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Carl Zimmer, a celebrated science writer, has published a piece about Neil deGrasse Tyson in the January issue of Playboy magazine. Almost immediately after the article started making the rounds on the internet, the question of whether "respectable authors" should publish in Playboy arose.
The discussion largely unfolded on the Google+ profile of Miriam Goldstein, a writer for the ocean science blog Deep Sea News, where a commenter asked, "What is with women who applaud Playboy -- the magazine that strives to reinforce a social hierarchy where men have all the privilege and women are told in no uncertain terms what they're good for?" The conversation shuffled between how pornography socially affects women and how this compares to other "more acceptable" publications such as Esquire and women's fashion magazines.
I will preface this discussion by saying that there are different kinds of pornography and that talking about the way pornography impacts women is akin to making a statement as broad and useless as discussing how literature or film impacts women. The type of pornography that Playboy offers is different from the sort, say, porn producer and sex educator Madison Young offers, which focuses on women’s pleasure as well as couples remaining intimate during pregnancy. Granted, Young’s work is much more recent than Playboy, which has changed little since Hugh Hefner created it in 1953.
"Playboy with a cigar" via Shutterstock.
The role that Playboy played in the "pornification" of culture cannot be brushed off completely, however, as it -- along with other publications of the time, including art and nudist magazines -- played a key role in creating a legal structure that upheld our right to express ourselves in regard to our sexuality, opening the doors to hundreds of literary works which had been banned in the United States since Anthony Comstock's crusade against immorality and sexual expression after the Civil War.
Allow me to paint a picture for you: Comstock used spies, informers, decoys and was not against tampering with the mail in order to capture the immoral, practices which blatantly flew in the face of constitutional freedoms in this country. We're not talking about the sort of porn we see online these days, we're talking about all of that, as well as educational materials about contraception, and all the way to Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Goodbye freedom, hello Society for the Suppression of Vice. Fines leveled against publishers and writers and anyone holding these materials were as high as $5,000 and jail time as lengthy as ten years.
Think about this: in 1877, a man committed to debunking the Bible, taxing church property, and educating the public about birth control by the name of D.M. Bennett ran an underground publication called The Truth Seeker. He was charged with mailing two indecent articles, one of them "How Do Marsupials Propagate Their Kind?" It was no euphemism. It really was about marsupials. Indeed, the suppression of sexual discourse has always come hand in hand with the suppression of literature, as well as that of scientific inquiry. This is something we cannot afford to forget.
The assault against freedom of expression in the guise of protecting the public against immorality continued long after Comstock's death, being taken up by all manner of church organizations and politicians in need of an easy battle to get behind. It was into this environment that Hefner was born in Chicago. And it mustn't be forgotten when mentioning Esquire magazine that the publication was not always what we know it to be today. Esquire was bullied by church leaders and severely weakened by the cost of having to defend itself in court for charges of obscenity between 1942 and 1946. This shift in content is evident if one looks at the issues closer to its inception in 1933. Esquire caved.
George Von Rosen, himself in the magazine business, published nude photography in his magazine Art Photography, a nudist lifestyle rag called Sunbathing & Hygiene, as well as Modern Man, a magazine that offered suggestive images of women along with excellent articles as a means to get around the laws that required publications to have "redeeming social value." Hefner joined Von Rosen's newsroom shortly after the launch of the latter and would eventually take the same combination of imagery and content when launching Playboy a few years later. Unlike Von Rosen's magazine, which was written for the outdoorsman, Playboy would cater to the urban, more intellectual man.
Playboy's contribution was two-fold: it created a Trojan horse out
