(This feature updated monthly!)
Like millions of other boys (and probably not a few girls), the first time I saw a photo of a naked woman was in Playboy™ magazine, and for many years that was what it was all about: the women. Every issue I got my hands on would quickly be pawed through in a hormone-fueled search for the two or three pictorials that each magazine contained, and the ridiculously beautiful women inevitably on display within.
But that's not what this is about.
Jokes about "reading it for the articles" notwithstanding, Playboy™ has always tried to be about more than just naked women. Playboy™ was and is about a lifestyle. Witness the insanely over-the-top "advice" in the Playboy™ Advisor column, always delivered in the royal "we," as if by a select panel of hopelessly cosmopolitan and worldly epicures. Witness the monthly features on the latest to-die-for gadgets. Witness the interviews with famous athletes, authors, artists, and celebrities. Witness the tone. Witness the first-run Ian Fleming stories. But witness, most of all, the backgrounds. I'm not sure when they first started really sticking out to me, but I suspect maybe my awareness was just always there, my hyperactive imagination overly sensitive to the whole package being sold to me, the whole situation that each photo suggested. When faced with a shot of a half-clothed woman in what was obviously intended to be a fancy high-rise apartment in a big city, my mind would immediately begin to construct a fictional life for the me that was living in that picture, up to and including the evening that had just been, and the events that were of course about to transpire...
Pretty girls were nice and all, but situations were (and are) what really fire my fantasies and get the juices flowing. Stories.
The Bad Porn Background is so famous that it's basically a cliché at this point; a tired stereotype that is unfortunately reinforced in countless photo sessions all over the world. The naked person is there, but why is there dirty laundry on the floor? Why are we in their kitchen? Is it just me or is this an empty apartment?
What we're here to celebrate is the Good Porn Background, as exemplified in, and still best practiced by, Playboy™ magazine. You will not see a single person in any of these photos, because they aren't germaine to the discussion. You know that the women are gorgeous, so you don't need to see them. Every girl in every photo is blacked out so you can concentrate on how carefully crafted each shot is, how the background is arranged just so, how the brandy snifter catches the firelight, how the blankets coordinate with the oh-so-casually tossed aside lingerie on the floor, and so on. We're also here to celebrate Playboy™'s success — for better and for worse — as an inadvertent preserver of design through the decades. From the angular atomic-age design of the fifties through the groovy sixties, earthy seventies, austere eighties, chaotic nineties, and now the overheated aughts, Playboy™ captures all that was, or was supposed to be, hip, cool, trendy, and always just out of reach.
So get yourself a snifter of cognac, sit back, relax, and enjoy the journey!
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