ABSTRACT
Playboy magazine, perhaps more than any other single pop culture phenomenon, has managed to change sex from a dirty joke into “entertainment served up with humor, sophistication and spice,” to purloin a phrase from its original apology. The options are clear enough, therefore: change the morality or change the practice. In the hands of an existentialist like Laurence Sterne, such a theory was good, but it did everywhere have such integrity. Samuel Richardson, for example, extracted sentiment from its existential roots and made it the rhetorical servant of a middle-class ethos. Playboy magazine, perhaps more than any other single pop culture phenomenon, has managed to change sex from a dirty joke into “entertainment served up with humor, sophistication and spice,” to purloin a phrase from its original apology. Today’s Playmate, through which the Playboy Image is projected, is the scrupulously antiseptic incarnation of almost virginal contemporary community standards, an occasional lapse into prostitution notwithstanding.
