PLAYBOY magazine has just celebrated the first anniversary of its launch in Ireland. I must admit that I'd hardly noticed its existence over the past twelve months. It seemed to me to have gone down with the Irish public the way it deserves to go down - like a lead balloon. Nobody I know buys it. Nobody I know reads it. And so, there I was thinking that maybe we're not such a bunch of gnats after all; then they go and spoil it by releasing sales figures which suggest that they must be gobbling it up everywhere from Gort to Gortahork. It is very fucking sad.
Were the crazy zealots who made it their business to ensure that Playboy was banned from 1959 to 1995 right? Has there been a discernible decline in moral values since this foul and pernicious publication became available here? Have the Irish people been launched into a lust-crazed frenzy of rampant copulation, wife-swopping parties and group sex orgies as a result of the availability of Playboy? Let's just say that we'll get back to you when it happens. In the meantime about 20,000 saps apparently buy Playboy every month to no discernible effect except that, presumably, the bulge in Hugh Hefner's bank account gets just a little bit bigger.
I had a look at the Love & Lingerie special issue that's currently on the newstands to see what's turning Irish men on in their droves (appropriate word that). Now I've heard the view expressed on occasion that it's got 'some great articles' in it - but frankly you'd want your head examined if you could take pleasure in reading an interview with Lawrence Schiller, no matter how ground-breaking it might be, in this kind of ludicrously tawdry environment.
The tone is set by the cover pic, with four playgirls, bunnies, or whatever they're called, gazing at the prospective reader with expressions as blank as Cindy dolls. Now I wouldn't denigrate these women for a minute. I'm sure that in real life they're probably decent people. They may even be attractive. But given the legendary Playboy treatment, they are robbed of whatever genuine vitality they may have, and are rendered as mere cyphers onto which people who need this kind of thing are presumably meant to project their hopeless fantasies. It is awful and demeaning not because there is flesh on display - because there isn't much - but because it is all so lacking in any suggestion of wit, grace, passion or humour.
Inside, one Kimberley West is Miss February - the subject of the magazine's Playmate of the Month 'spread'. This is supposed to be the piece-de-resistance but there's nothing to resist. No disrespect to Kimberley, but I cannot fathom how or why people find this kind of embarrassingly coy soft-porn a turn-on. It is about as far from being erotic as Peter Andre is from making good records. There's more sex in a single moan from Polly Harvey. It is risible. Fake. Clichid. Vapid. And people find this horny?
Have the readers of Playboy not actually experienced women in intimate circumstances in real life? Have they not seen them with their clothes half on, or half off? Have they not watched them lifting their skirts or touching their nipples? Have they not enjoyed the sight of a real arse bared, or a partner's cunt ready for love? Because alongside the real thing, and the glorious sense of adventure, danger and spiritual communion that it can involve between consenting adults full of passionate desire, these airbrushed mannequin photo-shoots are just utterly and completely flat and stupid. What the fuck is wrong with men - or some men at any rate - that they like this puerile shit?
Playboy isn't alone in this zone, but its ethos is even more eerie than the oafish sexism of Loaded and its dumb ilk precisely because it is so carefully contrived in its tweeness.
I've nothing against the attempts being made by sexual radicals to explore the vast and tantalising arena of sexual desire in print, photography, art, music or film. On the contrary. But what we're offered in Playboy is plain naff. (Which, for the record, is precisely the word I'd use for the telephone sex lines advertised at the back of Hot Press. The difference is that readers actually do buy Hot Press for the articles.)
Someone asked me recently why the sex industry is left to the devices of the stupidest people. It's an interesting question.
Niall Stokes
Editor