The Penthouse View

by Michael Schaffer

MARCH 23, 2009 TAGS: MAGAZINES, PORN, BUSINESS ADD A COMMENT

In early March, as the media industry reeled from the deaths of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, rumors circulated that an even more famous dead-tree publication was about to bite the dust: Penthouse, the 40-year-old adult magazine that once dethroned Miss America and disrobed Madonna.

Was it true? The chief operating officer for the magazine’s owner was quoted by associates saying he was shuttering the money-losing title. Not so, said the chief executive officer, noting that such a thing would have to be disclosed as part of an Initial Public Offering aimed at raising capital for the firm, whose main business is a website called Adult Friend Finder. But even that denial underscored how far the brand had fallen: Penthouse was now a puny piece of an Internet corporation more concerned with upcoming IPOs than scandalous centerfolds. The news didn’t even appear in the tabloids that used to cover the rag’s rakish founder. Instead, it showed up in Valleywag, a website that covers the high-tech industry.

Penthouse’s neighbors on the rear shelves of America’s newsstands are also having their troubles. At archrival Playboy, videos and web properties are now as big a deal as the magazine, where circulation is less than half what it was during the 1970s. The print and online operations were merged last year; February’s issue was just 122 pages. CEO Christie Hefner, the daughter of the magazine’s legendary founder, resigned in late 2008. Downmarket Hustler, meanwhile, has also transformed itself into a multimedia firm with DVDs, dirty web content, and even a video game (don’t ask). The actual paper magazine, whose legal battles inspired the Milos Foman film The People Versus Larry Flynt, almost never makes the news. Printed smut, it seems, is as doomed as printed coverage of school board meetings.

It’s hard to get too worked up about the end of the dirty magazine. Where shuttered newspapers’ dispassionate coverage of civic affairs may go unreplaced in the Internet era, there will always be more pictures of naked people available. Indeed, the demise of paper smut is less about Americans tiring of erotica than about the Internet being able to provide a better version thereof — free, private and specialized for every fetish.

And yet the transformation from paper porn to vapor porn still says something about our society. Not long ago, the skin magazines and their swashbuckling editors — Bob Guccione at Penthouse, Hugh Hefner at Playboy, Flynt at Hustler — were legitimate celebrities, influencing the country with their schemes and scandals. Hefner’s descriptions of the Playboy “lifestyle” were an early salvo in the sexual revolution. Later, Flynt’s vastly raunchier publication fought the law to keep itself in business, clearing the way for today’s more permissive understanding of indecency laws. Guccione’s Penthouse, aiming for the middle ground in what wags called the magazines’ “pubic wars,” helped create the current fascination for celebrity voyeurism, acquiring and printing old nude pictures of notables such as Miss America Vanessa Williams (who quickly stepped down) and pop sensation Madonna (who eventually one-upped the magazine by publishing her own nude pictures in book form) as well as persuading Clinton-era celebs Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones (twice) to undress for his cameras.

For newspapers, which so recently fetched astronomical prices on the open market, the reversals of the past year have been a shock, with many veterans unable to understand why their industry’s vaunted professionalism mean so little to the blog-perusing general public. Not so for smut merchants. Porn, so often in the vanguard of media technology, has been reeling for a decade in the face of the same basic phenomenon: The democratization of both production and distribution. When you need elaborate cameras and lighting to film a dirty movie, it’s an expensive venture. When you need a cheap handheld digital camera, it’s not. And when you need a printing plant and a newsstand network to distribute your smut, it’s a lot harder than when you just need a URL and an internet connection.

As for the other elements that differentiate pro smut from amateur — scripts for movies, photogenic models for pictures — they matter about as much in the market as that dusty collection of Pulitzers in the editor’s office of the bankrupt local daily. That’s especially true for the other staple of the dirty-magazine era: the quasi-celebrity impresario atop the skin empire.

At Penthouse, that particular aspect of the brand identity has already ended. Guccione, the gold-necklaced showman who started Penthouse as “the magazine of sex, politics and protest” before opting to turn it into the magazine of explicit genital depictions, resigned in 2003 as the magazine faced bankruptcy. In a wistful interview as the waters rose, Guccione credited his magazine, the first newsstand rag to show pubic hair, with pushing the envelope in ways that enabled highbrow creative programming like that of HBO. For better or worse, a publication without a deep-pocketed, publicity-seeking honcho might not have been able to do that. But, like every other anonymous smut site on the Internet, Penthouse isn’t that sort of title anymore.

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Michael Schaffer’s book One Nation Under Dog will be published March 31.