Playboy : The Cultural Impact Of Playboy

Tropp, Sandra Fehl., and Ann Pierson. D'Angelo. "Pornography (1983)." Essays in Context. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. 543-47. Print.

Kenon Breazeale’s argument in his text begins by touching on how Esquire would place certain articles in their magazine in hopes of attracting the male consumer. In order to do this, Breazeale claims that the magazine did so by the “simultaneous exploitation and denial of the feminine” (Breazeale 72). In that way, the magazine

It is now so deeply integrated in our society that a piece of entertainment loses its value when nudity is not present in some form. With all this nudity floating around,one may ask what role does it play in displaying the message of the image. Nudity itself is a challenging ideology to our society, the line between appropriate vs inappropriate and acceptable versis unacceptable have seem to grow thin. The act of nudity can represent a multitude of ideology before being nude was seen as sacred and the act of being seen nude especially in public was forbidden.But as the narrative has evolved overtime being nude is now correlated to being free and open minded. Being nude in our society is expressing yourself in a manner that you deem acceptable, that we shouldn't lot be limited to what society deems appropriate. It is actually a very selfish narrative where everything revolves around the person and his or her personal goals.Marita Sturkin and Lisa Cartwright hit on the ideology of individual in the “Practices of Looking,” “One could say that ideology is the means by which certain values, such as individual freedom, progress, and the importance of home, are made to seem like natural, inevitable aspects of everyday life (Sturkin & Cartwright 21).” This kind of egocentric narrative is present in the Rolling Stone cover when dissected fully,and it shows how the narrative in America is more like me, me, me instead of us, us, us. Even though nudity is now somewhat encouraged by our entertainment, there are still levels to nudity. In most cases when a woman is presented nude she is usually presented in a way that is not too exposing, just as Julia Dreyfus is doing in the cover. This is due to the fact that there is still a

Right of the bat, the 1950s saw magazine and publishing companies facing an exponential growth in popularity. Due in part to the public’s fear of both the “Cold War” and the “Korean War”, family oriented magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Look continued to post articles highlighting current events, fictional stories, family life and illustration. As they grew to the top of the consumer market, women became the primary demographic for these magazines. The most prolific magazines in the women's market where Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Day, Woman’s Home Companion, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, McCall’s and Cosmopolitan. (www.illustrationhistory.org)

Featherstone looks down on publications that emphasize most of their print on Fashion, relationships and celebrities and advocates for magazines that stimulate intellectual growth, promote a healthy body image and include diversity. As an active journalist, columnist and activist, Liza Featherstone makes a good point in her article all while using most abundantly three rhetorical tools: logos, ethos and pathos that she wove into a studied text organization and a simple writing style. It is through ethos that Featherstone does a great job at defending her viewpoint, because her argument lacks a lot

Cosmopolitan magazine, as it is today, is an international woman’s magazine involving topics on sex, relationships, beauty, fashion and health. The variation of Cosmopolitan (Cosmo) we have in today’s society is rather sexually explicit in many of its articles and covers. This was not always the case. Cosmopolitan was founded by Schlicht & Field in 1886. The magazine was originally created to be a “family magazine” . Cosmopolitan introduced articles on family and home life. In 1888, Cosmo gained a new editor in E. D. Walker. He would add new elements to the magazine. These included serial fiction, book reviews and color illustrations.

Starting off by addressing the noticeable prevalence of “[b]lack men...surrounded by dozens of black and Latina women dressed in bathing suits...in strip clubs, some at the pool, at the beach, or in hotel rooms” (Perry 1), Perry attempts to parallel such imagery with pornography and female objectification. By painting such an explicit, arousing picture in the minds of the audience, she immediately explains the effects of “pornography [being] increasingly mainstreamed” (1). She relates this phenomenon almost as a causation, and underlies her implicit position that pop culture is

The magazine Ladies Repository: A Monthly Periodical Devoted to Literature, Arts, and Religion is a magazine that was published in 1800 and was targeted towards young women. The magazine was a way to help teach and encourage women of the time on how to properly fit in and behave according to the rules that society had placed on them. It taught them how to be considered an ideal, cultured woman with high morals and spiritual standards. Although many readers today would argue that the teachings and ideas taught by this magazine are extremely outdated and outrageously sexist, one must realize that this was society’s standard for women during the 1800’s.

Magazines have implicitly and explicitly been influencing humans for decades. They are continually more involved in the media, however the market is highly competitive. It is extremely important for magazines to maintain the readers’ interest and loyalty therefore they must excel in its appearance and content. Helen Brown created the Cosmopolitan magazine in 1965. It holds a spot as one of the most successful women’s magazines of all time, and proceeds to be the number one selling monthly magazine. (Ouellette, 360, 2005).

Our social world is becoming increasingly sexualised as pornographic references and imagery are progressively more intertwined with mainstream media, social media, advertising, and pop culture. According to Tyler (2011), this intertwinement of pornography and pop culture consists of five fragments; the beginning of the pornographic boom, the

The expansion of the magazine industry in the post war years gave the American public easy access to ideologies that were being presented in advertisements.3 Also in the post war years, cultural shifts magnified longings for immediate gratification, with the middle-class becoming more open by a leisure-oriented consumer ethos.4 Carrie Pitzulo, author of Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy, states “with more disposable income and a diminishing sense of identity, growing numbers of men looked to magazine’s to confer an identity to guide them through the expansive consumer market”. These male-targeted publications presented an image that encouraged men to reinvent

movement and the sexual revolution. In today’s time, raunch culture is the new trend of Playboy

Naked women have been in the front of feminist's minds for several decades. Especially when they are pictured in soft-pornography magazine Playboy. Feminists for years have been yelling that Playboy is harmful to both men and women. Males around the country have countered that there is nothing wrong with their Playboy, it is merely a harmless vice. The problem I see with Playboy is not that it demeans women or subjugates them, and its not that it leads to violence. The main problem is that it fosters unrealistic images and expectation in men's minds about women. But since there is little we can do about it now, we merely need to take that first step and recognize Playboy for what it

By quoting several similar examples about home décor and drink, Breazeale pointed out that all those articles weren’t written in any occasional incidents. By contrast, Esquire was knitting similar misogynistic threads for years to conceptualize people about the gender related meanings of good and bad taste. Food such as steaks and fowl, home décor with clean and functional features and alcohol were considered as good and related with masculinity. On the other hand, ornamentation, carrot teensie-weenesies and anti-alcohol were perceived as bad and femininity. As a summary of the function of text, Breazeale concluded that all Esquire did were trying to recuperate a female-identified role for men which need arguing against traditional gender related social roles. Yet at the same time, Esquire conveyed the message that any attempts of changing the traditional modes of patriarchal rules was not allowed. So it was necessary to emphasize the privilege that male had over female. This job was accomplished by the other function of the magazine – illustrations.

There are many different aspects of American Culture. One part of this culture is the idolization of beautiful women. Playboy is one of many examples of how Americans idolize women. Playboy Enterprises, recognized by their iconic Playboy Bunny symbol, started off as just a men’s magazine that includes journal articles, fiction, and of course, photographs of nude women. Playboy Magazine was founded by Hugh Hefner in Chicago, Illinois in 1953. Hefner incorporated HMH Publishing Co., Inc. in Delaware on October 1, 1953. In December of 1953 Hefner released the first issue of the magazine that would feature Marilyn Monroe on the cover. It would become very successful, selling more than 50,000 copies of the first issue.