People Are Not Ready for Lust

It was reported on the Internet that Penthouse magazine founder Robert “Bob” Guccione died from cancer at age 79. Penthouse, a men’s magazine that has been considered pornography in some countries, brought substantial earnings to Guccione. According to Forbes, he was listed as one of the wealthiest people in the world with a net worth of $400 million in 1982. In 2002, the New York Times, referring to Guccione, wrote that the profit of the magazine during the 30 years of its existence has exceeded $4 billion. However, in early the 2000s, the pornography industry gradually began to deflate due to the Internet, where anyone could become familiar—for free or almost for free—with any form of sexual perversion that no one in the magazine industry has dreamed of. By the way, when Guccione started his Penthouse, the Internet did not exist yet.

Robert Guccione was born into a well-to-do family of Sicilian descent. His father was an accountant. Guccione himself almost became a priest, but changed his mind. He was married for the first time before the age of 20, and had a daughter Tonia. The marriage soon fell apart. Guccione left to Europe to become a painter. As a result of his wandering, he met an Englishwoman and moved to London. To support his family, he managed a chain of laundromats and worked as a cartoonist in the weekly newspaper, The London American. Meanwhile, his wife was raising their two children and selling pin-ups posters.

It is possible, that this particular activity prompted Guccione to think about publishing a men’s magazine. The first Penthouse issue came out in 1965 in England and four years later in America. In the beginning, the content of Penthouse was pretty much like another erotic magazine for men: Playboy (published since 1953). Very soon though, Penthouse found its unique style: more of sensationalism and less of intellectualism. The Penthouse reader became the average person. For the magazine’s early issues Guccione photographed the models himself (his experience as a painter came in handy), achieving a slightly blurry image of the picture that became very fashionable in glossy photos.

The new owners, who bought the magazine in 2005, softened the content by eliminating explicit scenes from its pages that did not contribute to expanding the magazine’s audience. However, it would have decreased anyway. In fact, such traditional genres of erotica and porn, like magazines and movies, now are experiencing hard times. Recently, Finance magazine dedicated to this topic a research where every producer in this industry was complaining in one voice about their audience leaving for the Internet. The Web is not to blame now, because the pornographic industry already began to deflate due to the Internet in early 2000s.

“It was a hot topic when it was banned,” commented chief editor of GQ magazine Nikolai Uskov. “Back then, nudity and sex was considered rebellious, unlike today. People who want to see any kind of pornography (child, old women, fat people, and skinny people) would rather turn to the Internet. It stopped being seen as something cool. There is no more excitement, just debauchery. Hence, there are less risqué magazines, such as Maxim, where the erotic theme is present but it is not the key.” There is one more aspect directly related to the fact that bare breasts and buttocks are no longer in fashion: advertising. “Fewer and fewer advertisers want to be associated with this kind of production,” noted Uskov. “It has lost its revolutionary spirit. Moreover, female body exploitation is not considered a very good activity. Nobody wants to quarrel with the feminists.” I wonder what the feminists would tell Guccione in the afterlife. Maybe, their bodiless souls no longer care about body issues.