My female readers might not understand this, but many of my fellow male readers will. Playboy Magazine used to be something you tried to get your hands on as a young man. If you were male and teen or slightly younger, the idea of seeing naked women was already enticing enough, but seeing them through pop culture’s most popular nudie mag was almost some kind of status. If you had a Playboy hiding under your mattress, you were one of the cool kids and the boys definitely wanted to hang out at your house. It wasn’t much different for grown men. Stag nights probably featured a couple of issues laying around on a table or bar somewhere.
That was some time ago. Today, Playboy Magazine is a shadow of what it once was. The age of the internet drove its sales into the dirt, as pornography had become free and easily accessible. It found further trouble in the #MeToo era. Playboy attempted to change with the times, even at one point making it clear that the centerfolds would no longer appear nude. Its appeal to the current year fell flat. Nothing helped. The empire once built by Hugh Hefner is all but collapsed.
Now the magazine, only appearing online, is desperately reaching for relevance in an age of wokeness. Its bright idea was to begin featuring models that weren’t even women. They attempted to give the spotlight to transgender RuPaul drag race contestant Gia Gunn, which wasn’t likely to attract men at all anyway, but now they’ve gone even further and invited gay male YouTuber Bretman Rock.
Watch your eyes.
It’s Bretman, bitch. 🌟 Introducing the October 2021 digital cover with icon @bretmanrock
See more: https://t.co/wj2pmXi7lT
Photography by Brian Ziff
Videography by Boa Simon pic.twitter.com/fvG0pIcyax— Playboy (@Playboy) October 1, 2021
Just a reminder that this is supposed to be a men’s magazine and yet, here they are attempting to put a gay man on the cover…for what?
Now, maybe you don’t care about Playboy. Maybe you think it’s disgusting and rotten smut that deserves to sink below the waves and be lost to the annals of time. I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but I do think something got wasted here, and it further highlights an issue with today’s woke culture.
Many corporations out there believe that taking a stand or becoming woke is absolutely necessary in order to stay relevant in today’s society. I don’t think that’s accurate.
Woke culture is, for all intents and purposes, low-hanging fruit. It’s what you go to when you either won’t or can’t think of a better idea in order to have your business gain relevancy. It’s ready-made idealism designed to make your business look like it’s both brave and caring. You, my dear reader, know it for what it really is: ideological fascism so nefarious that it’s a wonder people haven’t woken up to what it is sooner.
You really only head toward woke culture for your business if you’re stupid, ignorant, willfully fascistic and authoritarian, or desperate. There’s a good chance that it could be all of the above in some cases.
Let’s assume, for the time being, that Playboy was simply desperate, and it caused them to sink to the depths that it has in order to grab attention. What could it have done differently? How could it have stayed afloat in this day and age?
For starters, it could have remembered what it was. It was a men’s magazine.
This doesn’t mean it should have elevated the smut levels. Instead, what it could have done, is geared itself toward being a space where men could feel comfortable being men. Where men’s issues could be discussed without interruption from the radical left and things that men appreciate more could have been highlighted. Sports, cars, and yes, even women, but more than that.
Issues such as the rising depression and suicide rates in men could have been discussed and resources provided for those who need them. Questions about things like home defense, help with divorce troubles, and counter-arguments to the anti-male narrative all could have found a home in the digital pages of Playboy.
It could have become a space where men are celebrated for who and what they are, not some feminized idealization and condemnation we see so often.
This would have naturally angered many groups, including mainstream media figures, leftist blue checks, and activist groups galore, but that would have only worked in its favor. Men everywhere would have flocked to the magazine’s defense. It would have bolstered its sales from supporters looking to bring it into the counter-culture alone.
Playboy could have become something celebrated by men, as it once was, but for entirely different reasons now.
Instead, what we’re looking at is a magazine that was chewed up and swallowed by the same wokeness that infects most everything. It made something once great into a sickly creature that no one wants to touch. It’s completely lost its identity and will now be one of the many entities that time forgot.
Wokeness, when you think about it, is a lost opportunity. Like a hard drug that one becomes hooked on and is slowly destroyed by, it takes what could have been and turns it into what never will.
Oh, well. So long, Playboy.
