Pornland (6 page)

This implied reader of
Hustler
was as accurate a description of
Hustler
’s readers as the playboy was of
Playboy
’s readers. While both constructions were marketing ploys, they worked in very different ways.
Playboy
is an advertising-driven magazine, and like all such magazines, has to present an “image . . . for potential readers to desire, identify with, and expect to attain through consuming the magazine.”
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Thus, while
Playboy
continued to sell an image of the reader as an upper-middle-class executive, the median income for
Playboy
readers (less than 50 percent of whom have a college degree) in the mid-1990s was $26,000 a year for single men and $41,000 for married men.
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This was hardly a salary that allowed a man to play at the level depicted in
Playboy.

On the flip side, the
Hustler
reader’s median income in 1995 was $38,500, putting him squarely in the middle-income bracket of the
Playboy
reader.
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Despite
Hustler
’s caricatured image of working-class men, few if any actual subscribers, then, would have seen themselves as belonging to the same class as the “Archie Bunker” beer-swigging hustler. One possible reason for
Hustler
’s unusual marketing strategy of presenting the “ideal reader” in anything but ideal terms was to allow the real reader to
not
see himself as the intended reader. This enabled the reader to buy
Hustler
while at the same time distancing himself from this “outrageous” magazine, filled with cartoon images of semen, feces, child molesters, and women with leaking vaginas. For the duration of the reading and masturbation, he is slumming in the world of “white trash,” an observer to the workings of a social class that is not his own.

Hustler
seems to have been successful in its marketing ploy because mainstream publications and academics have bought into the image of the
Hustler
reader.
Newsweek
referred to
Hustler
as appealing to “beer-belly macho,” while
Time
defined it as being the most “vulgar” of sex magazines.
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In an article on
Hustler,
Laura Kipnis suggests that neither she nor the reader of her article (printed in a scholarly collection on cultural studies, targeted to academics), are
Hustler
’s “implied reader.”
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Rather than shedding light on who actually buys the magazine, Kipnis is actually reinforcing the marketing strategy of
Hustler
since no one is meant to see himself as the “implied reader.” The “implied reader” constructed in
Hustler
is someone to be either avoided or ridiculed, certainly not someone to identify with.

However, in
Hustler
’s advertising promotional material, the reader was defined as the “hard-working middle-class American Male” who “makes substantial purchases through mail-order services.”
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It would seem that while
Hustler
publicly called its readers “Archie Bunkers,” it wanted to assure its advertisers that they nonetheless had disposable income by writing “middle-class” on the first line of the promotional material as well as prominently displaying the median income ($38,500) in the reader profile box situated in the center of the sheet. Always the savvy businessman, Flynt is well aware that the image of the reader he constructs
for
the reader would not attract advertisers, so not only does he redefine the reader when looking to sell advertising space, he also provides a more accurate description.

The Playboy and the Hustler: Marketing Hefner and Flynt

Hugh Hefner is probably the first pornographer in America to have achieved mainstream celebrity status. Like his magazine itself, Hefner was marketed as an upscale, high-quality commodity in order to reduce the sleaze factor normally associated with pornographers. Articles on Hefner rarely picture him outside of his opulent surroundings; they are nearly always accompanied by photographs of him lounging on his famous round bed surrounded by “bunnies” or “girlfriends,” flying in his customized plane, or dancing the night away in the fully staffed Playboy mansion. Writers have gone into great detail about Hefner’s daily life, praising the gourmet food and excellent service at the mansion, which “has a staff of twelve which functions around the clock,” the kidney-shaped pool “with [the] inviting nook called Woo Grotto,” and his “rotating round bed.”
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Hefner’s life is cast as the playboy American dream come true: he is a man who works hard, plays hard, and has achieved the ultimate goals in life. A
Forbes
article on Hefner’s success even ran the heading “Hugh Hefner Found Complete Happiness Living the
Playboy
Life.”
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Hefner is presented as the all-American businessman who is “modern, trustworthy, clean, respectable” and is not afraid of hard work, since, according to
Newsweek,
“he works as much as 72 hours at a stretch.”
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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, most of the major newspapers and news magazines carried articles on Hefner the businessman rather than Hefner the pornographer. In these articles the centerfolds were backgrounded and the business success of
Playboy
and Hefner foregrounded. Part of this “playboy” image also involved him being a patron of liberal organizations such as the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws).
Playboy
magazine has often run stories on Hefner’s attendance at parties held in honor of his financial contributions to various causes.

Flynt, on the other hand, is presented as a working-class pervert who carries his poor Kentucky background with him wherever he goes. He is portrayed as low class, uneducated, and vulgar and, unlike Hefner, he has been demonized by the press as a sleazy pornographer. Many of the articles on Flynt highlight his poor beginnings as a way to link his class background with his sexual tastes.
Time,
for example, in an article on the 1978 shooting of Flynt, told its readers that “ever since Flynt came out of the Kentucky mountains to escape the poverty of his sharecropper family, he has led an aggressive life. He quit school in the eighth grade, entered the army at 14, worked nights at a General Motors assembly plant, whizzed through two marriages, two divorces and a bankruptcy by age 21 and finally opened eight ‘Hustler’ go-go bars around Ohio.”
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In a similar vein,
People
magazine referred to Flynt as “a nightmare version of the American dream come true. Born into an impoverished Kentucky family, he never completed high school.”
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Whereas Hefner is represented as a man who has a playboy sex life (good, clean heterosexual sex with young, attractive females), Flynt is cast as a pervert who at the age of eight “lost his virginity to a chicken on his grandmother’s farm” and now runs the “most vulgar of the leading sex magazines.”
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Flynt’s late wife Althea is described as an ex-go-go dancer who was “brazenly debauched,” drug addicted, and destroyed by AIDS.
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While Hefner has been involved with women who were either murdered (Dorothy Stratten) or committed suicide (Bobbie Arnstein), he is the “Teflon pornographer” in that his reputation as a fine, upstanding American citizen remains intact to this day.

This celebration of Hefner and demonization of Flynt helped to obfuscate the connections between
Playboy
and
Hustler
as the two magazines that staked out the parameters of the once hugely successful mass-distributed pornography magazine industry. The success of these magazines is measurable not only in terms of past sales and advertising revenue but also by the role they played in laying the economic, cultural, and legal foundations for the contemporary multibillion-dollar-a-year porn market.
Playboy
was especially important for today’s high-end feature studios since it helped create the idea that porn could be both classy and tasteful. For the more gonzo type of porn,
Hustler
helped build a taste for images that overtly degraded women.

Playboy, Penthouse,
and
Hustler
Today

Times have indeed changed for the three magazines, as the Internet has taken over as a major source of porn delivery, and the porn magazine business is struggling to stay alive. Guccione has come a long way from when
Forbes,
in 1985, put him on its Rich List, estimating his fortune to be about $200 million. According to
Forbes
, by 2003,
Penthouse
had a circulation of only 320,000 and was losing $6 million a year.
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Guccione’s company went bankrupt and
Penthouse
was bought by Marc Bell Capital Partners.
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While the magazine is no longer a moneymaker (
Penthouse
had only twelve pages of ads in the March 2008 issue),
Forbes
reported in 2008 that the Penthouse Media Group is the world’s largest adult entertainment company owing to “a racy collection of 27 social-networking Web sites that Marc Bell and Daniel Staton, company chairman, bought late last year for $500 million in cash and stock.”
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Guccione himself was in deep financial trouble and in 2003 he had to sell off his famous collection of paintings and his thirty-something-room house in Manhattan.

Even though it is a huge business concern,
Penthouse
is not a major brand in today’s pop culture. Bell was even quoted as saying, “
Penthouse
is just another Web site. We are in the social-networking business. We are not in the business of
Penthouse.
”
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The largest networking site it owns is AdultFriendFinder, a site where people can find sex partners. With 22 million active members, it is, according to
Newsweek,
one of the most highly traveled Web sites in the world.
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Penthouse,
through its various acquisitions, has now developed synergy among its different product lines: “
Penthouse
Pets make guest appearances in nine
Penthouse
Executive Clubs, which bring in $4 million in licensing fees a year. Ads in
Penthouse
magazine tout AdultFriendFinder. Members of that site will soon be able to subscribe to an online version of the magazine, which will be delivered as a pdf file, for $1 a month.”
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Penthouse
is not the only porn magazine to branch out into other areas that are more profitable than magazines. Hustler has built a large business empire and Flynt now has a number of Internet sites, the most profitable being Hustler.com and Barely Legal, which specializes in women who look more like adolescents than adults. Some of his more successful businesses include a Hustler Casino in Los Angeles, a chain of sex shops, his adult video productions, and a distribution company. In an interview in 2004, Flynt revealed that the magazine was 80 percent of his business in the 1980s but in 2004, it accounted for only 20 percent, with the rest Internet and video.
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Flynt is thought to be a billionaire by some in the industry, but whatever his wealth, he has been extremely successful in diversifying his business interests.

Of the three magazines,
Playboy
is the most visual brand in pop culture. According to an article in
Multichannel News,
“The overall
Playboy
image remains a potent brand in magazines, television and the Internet, not just in America but around the globe.” Although Playbo
y
Enterprises has been losing money for some time—in March 2009 it reported a losing quarter, with net losses of $13.7 million—its consumer product division continues to do very well. This is because the Playboy brand has penetrated the mainstream like no other pornographic product. Playboy licenses a whole range of products, including underwear, socks, notebooks, pens, watches, and sunglasses, and is always on the lookout for new items. Bob Meyers, president of Playboy media, is quoted as saying, “Our brand is unique in that we have this certain aura.”
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Playboy
launched a cable station in 1982—the Playboy Channel, later renamed Playboy TV—and it quickly made its way into 750,000 homes through 450 cable stations. In 1994,
Playboy
became the first magazine to have a Web site and by the mid-1990s, Playboy launched Adultvision and bought up a number of the “Spice Channels,” as well as Club Jenna, which was originally started by porn star Jenna Jameson. Some of these channels carry hard-core porn, but Playboy has been careful to keep a distance from these ventures so as not to tarnish its soft-core image. Recently Playboy has been strategizing how to get into the mobile phone porn business, and in 2008 the company “signed a deal with THQ Wireless to develop Playboy-branded lifestyle-themed mobile games, which will not have nudity.”
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Playboy is also going into casinos and what they call “Playboy concept Boutiques” that carry only Playboy-branded products. According to Chris Napolitano,
Playboy
’s editorial director, “The whole licensed products business now generates in excess of $800 million in global retails sales in more than 150 countries.”
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