by Gail Dines
Penthouse started with a circulation of 350,000. By February 1970 this figure had grown to 500,000. Miller argues that one major reason for the increase was that Penthouse photos were more explicit, especially in their willingness to reveal pubic hair.44 Playboy, meanwhile, resisted pubic hair by focusing instead on what they called the “girl next door look.” The more explicit imagery in Penthouse was the focus of a number of articles in mainstream magazines, from Forbes to Business Week to Time, all commenting on the willingness of Penthouse to go beyond Playboy’s levels of explicitness. Forbes described Penthouse as being “much bolder. Whereas Playboy bared breasts in the mid-fifties, now Penthouse has introduced pubic hair . . . and kinky letters to the editor on subjects like caning and slave parties.”45 Such articles could be seen as free advertising for Penthouse since they often discussed the competition in a tongue-in-cheek manner, with no analysis of how this publishing war, with its battleground being the female body, could have consequences for the way women’s bodies were represented in mainstream pornography and media. Rather, the articles gave titillating accounts of Guccione’s Penthouse (“his girls look less airbrushed—and hence sexier—than Playboy’s and the copy in Penthouse is more bluntly erotic”) and gave quotes as teasers from Penthouse magazine stories (“Her eyes sparkled. ‘We are in a birchwood. Perhaps you want to birch me. Yes?’”).46 The only topic that was treated with any seriousness in these articles was the impact that this war was having on the financial health of the magazines.
By the end of 1970, Penthouse’s circulation had reached 1,500,000. Hefner decided that he could no longer ignore Guccione and there “began a contest between Hefner and Guccione to see who could produce the raunchier magazine.”47 In August 1971, Penthouse carried its first full-frontal centerfold and in January 1972, Playboy did the same. The change in policy was successful; by September 1972, Playboy’s circulation had risen to 7 million, but by 1973, it began to decline, while Penthouse’s increased to 4 million. To make matters worse for Playboy, the magazine’s advertisers were beginning to complain again about the explicit nature of the pictorials, and high-level executives had to fly to New York to placate them. Eventually, due to the combined pressure of advertisers, internal battles with editors, and the appearance of competitors such as Gallery and Hustler, which captured the more hard-core market, Hefner capitulated to Penthouse, sending a memo to all the department editors informing them that Playboy would cease to cater to those readers interested in looking at the more hard-core images. He would instead return to the magazine’s previous standards.48
Circulation figures from the 1990s suggest that Hefner made the right decision. In 1995, Playboy had a monthly circulation of nearly 3.5 million, while Penthouse reported just over 1 million. One possible explanation for this is that Playboy, in staking out its terrain as the respectable soft-core, lifestyle magazine, still had no real competitor. Indeed, in its promotional material aimed at potential advertisers, Playboy compared itself to Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and Details, and described itself as being about “the way men live in the nineties. . . . Entertainment, fashion, cars, sports, the issues, the scene, the people who make waves, the women men idealize.”49 What is clearly absent from Playboy’s list of competitors is its real major competitor, Penthouse, and what is thus rendered invisible in its promotional description is the pornographic content that sells the magazine.
Penthouse, on the other hand, because it tended to be more explicit in its focus on women’s genitals, simulated sexual intercourse, sexual violence, and group sex, had only one foot in the acceptable “soft-core” market, with the other in the more “hard-core” market. This was probably the worst of both worlds because the magazine couldn’t compete with either. It couldn’t attract the writers or interview subjects that provided Playboy with its markers of respectability and thus its advertising revenue; nor could it attract readers away from the hard-core magazines by being even more explicit, for fear of offending the advertisers it already had.
The magazine that was largely responsible for drawing readers away from both Playboy and Penthouse with the promise of delivering real pornography was the more hard-core Hustler. Within three and a half years of its inception, Hustler reached a circulation of over 3 million, and after four years was showing a profit of over $13 million. It is no coincidence that Flynt published the first issue of Hustler in 1974 because one of the results of the battle between Playboy and Penthouse was a growing acceptance in the mainstream porn market of more explicit imagery, which opened the way for mass distribution of more hard-core materials. Without a doubt, Flynt has had to fight many legal battles, but the groundwork laid by Playboy and Penthouse facilitated his aim of creating the “first nationally distributed magazine to show pink.”50
Understanding the pivotal role that product differentiation plays in capitalism, Flynt wrote in the first issue of Hustler, “Anyone can be a playboy and have a penthouse, but it takes a man to be a Hustler.”51Flynt repeatedly wrote in Hustler that his target audience was “the average American” whose income made it impossible for him to identify with the high-level consumption and lifestyle associated with Playboy and Penthouse. Taking shots at both competitors for being too upmarket, for taking themselves too seriously, and for masquerading the “pornography as art by wrapping it in articles purporting to have socially redeeming values,” Hustler carved out a role for itself in a glutted market as a no-holds-barred magazine that told it like it was, “unaffected by the sacred cows of advertising.”52 From the very first issue, Flynt limited advertising in his magazine mainly to those companies involved in the sex industry (phone sex, vibrators, and penis enlargers being the main wares advertised).
The decision to sacrifice advertising revenue and instead rely largely on subscription-financed revenue paid off—Hustler is the most successful hard-core magazine in the history of the pornography industry and Flynt is a multimillionaire today. Moreover, given the type of magazine Flynt wanted to produce, he had no choice; it seems unlikely that even the most daring of advertisers would select Hustler as the place to market its products. Flynt created a magazine that looks different from Playboy and Penthouse in its print and image content. The first few pages of the magazine are often given over to advertisements from the sex industry, with very explicit pictures of women’s genitals and men’s penises. While Penthouse may have published shots of women’s internal genitalia, leaking or ejaculating penises were strictly taboo in any section of Playboy and Penthouse. Within the first ten pages of Hustler is a regular feature called “Asshole of the Month,” whose centerpiece is a photograph of a male bending over, testicles in full view, and the picture of a politician or celebrity superimposed onto the anal opening.
Although Hustler’s key marketing strategy has been its claim to be the most “outrageous and provocative” sex magazine on the shelves, its centerfolds and pictorials in the early years tended to adopt the more soft-core codes and conventions (young, big-breasted women bending over to give a clear view of their genitals and breasts) rather than the hard-core ones specializing in explicit sexual penetration. Hustler was careful not to alienate its mainstream distributors with pictorials that might be considered too hard-core and thus find itself relegated to the porn shops, a move that would have severely limited sales (Hustler’s success was mainly due to its ability to gain access to mass-distribution outlets in the United States and Europe).
However, Hustler also had to keep its promise to be more hard-core or else it would have lost its readership to the more glossy, expensively produced soft-core Playboy or to the more hard-core pornography sold in “adult bookstores.” One way that Hustler negotiated this built-in conflict was to use cartoons as the place to make good on its promise to its readers to be “bolder in every direction than other publications.”53 Cartoons, because of their claim to humor, thus allowed Hustler to depict “outrageous and provocative” scenarios such as torture, murder, and child molestation that might, in
a less humorous form such as pictorials, have denied the magazine access to the mass-distribution channels.
One recurring theme in Hustler was the construction of the reader as a man who likes “tasteless” humor and no-frills pornography, and lacks the financial ability to live like a playboy and own a penthouse. This image trades on the most classist of stereotypes, one that Hustler has worked hard to promote both in and out of the magazine. In the 1970s, Hustler regularly ran a full-page picture of an overweight, middle-aged white male wearing shabby-looking clothes leaning on a bar, his beer gut spilling over his worn jeans and a glass of beer in his hand. The caption underneath read, “What Sort of Man Reads Hustler?” The answer, of course, is a fat, unkempt, working-class male who drinks beer all day. Flynt told Newsweek in 1976 that Hustler was more interested in attracting truck drivers than professors, and that “we sell to the Archie Bunkers of America.”54
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.”55 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.56 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.57 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.58 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.”59Rather 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.”60 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.”61 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.”62
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.”63 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.”64
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.”65 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.”66 Flynt’s late wife Althea is described as an ex-go-go dancer who was “brazenly debauched,” drug addicted, and destroyed by AIDS.67 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.68 Guccione’s company went bankrupt and Penthouse was bought by Marc Bell Capital Partners.69 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.”70 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.”71 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.72 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.”73
