DON'T FORGET TO "LIKE" BEE-OTCH OF THE DAY ON FACEBOOK!
Name: the religious right
Age: ageless
Occupation: bullshitters on religion
Last Seen: everywhere
Bee-otched For: hammering the first nail in Playboy's coffin
Age: ageless
Occupation: bullshitters on religion
Last Seen: everywhere
Bee-otched For: hammering the first nail in Playboy's coffin
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It's been over a day since the announcement that Playboy Magazine was eliminating nudity from its publication.
The Earth is still standing, the birds are still chirping, the trees are changing color, but Lamar Odom is in a coma after coking out in a brothel in Nevada.
But it's gonna suck for some who still didn't mind paying $8 to look at pussy.
Many claimed that Playboy's decision to downgrade itself from nudie mag to laddie rag was a reasonable one since anybody could look at nudes for free as-is on the web. Its descent in circulation over the past 40 years from six million units sold per month to only 800,000, plus the fact that it had been losing money was a huge reason for its format change, starting in March 2016.
But IMHO, Playboy's decrease in circulation didn't start with the internet. It started with folks like the late Jerry Falwell and other members of the religious right. Because they pressured Americans to give them as much money as possible, they used that money to help fund Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign. They also worked on pressuring retailers that sold Playboy and other mags that showed even the slightest hint of butt crack to yank those mags off their racks. When I was a kid in the 1980s, my childhood supermarket, Village Market of Elk Rapids, MI once sold Playboy and even rented out X-rated videos. However, they got out of the sex biz in the late 80s. I heard that it had to do with some crazy law passed in Antrim County, but then again, 1) several other video stores came and went - one of them being owned by the family that started Village Market in 1949 - and they all rented porn and 2) for many years, the downtown party store sold adult magazines behind the counter.
Since family grocers didn't want to associate themselves with Playboy and harder, it did hurt sales. True, there was that slight renaissance in the early 90s thanks to Jenny McCarthy and Pamela Anderson, but the internet hurt them like hell. Why spend $8 on Photoshopped - and lightly censored - nudes when you can see girls in the raw for free on the web?
In a way, the right won with Playboy's no-nude announcement, but now, their new target has been magazines such as Cosmopolitan and their spicy headlines and images of exposed cleavage on their covers. They've pressured retailers to either put blinders over the covers or yank them altogether. Many, such as Meijer, Rite Aid and Kroger have complied with blinders.
When I was in my left-leaning church on Sunday, we talked about guns during our weekly "joys and concerns" segment of service. One woman told the congregation that young men are going out and shooting people and she wanted to know why. It's true: most mass shooters tend to be young men obsessed with guns. Many of them are loners and in the case of the shooter in Oregon recently, he was a 26-year-old virgin.
Despite the recent shootings, our government hasn't stepped in and called for tougher gun laws. That's because our Senate and House are all Republicans bought by the religious right and the NRA. When Janet Jackson accidentally showed her boob during the Super Bowl, the government reacted by forcing the FCC to boost indecency fines. Yet, we've had to deal with mass shootings too many times this year and nothing's been done.
You see, the religious right loves to come up with crazy bullshit to make us think that every time we look to see how some young woman shaves her cooch, Jesus cries, even though it was God himself who created that woman. But yet, one of the Ten Commandments is "Thou Shalt Not Kill". It's funny that these people will tell us that sex is a bad, bad thing, yet we have religious right-approved dipshits like Cindy Gamrat and Todd Courser who do a good job at breaking yet another of God's commandments: "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery".
My point is, if you voted Republican in the 1980s, well, it's your damn fault that you helped to make Playboy and sex in general so passe. The one thing in life that keeps us sane and yet, these holier-than-thou pricks come out and tell us lies such as "every time you have sex, you're gonna get AIDS!" and so forth. Look, these same assholes got busted in the late 1980s for tax troubles, hanging out with hookers, etc. They're not perfect, and neither are we.
Personally, if the religious right kept their goddamned mouths shut and not pressure retailers about what they sell, Playboy would be still sold everywhere instead of dingy party stores and what few retailers still sell it, such as Barnes and Noble. What's next? Muslims forcing these same supermarkets to stop selling pork? No more bacon?
If supermarkets bowed to every religious and social group out there, the only thing they'd be selling is a whole lotta nothin'.
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