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 Play Boy بعد مراجعاتها: العري هويتنا وفلسفتنا.. ولهذا فشلنا في التحول إلى مجلة عادية
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09:01 PM February, 14 2017 سودانيز اون لاين
زهير عثمان حمد-السودان الخرطوم
مكتبتى
رابط مختصر عادت مجلة"بلاي بوي" إلى أصولها في محاولةٍ أخيرة لإنقاذ مبيعاتها التي تراجعت بشكلٍ كبير.
الصور العارية عادت إلى صفحات المجلة الأميركية عودة بعد عامٍ على توقفها عن نشرها في محاولةٍ لزيادة عوائد الإعلانات.
وتأتي المساعي الأخيرة للعودة لما وصف بجذور المجلة عن طريق كوبر هيفنر، ابن الـ25 ربيعاً ونجل مؤسس المجلة التسعيني هيو هيفنر. الذي تولى مقاليد إدارة المجلة كرئيسٍ لقسم المحتوى الإبداعي، حسب تقرير لصحيفة الغارديان البريطانية.
وقال كوبر في تصريحٍ له: "سأكون أول من يعترف بأن الطريقة التي أُخرجت من خلالها الصور العارية في المجلة كانت قديمة الطراز، لكن العُري لم يكن المشكلة لأنه ليس مشكلةً من الأساس. واليوم نسترد هويتنا الأصلية ونستعيد صورتنا الحقيقية".
لماذا تخلصت من العُري؟
كانت "بلاي بوي" قد تخلَّصت من العُري في نسخة يناير/كانون الثاني - فبراير/شباط عام 2016، والتي ظهرت الفنانة باميلا أندرسون على غلافها. وصدر بعدها بيانٌ في شهر أكتوبر/تشرين الأول 2016 مُعلناً عن التغيير:
"السؤال الذي خطر على بال الجميع عند الإعلان عن تخليها عن العري هو على الأغلب: لماذا؟ لطالما كانت "بلاي بوي" صديقةً للعُري، كما كان العُري صديقاً لبلاي بوي على مدارِ عقودٍ من الزمن. والإجابة المختصرة هي: إن العالم يتغير من حولنا".
وقرر الناشر أن تعود أعماله لطبيعتها بعد اكتشافه أن رغم نجاح سياسة "اللا عُري" في توفير مساحةٍ أكبر للمجلة في الظهور بأكشاك بيع الصُحف، لم يساعد ذلك في تعويض انخفاض المبيعات والاشتراكات.
وقال سمير حسني، مدير مركز تجديد المجلات بجامعة ميسيسيبي الأميركية: "لقد قلت أن هذا كان تصرفاً خاطئاً عندما تخلصوا من الصور العارية على صفحات المجلة. فالعُري هو محور العلامة التجارية للمجلة؛ وعند تخلصك منه في أي وقت، فأنت تقتل صورة العلامة التجارية.
وأضاف "لعل الأمر يبدو متناقضاً أن نرى بلاي بوي بدون صورٍ عارية. لذلك فالعودة إلى العُري هي خطوةٌ على الطريق الصحيح"، حسب تعبيره.
وباستخدام العنوان التسويقي: "العُري أمرٌ طبيعي"، وصف كوبر عودة النساء العاريات بأنها "لحظة استثنائية بشكلٍ لافت للنظر على المستويين الشخصي والمهني".
فلسفة بلاي بوي
وفي مقال يحمل عنوان "فلسفة بلاي بوي"، أصر كوبر على أن الكثيرين قد غابت عنهم أهداف والده الأصلية، ألا وهي: "فتح أواصر الحوار الخلاق والصحي عن الجنس، وتشجيع الحديث عن وجهات النظر الاجتماعية والفلسفية والدينية في الأمر".
وتابَعَ: "العديد من الناس أساؤوا تفسير الرسالة أو أخطأوا إدراكها تماماً". وأضاف أن "بلاي بوي ستستعيد تقاليدها الأصيلة"، في ظل فلسفته الخاصة بالمجلة.
وتُشير التقارير إلى أن العدد الجديد يُظهر صدوراً ومؤخراتٍ، لكن بدون العُري المباشر الذي ميّز معظم أعداد المجلة على مدار الـ 63 عاماً المنقضية.
ويضم العدد الجديد المُمَثِّلة الأميركية سكارليت جوهانسون، ومُقدِّم البرامج فان جونز، وفريق Run the Jewels لموسيقى الهيب هوب، بالإضافة إلى عددٍ من نجمات بلاي بوي العاريات مثل بلاي ميت وسكارليت بايرن، التي تكتب عن أهمية الجاذبية الجنسية للنساء والمعايير المزدوجة التي لا تزال متواجدةً بين النساء والرجال.
وبالإضافة إلى العُري، ستضم المجلة في حُلتها الجديدة عدداً من العناصر القديمة، مثل قسم "نكات الحفلات" والقسم "التراثي" الذي يضم صفحات من أعدادٍ قديمة.
ويرى حسني أن عودة النساء العاريات ستسمح لبلاي بوي باستعادة بعض بريقها المفقود وصورتها السابقة.
فقال: "هل يمكن أن تعود العلامة التجارية إلى عصر تداول 7 ملايين نسخة من أعدادها؟ لا، لن يحدث هذا. فهي بحاجةٍ للابتكار وليس للترميم. ومع بداية خروج هيو وفي ظل القيادة الإبداعية لكوبر، ستكون للمجلة فرصة أكبر في النجاح وتقديم تصورٍ جديدٍ لما يمكنها أن تكون عليه في المستقبل".
The Playboy problem: has the brand ever endangered women؟
An ex-bunny describes the loss of her ‘family’ as the magazine stops publishing nude photos – but Gloria Steinem is among its detractors, saying the publication has never expressed ‘the full humanity of men or women’
Barbi Benton on the cover of the July 1969 issue of Playboy.
Barbi Benton on the cover of the July 1969 issue of Playboy. Photograph: AP
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Rose Hackman Rose Hackman
Sunday 18 October 2015 13.30 BST Last modified on Thursday 11 August 2016 11.04 BST
Jaki Nett, a 72-year-old yoga instructor and former Playboy bunny, is worried.
“Do you know if the magazine will survive؟” she asks, on the phone from Germany.
Nett is reacting to this week’s announcement that Playboy, a magazine first published over 60 years ago featuring a nude Marilyn Monroe, has decided to no longer feature photos of naked models in its pages.
Time has marched on, but the move to take nude photos out of its pages seems so antithetical to what the magazine has stood for and symbolized for six decades, it does not seem like an overreaction to question the magazine’s destiny.
Jaki Nett in her Bunny uniform
Jaki Nett in her Bunny uniform.
Nett, who worked as a bunny for more than 11 years in the 1960s and 1970s out of a Los Angeles Playboy club, and was one of the first black bunnies to be employed there, says that “family” is on the line.
“Once you are a bunny, you are always a bunny,” she explains, recalling very happy years working out of the bunny-themed gentleman’s nightclub. Nett remembers nostalgically the mystique that came with being a bunny and being associated with the brand. “Men would look at us with these eyes of wonder,” she recalls. “We became part of an experience, a part of Americana.”
She says that Playboy took care of its own, financing at least half of her undergraduate degree, and making sure that things like sexual harassment and assault were never tolerated within the walls of its clubs.
“Even if people touched our tails, their [Playboy club] memberships were taken,” she says, referring to the fluffy white pompoms women working for Playboy wore on their rear. “As long as we were on the Playboy premises, we were protected.”
But shielding her from the worst in male-on-female violence was not something the Playboy franchise could help with on the outside.
Playboy: doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons؟
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Nett recalls being raped by one of the club’s patrons during her bunny years. The rape took place outside of the club premises, she says.
She says reporting the incident to the police was out of the question at the time (“At that point, the woman was usually seen to be in the wrong, I didn’t want to go through that”). She was very clear who had done it, however, and knew his face well: he was a regular at the club.
Nett may not have felt she could turn to the authorities for help, but at the club there was no question whose side management was on once she shared what had happened: hers.
The next time he came in, all she had to do was point him out.
“He said he didn’t do it, and I said he did.”
The regular was banned for life, she says, even as he denied her accounts. “They did what they had to do. Inside the club they did what they could. Some people thought we were being used as a sexual object. This was not the case. I was very well protected. We all were,” she says.
Men would look at us with these eyes of wonder. We became part of an experience, a part of Americana
Jaki Nett
Many women, however, see the brand that Playboy created as dangerously destructive to women’s well-being.
Jennifer Lena, a sociologist and professor at Columbia University, describes the Playboy phenomenon as anchoring down a reference point in terms of women’s sexuality which led to a way of thinking about women that was “an impediment to progress”.
At the time when women were set up to take advantage of sexual liberation, and define their bodies on their own terms, Playboy’s depictions of sexually willing and available “girls next door” made female nudity synonymous with the fulfillment of male desires in a male-dominated, patriarchal society, rather than one that finally paid attention to women as agents of their own bodies.
The creation of such a framework may be seen as having helped to lay the foundations for what has led to the rise of a mainstream, hyper-pornified culture that is more often than not degrading to women and divorced from notions of female consent.
Gloria Steinem, the American feminist icon and pioneer, told the Guardian: “For Playboy to stop publishing nude photos of women (of course, it never published nude photos of men) is like the NRA saying that it’s no longer pushing handguns because machine guns and assault rifles are so easily available.”
The activist and feminist Gloria Steinem is a longtime critic of Playboy. “The magazine would have to change its title, heart and brain cells in order to express the full humanity of men or women,” she told the Guardian
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Gloria Steinem is a longtime critic of Playboy. ‘The magazine would have to change its title, heart and brain cells in order to express the full humanity of men or women,’ she told the Guardian. Photograph: YONHAP/REUTERS
“Playboy would have to change its title, heart and brain cells in order to express the full humanity of men or women,” Steinem continued.
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Steinem is a longstanding critic of the Playboy franchise. In 1963, she published an exposé of the life and realities of a Playboy bunny after going undercover as one in in a New York Playboy club.
But for Carrie Pitzulo, an adjunct professor of history at University System of Georgia, depicting Playboy and its franchise as a wholly anti-woman operation is vastly mistaken.
Pitzulo, who has written a book on the subject, says that while the magazine was by no means radical, it introduced America to the notion that it was all right for good girls – specifically of the middle-class, white variety – to have sex.
“The playmate was the sweet girl next door,” she explains.
In such a way, Playboy – and its larger-than-life creator, Hugh Hefner – was actually promoting very mainstream, politically correct ideas of sex, Pitzulo says, centered on notions of family and monogamy. Such values were reflected in the advice columns Pitzulo recovered from the 1950s and 1960s that favored faithfulness, for instance, over promiscuity.
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Liberal – even if not radical - causes were also taken up by the magazine, which was an open supporter of abortion rights, the creation of rape crisis centers and child day care centers. “Yes, it was a sexist magazine, but it wasn’t only about that,” she says.
For Pitzulo, the fact that Playboy has decided to stop publishing naked pictures in print says more about the state of our culture than about the publication per se.
“It shows us how far America has gone in terms of hypersexualisation in the mainstream: that the magazine that used to be the leader has given up.”
But no more naked pictures by Playboy needn’t be all bad. For some cultural commentators, the moment comes with a much-awaited degree of symbolism.
“I am so bored that conversations about women’s sexuality have focused on Playboy for 6o years, and I am glad it’s over,” says Lena.
“It’s time what we have a conversation about women’s sexuality on our own terms.”
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زهير عثمان حمد
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