Youth nostalgia is usually a much more straightforward and acceptable thing, but it kind of seems like any sadness over Playboy’s decision to banish nudity from its magazine should be shoved under a bed and hidden away from those who might think that you’re a pervert for getting wistful over your adolescent days of boob gazing. After all, despite the good that Playboy’s creation did for the ongoing war on puritanism and the impact it had on our culture, it would be hard to argue that the lad mag didn’t slightly overshoot its righteous gains by focusing so much on airbrushed and hollow interpretations of women.
Nevertheless, if you were a boy hitting puberty in the pre-internet era and you got your hands on a copy of Playboy, you didn’t care about airbrushing or the need to not let porn warp your view of women (which speaks to a larger issue, of course) — you were just aware of the raging hormonal war within yourself that fueled a constant desire to see naked women, and you were over the moon to possess it. It’s that past iteration of young men (like me) that are probably feeling some nostalgia today that others of a certain age — namely, those who grew up with the internet at their disposal — just can’t possibly understand, due to the internet making so many things in life easily accessible. In this case, pornography. It’s just there. For free. Always.
I can’t tally the hours I spent as a boy trying to devise ways to see naked women — from trying to catch a fleeting glimpse of a woman’s naked body via a snowed-out Spice channel, sneaking down late at night to our family’s lone cable box to view Skinemax, and all the times I went into a convenience store sure that I was going to grab a copy of Playboy and run out without paying (only to always chicken out) — but it was a substantial amount. These now foreign challenges made it all the richer when the impossible happened and I was successful in my efforts. If you were lucky enough to possess a copy of Playboy, you guarded it like a precious treasure. You were committed to images of Miss July and Miss December, the cheerleaders of the Big East, or some long lusted-after celebrity who agreed to pose nude for a big check signed by Hugh Hefner. The Playmate bio page on the back of the centerfold may seem dopey, but it humanized people a little and, strange as it is to say, there was some innocence to the whole thing.
Internet porn, on the other hand, is far from innocent and its convenience is part of what makes the whole thing seem so much colder. So, on this, the day where it appears to have finally clinched it’s long-rumored victory against the more quaint kind of porn that many of us grew up lusting over, perhaps it’s alright to feel a little nostalgic for the good ole days of Playboy. Technological innovation doesn’t always lead to progress.
