Playboy, preeminent purveyor of antiseptic hetero glamour shot porn, will be branching out into the gay market. Are you ready for hot, hot, hot, "professionally produced adult programs" that "shall not depict actual anal penetration, licking or anal sexual play of any kind?" We thought so.
According to a May 9 item on Xbiz.com, Playboy enterprises will begin offering softcore gay porn through an on-demand cable channel tentatively named Gay Targeted VOD Package Service. Package service, indeed.
My question is, who pays for softcore? It's one thing if you're in a hotel room and they happen to have a free channel of smooth adults with carefully concealed genitals rolling around on silk sheets, or if you're thirteen and Showtime is rerunning a Red Show Diaries episode at 3am. But who pays for softcore smut when free porno teaming with penetration exists for free on the Internet? Playboy may have a reliable customer base in straight men, but will gay men who have no fond memories of discovering Playboys under dad's bed fork over their cash to maybe see an erect penis? --Andy Wright
Playboy has not just been about "hetero glamor porn". Girl-on-girl, which is often featured in Playboy, is homosexual. Therefore it would be more correct of the author of the above article to refer to Playboy as a purveyor of "hetero + female homosexual" porn.
Anyway, I don't see the Playboy move towards the gay male market as enlightening at all. Playboy, like most liberal institutions, is about normalizing female bisexuality but marginalizing male bisexuality. It's the bisexual double standard brought to you courtesy of Playboy and other "iberal"institutions. The bisexual double standard plays right into the hands of heterosexual men. It serves to exclude the male-male interaction from mainstream depictions. It's homophobic towards men, bottom line.
Posted at: May 15, 2008 5:01 AM