The thrill of buying the colourful Playboy, wrapped in polythene, at newsstands or bookshops abroad will not be the same anymore. In the old days, Indian travellers would see (ogle) every page and read every word before tucking it inside any other popular magazine to smuggle it through customs. There were times when even NYPD Blue would be confiscated because it had the word “Blue” in it.
In these liberal times, although mostly in the privacy of bedrooms, Indians are among the biggest viewers of porn. They must find it a fallacy that Hugh Hefner’s glossy portrayal of women as an ode to male libido for six decades should now become coy in the age of liberated sexuality, especially since its circulation has fallen from 5.6 million in its salad days to a mere 8,00,000 now.
Nudes are passé at this juncture when an Internet user is only a vicarious click away from every sex act imaginable, Hefner explains. The move is, perhaps, a tacit acceptance of the greater maturity of certain societies. Having survived attacks from the Right and Left, as well as from feminists, for its unabashed reduction of women to sex objects, it is a wholly new path that Playboy is breaking out on. It is a moot point whether its liberal view on interviews with thinkers and political leaders as well as heretics will continue to be interesting enough in a time when the world fears for the reading habit itself. We can only hope that in India such a mature view of sex will evolve quickly to ensure women are no more treated as sex objects.
