Word: sexualize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Insist that private firms adhere to standards that would stop the collecting of information that they do not need. For instance, insurance companies should stop gathering details about people's alleged sexual adventures or the condition of their lawns-none of which affect the applicant's insurability...
...sellers.) Since with age and success Playboy has become the most "conservative" of the sex magazines, some might argue that its newsstand decline only proves Gresham's law. But this morality play isn't all that simple. It has more to do with society's shifting sexual standards and who is more adept at exploiting them. In this, Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione, a canny tortoise, has at least drawn even with the Bunnies of Hugh Hefner, whose bigger but long overextended Playboy empire is in trouble. Only Hefner's London gambling clubs, which attract rich Arab...
...times, for not seeing that the girl next door grew up, "is no longer uptight about nudity," and thus in Penthouse is pictured enjoying her own sensuality. As a photographer himself, Guccione is the best in the business at the narrow craft of what he calls "romanticizing the sexual encounter"; since the mystery used to be in what was concealed (but no longer is), Guccione has to work hard, with soft focus and Victorian props, to lend variety month after month to anatomical sameness...
...critics, the success of such magazines only proves America's declining moral standards, but that success also coincides with increased contemporary sexual awareness, openness, candor. In this the magazines have sometimes played a liberating role, giving space to honest facings of troubling concerns. But they all compete to exploit these concerns and curiosities. Their subject is sex, not love; their emphasis is all on experiencing and experimenting; their message is self-gratification. "I went pubic in 1967," says Guccione proudly -while Playboy was still holding back. He also started a skin magazine for women, Viva. With...
Guccione's own fastidiousness might be more creditable if Penthouse didn't devote so much space each month to advice by Xaviera Hollander, "the happy hooker," who favors whatever two or more people can do together. He also publishes long accounts of readers' fantasized sexual successes, which he apparently considers a contribution to mental health: "Some browbeaten bastard in a bed-sitting-room reads it and says, I'm not a freak.' " How much further does Guccione long to go? "I'm no missionary. It isn't really what we want...