Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Three / The aspirational aesthetics
of ‘Gentlemen’s
1
pornography’ Stella Viljoen
1. Introduction
The rising popularity of ‘glossy men's magazines’ in South Africa is all
too clear with the emergence of the South African issues of
Gentlemen's Quarterly (GQ), For Him Magazine (FHM) and Maxim in
the past decade. This chapter examines the visual and social
mythology that gave rise to this new brand of objectifying imagery,
and proposes a new term for this more elusive pornographic genre.
In 1953, Hugh Hefner launched the first so-called soft-porn magazine
targeted at upwardly mobile men. Playboy (it was originally going to
be called Stag Night), was similar to other pornography in that it
objectified women for the purposes of male pleasure, but unlike its
various predecessors it also included what Gail Dines 2 terms ‘service
features’ on sexy consumables, current events, advice columns,
reviews, interviews and short stories. The much-imitated genre of
soft (softer and softest) pornography is no longer the novelty it was in
the 1950s, but has grown to a billion dollar industry with manifold
faces. The political and economic valorisations that have fed and
milked this cash cow are in part also responsible for the continued
ennobling of female objectification that forms a kind of Ariadnian
thread throughout the history of western visual representation.
Pornography, whether subtle or explicit, is not a contemporary
phenomenon; it has a long and politically diverse history. 3 Since the
‘erotic’, similarly, seems to have existed throughout western
history, it too may seem to be a transhistorical concept. However, it
was specifically in the nineteenth century that the pornographic was
categorised as separate and distinct from the erotic, and it is in this
1 This chapter is based on a conference paper delivered at the annual Design
History Society Conference (Norwich, UK) in September 2003 and was posted on
the African Gender Institute’s Gender and Women’s Studies website (http://
www.gwsafrica.org/knowledge/manet.html) in 2004.
2
G Dines ‘I buy it for the articles: Playboy Magazine and the sexualisation of
consumerism’ in G Dines & JM Humez (eds) Gender, race and class in media, a
text reader (1995) 254 255.
3
See W Kendrick The secret museum: Pornography in modern culture (1987); L
Hunt (ed) Eroticism and the body politic (1991).
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