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ATOMIC DOG
The Influence of Playboy


The Atomic Dog is a weekly feature that isn't necessarily about weight training or bodybuilding. Sometimes it's about sports in general, sex, women, or male issues of some kind. At times it's inspirational, but it can also be informative, funny, and even a little weird, but hopefully, always interesting and a little controversial. We hope it reflects the nature of Testosterone magazine in that, just as no man is completely one-dimensional and only interested in one subject, neither are we. If it makes you think or laugh — or even get angry — it's served its purpose.

It's the midnight ride of TC! One if by land, two if by sea!

Hey, I've got photographic evidence. I'm not just some troublemaker shouting "fire" in a crowded massage parlor. This is serious stuff.

The amazing thing is that it took a woman to point it out to me. There I was, flipping through a recent Playboy, scanning to see if they'd discovered any especially tasty morsels that might transcend their centerfold status and become part of popular culture, when she stuck her finger smack-dab into a cellulose hoo-hah and said, "What is that?"

Momentarily confused, I didn't know what she meant...until I looked more closely at the vagina. Sure enough, it looked odd.

It was barely a slit. The color was uniformly the same as her flesh without a hint of capillary infusion. Neither was there a hint of the labia minora, which isn't necessarily that odd, but something about the whole package looked strange. It was just too small, too pale, too tidy, and too shy.

Maybe the Playmate was a veteran of the Iraq war, the victim of a roadside bomb that had blown off her vagina. Sure, they'd just fitted her with a pink-colored prosthetic made out of one of those old-style vinyl change purses that insurance agents used to hand out.

The "Playmate Data Sheet" indicated her ambition was to work with animals and to travel the world and that her turn-offs included "rudeness" and "bad hygiene" (imagine that), but nowhere was there mention of military service.

Hmm. I quickly flipped to the "Girls of the Big 10" pictorial. They too, had odd-looking female parts! Same with the "Girls of Wal-Mart" pictorial!

There wasn't a loose lip among them. No hoo, no hah. And in many cases, the top of the vulva seemed to have been lopped off, as if some Puritanical airbrush artist had taken it upon himself to turn these flesh and blood mannequins into real mannequins, devoid, of course, of private parts.

What in the previously wide, wide, world of snatch is going on here?

Howzit gonna' avail ya', when ya' got no genitalia? Playboy has always been famous for airbrushing away any imperfections, but it seems they've now turned their attention to the vagina.

Could it be that Hugh Hefner, in his old age, has developed a little bit of an obsessive-compulsive disorder? Perhaps Hef, in addition to having an aversion to excess lettuce hanging over the edge of his sandwiches, loose locks of hair, and a lack of hospital corners on his bed, insists that his hoo-hahs be as trim and tight as the sails on an America's Cup schooner.

Given that Testosterone is PG-rated, I can't show any examples, but I can give you a pretty good approximation. Take a look at the picture on the left. It depicts President Bush's face when he's cipherin'. The picture on the right depicts an equally befuddled Jennifer Aniston.

Now look at their lips. Those on the right are a fairly accurate representation of what the average hoo-hah looks like, while the ones on the left represent the typical Playboy version.

Maybe you're wondering why I should even care what a dinosaur magazine like Playboy does or thinks. That's probably a somewhat valid point, but if you're over, say, 30 years old, you probably don't realize the part Playboy played in most men's lives while they were growing up. Neither do you realize the role the magazine played in developing our current sexual culture.

Hugh Hefner was 27 in 1953 when he laid out the first issue of Playboy on a card table in his Chicago apartment. He'd borrowed $8,000 and he spent $500 of it to buy the rights to some nude photographs of Marilyn Monroe.

This first issue also contained an editorial penned by Hefner. It described what was to become known as "the Playboy Philosophy":

We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.

What a load. Still, guys who were 50's and 60's versions of TV's Earl suddenly saw themselves as sophisticates, as playboys. Within five years, Hefner was selling a million copies a month. At its peak, in the seventies, Playboy sold over 6 million copies a month and it continued to thrive into the 80's.

Playboy also became known for publishing articles by famous mainstream authors, thereby allowing men to buy the magazine under the pretext of wanting to read the articles. Most of the articles were throwaways, though, and Playboy's lower-rent competitors were the ones publishing the truly innovative work.

Prior to the widespread use of the Internet, men depended on Playboy and its knock-offs to get their fill of naked pics of women. There was no place else to go. And for young boys, me among them, Playboy was hallowed ground. With trembling hands, we'd hide issues in the closets, under our mattresses, under a loose floorboard, in our pants (oh!), anywhere we thought mom wouldn't find them.

But it wasn't necessarily whack-off material. Somehow, it would have seemed wrong to splooge on the angels depicted within. These women were to be worshipped as unobtainable feminine ideals. These women were the ones who'd someday shun us and tell us "drop dead" if we mustered up the courage to talk to them. As such, they deserved our geekish veneration.

Playboy mags were never thrown away. They were carefully preserved and archived, like National Geographic which, ironically, was where men of the previous generation had gone to see naked women, even though their 3rd-world, sun scorched, gravity abused breasts weren't quite as appealing.

I've subscribed to Playboy for about 20 years now and I can't really explain why. I suspect it's just habit, or sentimentality. The mags occupy a dusty shelf in my closet and I haven't had any reason to look at back issues until now.

Looking at them, though, seems like looking at a naked time machine — a long naked conga line of beauties arching their backs into the pulchritudinous past.

As I look at the old issues, it's difficult to say whether Playboy influenced the feminine ideal or merely reflected it. A case can be made for either scenario.

While it's often said that beauty is ever changing, skin-deep, and superficial, that line of thinking is largely bunk. Regardless of cultural preferences, two things remain timeless and irrefutable markers of beauty: facial symmetry and the mystical .7 waist-to-hip ratio, or WHR. If you haven't heard of the WHR before, Professor Devendra Singh of the University of Texas at Austin originated the concept in a paper he wrote in 1993.

Quite simply, the .7 WHR reflects the size of the waist to the size of the hips. Non-obese men, obviously, have a WHR closer to 1, while non-obese women, more wasp-waisted, have a WHR smaller than 1, the ideal being close to .7.

Singh came to the conclusion that across the ages, across cultures, regardless of body fat levels or preferences for fuller breasts or butts, the .7 WHR remains a rock solid predictor of female desirability and it's tied directly to endocrinology.

Estrogen, quite simply, inhibits fat deposition in the female waist and stimulates its accumulation on the gluteofemoral region, thus accentuating the .7 ratio and thus signaling the primitive inferior temporal cortex of the male brain that the woman in question is as ripe and as primed for birthin' babies as a libidinous lagomorph, which, not surprisingly, just happens to be the Playboy logo.

For its entire history, the Playboy centerfold has reflected this magic ratio, regardless of whether you were looking at the American edition of Playboy or the Brazilian, German, Croatian, Italian, Polish, Japanese, or Taiwanese version.

Case in point, a female friend recently brought me back a copy of the Brazilian Playboy. The centerfold had smaller breasts and a bigger bottom that is typically seen in an America centerfold. Surprisingly, despite the fame of the Brazilian wax job, the model had a full bush, as dark and foreboding as the Amazon jungle itself, complete no doubt with its own pygmies and wonderfully colorful macaws that arise at sunrise each morning to fly en masse to their fruity feeding grounds before returning at sunset to spend the night in their cozy enclave.

Despite these differences, the centerfold had a WHR of approximately .7.

However, I've been noticing a funny thing in the American version of the magazine. In addition to the nipped and tucked hoo-hahs, the typical Playboy centerfold is changing. She's getting softer. She's getting further and further away from the hard body look of the 90's. Some even have WHR's that look to be approaching .75 or even .8.

Likewise, there's at least a slight, sporadic movement back to natural breasts. Butts are flatter and in some cases, flabbier. Omental fat has, in many instances, taken the place of flat, hard bellies.

Take a look at the following centerfold model, Stacy Sanches, from March of 1995. Stacy is clearly a hard body. She lists lifting weights as her hobby. Her body fat level is probably a respectable 15%.

Now look at a Playmate from last year, Monica Leigh. She's clearly softer than Stacy, with a much higher body fat percentage. She likes boating and snowblading and dancing and her trips to the gym—if she even goes — probably consist of Pilates or Bosu ball gymnastics.

Likewise, the following recent Playmate displays a belly and overall softer look that's more reminiscent of Playmates from the 80's: 

Beyond all that, it's amazingly difficult to find a really sexy picture in the Playmate of the month feature. Yes, yes, they're all naked or nearly naked, but the pictures aren't titillating. They're cute and quaint and almost antiseptic. In fact, the ads in Playboy are often sexier than the photos.

Maybe you don't have to look further than the Playboy West Coast Editor, Marilyn Grabowski, to figure out what's happening. Ms. Grabowski has been in charge of the centerfold for 40 years now. Working in conjunction with Hef himself, the two pick all the shots that appear in the centerfold pictorial.

I suspect that Ms. Grabowski, surely menopausal now, has long since lost her .7 WHR and is now, at least subconsciously, less in tune with what men like. Likewise, Mr. Hefner is probably hormonally challenged himself, despite the heroic pretense posed by living with seven beautiful blond women who, like the seven dwarves, must toil mightily to get the job done.

Of course, I understand that Hef has recently culled the herd down to three women. I guess we all slow down.

The inescapable truth is that Hef's and Ms. Grabowski's glands are too withered to recognize a truly sexy picture, but despite the marginal photos, the annoyingly formulaic features, the lackluster writing, the recycled jokes, the bad advice, pictorials of stars we don't want to see at all, let alone naked, and the overall out-of-date feel to the magazine, I think Playboy still influences the look American women strive for.

American women seem to have opted for a softer, less toned, less muscular look, just like the one apparently prized by the Playboy magazine of the 21st century. Personally, I prefer the slightly harder look of the 90's Playmate, but Hef never bothered to consult me.

Oh well, I just hope American women don't try to get rid of their vaginas, too.

© 1998 — 2007 Testosterone, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

 

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