Playboy has relaunched. Apparently it did so last month, but I didn’t know about it until a few days ago when I saw a copy of the new – quarterly, I’m told – magazine, with Cara Delevingne in a latex corset with a hand covering her lower frontage, on a male friend’s coffee table.
I greeted this news with a mixture of weary resignation and utter bafflement. The former element derives from the fact that at this particular time and place in my life and in our dismal history, I have largely given up on the very concept of good news. Of hearing anything that suggests progress, enlightenment, intelligent and/or joined-up thinking (particularly of the governmental kind).
And I feel this especially whenever it comes to women and their rights. Why am I mystified by the decision to relaunch a jazz mag? Well, imagine me gesturing at the internet as I say, “Because of this.”
We live in a world – and I’m back to weary resignation at this point – in which any possible taste in matters of the flesh is catered for. There is nothing men can’t find out there. No desire, however mild or sickening, is going unmet in this year of our Lord 2026, I assure you.
It’s into this world that the new team, headed by Anna Wintour’s former protégé Phillip Picardi, has resurrected Playboy. Now, obviously – they say – it won’t be like the old Playboy. This magazine is, according to the accompanying publicity, “respectful”, “modern”, “artistic”, “sensual” and a whole lot of other words designed to obscure the fact that women’s naked bodies are on display for the purpose of separating men from their money and giving them more material over which to expel bodily fluids.
