Playboy Magazine

Launched by publisher Hugh Hefner in 1953, Playboy magazine became a huge commercial success by combining soft-core pornography and up-market lifestyle features for men in one magazine. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, its soaring circulation became the basis for an international business empire embracing publishing, movie production, and a chain of nightclubs, casinos, and hotels. Playboy's success marked not only a transformation in American sexual morals and a greater legitimacy of pornography within mainstream culture, but also the ascendance in U.S. society of masculine identities that eschewed moderation and the work ethic in favor of hedonistic consumption, recreation, and personal gratification. Its mascot, a white rabbit sporting a bowtie, symbolized this model of masculinity by connoting affluence, sophistication, lighthearted leisure, and sexual license.

Playboy was highly controversial throughout the 1950s and 1960s, facing opposition from moral crusaders, who viewed its nude pictorials as lewd and indecent, and from the growing feminist movement, which objected to what it considered to be sexual exploitation of women. Playboy was nonetheless a publishing triumph. Monthly sales climbed to nearly 1 million by 1959 and to more than 4.5 million by 1969 as Playboy became a totem of the Sexual Revolution. Primarily appealing to urban, white, middle-class men, its circulation was highest in the East, California, and metropolitan enclaves in between. Playboy also successfully pitched itself to a young market, with college students comprising over a quarter of its readership. Although Playboy posed as a champion of foot-loose bachelorhood, during the 1950s married men made up slightly more than half its readership, perhaps because they were attracted by the magazine's vicarious fantasies of independent hedonism.

In 1960 the first Playboy Club was opened in Chicago, and by 1967 Hefner owned seventeen nightclubs and hotels. Based in cosmopolitan cities such as New York, Miami, and San Francisco, and staffed by scantily costumed female “Bunnies,” the Playboy Clubs boasted a membership of half a million during the late 1960s and turned an annual profit of nearly $25 million. Merchandising items of stylish male consumption—including ties, cigarette lighters, golf clubs, and polo [Page 362]shirts, all emblazoned with Playboy's Bunny insignia—was another lucrative sideline.

A 1962 photo of Playboy magazine publisher and editor Hugh Hefner, surrounded by “bunnies” who staffed his Playboy clubs. Hefner's model of masculinity, characterized by bachelorhood, affluence, sophistication, leisure, consumerism, and freewheeling heterosexuality, challenged the post–World War II model of the married suburban father and heralded the 1960s Sexual Revolution. (From the collections of the Library of Congress)

Much of Playboy's success lay in its appeal to a new generation of upwardly-mobile men whose gender identities were pre-eminently constructed around leisure and personal consumption. Playboy's inclusion of semi-pornographic content established it as an avowedly masculine and heterosexual magazine; its features and advertisements dealing with fashion, entertainment, foreign travel, and interior décor grounded masculine identity in the universe of modern consumerism; and its literary features, political commentary, investigative journalism, and interviews with major public figures were intended to infuse this new model of American manhood with cultural sophistication.

In September 1972, Playboy's circulation exceeded 7 million—its highest total ever. During the mid-1970s, however, its image began to look anachronistic as competing titles such as Penthouse (a British magazine launched in America in 1969) and Hustler (launched in 1974) offered more sexually explicit material. Playboy's dipping sales prompted marketing reappraisals and cost-cutting measures that ultimately led to the closing of the Playboy Clubs in the 1980s. During the late 1990s, however, Playboy's international circulation still totaled 4.5 million, while steady expansion into video sales, cable TV, and Internet services maintained the financial success of its parent company, Playboy Enterprises.

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