are moving but all I hear is “WAAAAAAHHHH THE UNIVERSE DOESN’T CATER TO US AND ONLY US ANYMOOOOORRRE!”

Also, note to Lady Gratham: not all of us are straight and will never be, either. Deal with it.

A personal thing but one thing I cannot STAND is self-dramatising, childish fake retching. Like when a grown adult is presented with food which isn’t their preference and instead of saying “oh, not for me, thanks”, they’re like *fake retch retch* urgh that’s DISGUSTING *retch*. So the inclusion of all the over the top retching gifs is just really annoying. It’s a bloody man in a not even very revealing outfit, for gods sake. Are they so repulsed by their own bodies? Just GROW UP.

@Jess

Now degeneracy has even tainted our wholesome porn? Won’t someone think of the children?

Lol.

So they’re merging Playboy and Playgirl now? Bold move. ?

I do have personal memories of Playboy, though the videos and not the magazine. After my mother moved out, my father sometimes rented softcore porn VHS (this was during the late 1980s), mainly Playboy ones, and didn’t particularly care if his kids watched. Note: when that started, I was 14 and my brother was 9. He was not a good person. Anyway, seeing the girl-on-girl scenes helped me realize I was bisexual. But there were some things about it that rubbed me the wrong way, though I couldn’t have easily explained it at the time.

As an adult I figured them out: For one thing, there were a lot of scenes which women were just kind of “there for the taking”, for lack of a better description, even if it was depicted as consensual. I mean, while I fully embrace the label of “slut”, I wouldn’t react *that* positively to attentions from a random stranger, I don’t know anyone else who would, and I would be weirded out if anyone I hit on acted like that. I’m aware it’s a fantasy, but that’s really not my fantasy. And I’m also aware of how damaging it is when poorly socialized men idealize that kind of behavior in women.

For another thing, the women are usually portrayed in ways which are nonthreatening to fragile male egos, sometimes in ways that also felt subtly infantilizing. Yeah, no. You want me to pretend to be that way, you pay me. My own ego is fairly robust, and I’d prefer to date people who are the same, regardless of gender.

I also have a memory of a scene where a woman was repeatedly molested by a doofy, Benny Hill-esque man, and while she didn’t reciprocate his “affections”, she also wasn’t very forceful in getting rid of him and seemed more mildly annoyed than distressed. I wanted to hit him and chastise her for being spineless. Not 100% certain this was one of the Playboy ones, though.

The one positive point that I can say about them is that I saw more intimacy and less stunt sex than industrial hardcore porn, though that’s hardly enough on its own for me to consider it “good”.

I notice many of those comments speak about this being something “they” are doing. Some folks are very desperate for any move away from post WWII societal attitudes to be a conspiracy because they really don’t want to admit the truth: their views are no longer popular, and they are being left behind.

Playboy magazine went all digital last year. The weird thing is, a quick google doesn’t bring up a place to specifically read new issues. There’s a big archive on Playboy.com that you have to pay to access, so I guess the new issues are there? The site seems to exist mainly to sell merch. They’re trying to sell NFTs, too.

@Alan
Where I am it’s the opposite: you pump your own in rural areas, but in the city you’re legally required to let the attendant do it. Until a few years ago there was no self-service at all in the state.

I wish more men would wear lingerie . it’s really hot.

Hey, he might BE a playboy, just with other boys.

I didn’t know Playboy was still a thing that was on paper, where boys could see it. Is Playgirl (aimed at men, despite the name) still a thing?

Is any teenage boy in America needing a magazine to look at nude women who are heavily airbrushed and not moving?

(Narrator: No, of course not. As the song goes, that’s what the internet is for.)

Anyway, well done to Playboy for managing to get some interest and riling up all the worst people.

I think for men [lingerie] is often considered something of a joke or novelty item.

Personally, I find the English concept of “lingerie” curious, and still somewhat foreign. The underlying idea certainly exists in Finnish culture, too, but you’d have to express it differently.

Lingerie seems to mean alternatively “underwear for women”, “sexy underwear” or “sexy underwear for women”. Sometimes used ironically for underwear that doesn’t fit some/all of these definitions. There are complicated interrelations between female/male gender presentation, culturally coded femininity/masculinity, culturally coded sexiness, culturally coded kinkiness and the specific fetishes of specific people like myself.

The notion of wearing sexy underwear in everyday life, as opposed to special occasions, is especially odd to me as a straight man. Who is it for, anyway? Do women commonly go out of their way to look sexy under their street clothes, because they feel it’s important? Or is it generally possible for women to have practical/affordable underwear that’s also sexy, if only because any feminine designed underwear is coded as inherently sexy? (By “commonly” I don’t mean “most women most of the time” but rather “it’s a thing people do”.)

Some kinksters do regularly wear impractical fetish gear under their street clothes, to feel sexy all day, but that’s fairly uncommon, and it’s certainly not my thing. I like my everyday underwear cheap, comfy and simple. I could very well pose erotically for a partner, if I had one, and sometimes I do pose for a mirror. I also like feeling sensual in fetish gear, but that’s different from feeling I look sexy, and it’s not something I could do much of the time without getting inured.

There seems to be little cultural consensus of what even constitutes “sexy” underwear for men – though that might be because I intuitively expect something fairly specific, since my own personal concept of sexiness is fairly specific. I do have some clothing fetishes that aren’t particularly feminine coded (hah) and also aren’t necessarily sexy or kinky in conventional sense, regardless of who wears them. As a kinkster, I’d presume to accommodate my partner’s wishes within limits, but only on their explicit specific request, rather than trying to present sexy in some generic sense.

Me, an ESL learner: So, what kind of underwear exactly is “lingerie”?

Victoria Wood: It’s complicated.