Gonna Miss You, Girl

I read recently that Playgirl magazine is folding. The last issue is the one that is on the newsstands now. I don’t know, exactly, why this news bothers me, but it does.

I hate to see it go. I was a kid in the ’70s when the magazine started, heralded as bold evidence of the women’s rights movement. Equal rights equaled equal access to nudity, even if it WAS mostly poorly groomed men with blow-dried hair and awesome mustaches.

All I knew was it was just another dirty magazine I couldn’t get my hands on. Just like Playboy, Penthouse, Oui, Dude, Gent and a bunch of others I probably shouldn’t list here (much less remember in such vivd detail). So Playgirl hung around for 30+ years, less a part of most women’s lives than it was a tangible icon of liberation from the uptight male-dominated ’50s and ’60s. Something you could point to as a benchmark in gaining equality for women.

Funny thing is, for the past decade it wasn’t a women’s magazine at all; its primary audience was gay men, even while the skeleton staff of three young women who wrote, edited and art-directed it tried to champion the feminist issues of the millennium.

Turns out women weren’t really that interested in a glossy magazine with naked men anymore. Instead they’re flocking to another kind of porn: it’s called the IKEA catalog . . .