Excerpt: 'Playboy': 50 Years
— -- Below is the introduction from Playboy: 50 Years: The Photographs. Playboy magazine is marking its 50th anniversary in an issue hitting newsstands Dec. 2.
INTRODUCTIONScientists at the Massachusetts General Hospital, a Harvard affiliate, said they wanted to see how the brain responded when heterosexual men were exposed to photographs of women of varying degrees of attractiveness.… The researcher found, among other things, that the part of the brain that responds to facial beauty is the same area that is activated by food, recreational drugs and money.— Vital Signs: Patterns Beauty, It Turns Out, Lights the BrainBy Eric NagourneyNew York Times, February 19, 2002
The experiment was simple. Men looked at and evaluated pictures of attractive women. Not surprisingly, they lingered over the beautiful. As they did, brain scans showed the "reward circuitry" of their brains lighting up like a pinball machine.
It took scientists fifty years to figure out what Hugh Hefner knew from day one. Beauty is its own reward. It's in the hard wiring.
The publisher of Playboy grew up with two competing visions. Hollywood films of the thirties filled the young man's mind with opulent dreams, with visions of glamour and the good life. But it was the newsstand that gave him a tactile sense of the world. Hefner devoured Life, Look, Esquire, True, and Park East; he papered his bedroom with Petty girls and Vargas art. During WWII he kept a pinup in his footlocker. In those days pinups were "morale boosters" (which is another way of saying they ignited those reward circuits).
To understand the revolution represented by Playboy, one has to look at the newsstand of the fifties. There were the "sweaty armpit" men's magazines, full of grizzled rogues "thrashing through thorny thickets or splashing about in fast-flowing streams." Nudity was practically nonexistent; at best it was nonsensual, more likely to strike the funny bone than the reward circuits. There were the coarse and grainy pictures in Focus and Foto, naughty picture stories with lots of cleavage in titles like Titter and Whisper, and plenty of native nudity in National Geographic. By the fifties, Esquire had abandoned testosterone, purging the Petty girls, the sexy cartoons, backing away from the glory days of the WWII pinups, to become an effete, tweedy, neutered publication. Arnold Gingrich, the publisher, said he wanted to "rescue Esquire from bawditry', and actually called for a New Puritanism. When that magazine moved to New York in 1951 Hefner, then working in Esquire's subscription and renewal department, stayed in Chicago to work on his own magazine. He'd been in training for the moment all his life.
Hefner's bold stroke: to publish nudes of Marilyn Monroe in full color on the best paper he could afford in the very first issue. And to never back down from that promise. Playboy would be a visual feast. Hefner worked with illustration, cartoons and pictorials, pacing the magazine with the care of a film director. The early issues, put together with "scotch tape and paper clips," were a blueprint for all that followed.
