Three cheers for the Internet!
"The bastards lost!" cry the Freeeee-dumb fighters.
"HA HA HO HO HEE HEE," giggle people who aren't among the 100's laid off (and not in a good way) at the magazine companies.
Free Internet smut is all over the torrents and blogs and search engines...the newsstands? It's all over for the two biggest men's mags of the past 40 years.
IF I'M BEING HONEST, the surprise concerning the fate of Playboy and Penthouse is that it took so long. FREE PORN, after all, is what fueled the Internet from the start. OH, the thrill and delight when you could type in dirty words and get dirty photos. FREE.
Today's news? Coming on the high heels of Playboy's decision to wimp out and not offer nudity, is Penthouse shutting its New York office (and killing its infamous Forum and Variations digest mags) and preparing for an Internet-only life as just another sex website.
Soon enough, blogs were loaded with "PRON" and thousands of forums specialized in every bizarre form of it. It was actually a rare forum that prohibited some dopey Dutchman from tossing a Photoshop photo of "Laura Bush" naked from the waist down. EVERYBODY likes free smut! The question was then, "Is anyone gonna buy men's mags?"
This was a VERY SERIOUS question for some writers and photographers and cartoonists, who could make some very good freelance bucks off these publications, for both straight and sexual material.
Let me wax nostalgic, or to quote an amusing remark from a pornographer-author, recollect the good old days "when sex was dirty."
At one time, the sexual thrill was as much in GETTING your smut as seeing it. It required finding a newsstand where you wouldn't be recognized. Or sending away mail order. Or, to Ian Dury it, stealing a "Razzle" because you were too young to buy it legit even if you had the money. And if you had the money was there anything more sinister and illicit than watching the store owner furtively slip your mag in a paper bag and slide it practically UNDER the counter toward you??
Most over 40 could tell you with grand nostalgia of the fear and excitement involved in going to a real "adult bookstore" that sold hardcore magazines, 8mm films or VHS tapes. WOWIE ZOWIE. Err, WOWIE, DUNCAN.
It didn't seem that anything could replace the "stroke mag" (Lenny Bruce's term) and hiding one under the bed, or rolling one up to show to the guys in the schoolyard. The ads in the back were the gateway to even better (or worse) stuff. These mags also walked a certain line. They could only go SO far. So, for all your adolescence (and then some) you were stuck in that same groove. The centerfold? ALWAYS arousing.
Now? The Internet. Everyone who's reached puberty has seen three-way sex, bukkake, and every bizarre fetish. For a while it seemed that venerable old men's mag would never fail. After all, pudgy E.L. James and her "Shades of Gray" garbage was selling, and De Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" was more obscene. That suggested that people were still buying books and using some imagination, and from the 17th or 18th century right to the shitty 21st, describing filthy doings could still be a turn-on. Not really. E.L. James, both physically and in her writing, is a freakish exception. Most bad writing isn't successful no matter how purple the prose, and only England venerates ugly fat women. E.L. James' crappy books may be welcome in America, but she isn't. She's a bland, stupid, pudding-faced cretinous blob who is just an idiot savant Autistic monster who got lucky by self-publishing a book somebody stupidly tried to ban. Which isn't to say that I'd be happy if she got flattened under the wheels of a truck. No truck could flatten her.
For a while it seemed that free porn on a crummy small computer screen was no match for a CENTERFOLD. BUT...screens have gotten bigger. The World's Wankers have learned how to toggle back and forth with favorite images on their laptop, their laps moving in rhythm. They've learned how to create ultimate slide shows. They don't primitively have one hand free to thumb through pages, or to spread out five different magazines and open them to key pages. Internet wanking and free porn pages galore killed off Playboy and Penthouse, like MTV killed the radio star. Anyone out there NOT able to score a free PDF of either magazine via a torrent or blog??
IF I'M BEING HONEST, with the easy way people can do a "site rip" and steal everything, and with the fact that a new generation has grown up knowing all about torrents, I don't see how corny websites like Playboy and Penthouse can make a profit. They barely have a chance to break even via banner ads. (And don't we all BLOCK all that shit?)
Hugh Hefner is selling his Playboy mansion, and really, only some Muslim oil-sheik scumbag could afford it, or a Kardashian. His deal is that if you buy it, you have to let him stay in it till he dies. Hell, there are enough rooms you won't ever even see him.
Guccione, the Mafioso-like publisher of Penthouse, ended up with some kind of similar deal. He lost it all, but hung onto his posh townhouse, lurking in there while some new corporation ran his magazine (into the ground, obviously). He became a recluse because mouth cancer had taken part of his tongue and he was almost incoherent.
Meanwhile some anonymous Internet thugs run dozens of porn websites and don't seem to mind the "site rips" or the enormous amount of stuff they give away FREEEEE. There are photo sites, variations on GooTube, sites where idiots make chump change selling their amateur video clips...and there's no longer anything cool about any of it, and no longer any "stars."
At one time the magazines had "stars." You bought an issue because Candy THIS and Ginger THAT and Lisa De WHAT had a layout, and you didn't tire of these bitches for many years, if ever. At one time people also bought into the publishers; Hefner, Guccione, even Flynt, and admired and emulated them. Now it's anonymous Internet assholes offering anonymous assholes, tits and twats.
The future? People will be so bored and numb they might all turn into Chaz Bono or Caitlyn Jenner, and turn into sexless versions of the opposite sex. They might just become jaded and lose interest in sex entirely, helped by the depressing world of Isis and by food additives that might as well be loaded with saltpeter.
Dirty photos are now as valueless as good rock music. The numbing number of amateur porn flicks of duckfaced bints showing off for the camera, will create the same apathy as "reality" TV shows of boring farts hanging around a house till everyone leaves, or some bachelor picking an airhead to go on a date in a balloon. It's all predictable. We've seen it before.
And the answer to the porn question will be the same as the answer to the Rod Stewart song. "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"
NO!
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