Taschen has just published The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds ($39.99), by Gretchen Edgren, a contributing editor to Playboy, and the book is a testament to Hefner's fidelity to his vision. Six hundred and thirteen women are represented, but there is one basic model. On top is the face of Shirley Temple; below is the body of Jayne Mansfield. Playboy was launched in 1953, and this female image managed to draw, simultaneously, on two opposing trends that have since come to dominate American mass culture: on the one hand, our country's idea of its Huck Finn innocence; on the other, the enthusiastic lewdness of our advertising and entertainment. We are now accustomed to seeing the two tendencies combined -- witness Britney Spears -- but when Hefner was a young man they still seemed like opposites.

Hefner said from the beginning that he was not producing a girlie magazine; Playboy was a "life style" magazine, of which sex was only a part. He was put off by the men's magazines of his youth, with their emphasis on riding the rapids and fighting bears. Why did virility have to be proved outdoors? Why couldn't its kingdom be indoors? "We like our apartment," he wrote in his editorial for the first issue of Playboy. "We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." Whatever one may think of DeDe Lind's interest in Nietzsche -- or Hefner's, for that matter -- this was the scenario he had in mind. He grew up in a comfortless Chicago family. His father was an accountant, his mother a Methodist disciplinarian. He has said that there was never any show of affection in his house. One suspects that there was likewise little evidence of jazz or hors d'oeuvres -- pleasure for its own sake. This is what he set out to sell: an upscale hedonism, promoted by the magazine’s articles and ads as well as by its nudes.

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In the nineteen-seventies, because of competition from the new and raunchier Penthouse, Playboy made the decision to show pubic hair, and with this upping of the sexual ante a certain coldness set in. Now the makeup becomes very heavy, causing the women, who already looked alike, to seem as if they were clones.

In the nineteen-eighties and thereafter, the artificiality only increased, as did that of all American mass media. The most obvious change is in the body, which has now been to the gym. Before, you could often see the Playmates sucking in their stomachs. Now they don't have to. The waist is nipped, the bottom tidy, and the breasts are a thing of wonder. The first mention of a "boob job" in The Playmate Book has to do with Miss April 1965... But over time the augmented bosom became confessedly an artifice -- a Ding an sich, and proud of it. By the eighties, the Playmates’ breasts are not just huge. Many are independent of the law of gravity; they point straight outward. One pair seems to point upward.

Today -- or, actually, by the eighties -- one wonders whether sex, as it is experienced by human beings, is still the point. The current centerfolds, buck naked though they may be, communicate almost no suggestion of anything. In Playboy pinups, one is not looking for the note of the divine that one finds in the Venuses of ancient statuary, let alone for the pathos of Rembrandt's nudes. Nor should one ask for naturalness -- a real-looking girl. That is a sentimental preference, and one that many great nudes (Ingres's, Degas's) can refute. But what is so bewildering about the later Playboy centerfolds is their utter texturelessness: their lack of any question, any traction, any grain of sand from which the sexual imagination could make a pearl.

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That, in the end, is the most striking thing about Playboy’s centerfolds: how old-fashioned they seem. This whole "bachelor" world, with the brandy snifters and the attractive guest arriving for the night: did it ever exist? Yes, as a fantasy. Now, however, it is the property of homosexuals. (A more modern-looking avatar of the Playmates' pneumatic breasts is Robert Mapplethorpe's Mr. 10 1/2.) Today, if you try to present yourself as a suave middle-aged bachelor, people will assume you're gay.

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