Pining Over Playboy

It will be interesting to see if Chicago Reader's profile of ardent Playboy fan Peggy Wilkins helps turn things around for the long-suffering magazine. The story asks, "What Kind of a Woman Reads Playboy?" The answer is that by day Wilkins runs runs Unix servers at the University of Chicago. "By night she tends her apartment-size collection of Playboys, moderates the Playboy Mailing List, builds Playmate databases, and even sends free advice to Hef." Wilkins has been hooked on the magazine since 1978, as a 13-year-old in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Since then, she has collected pretty much everything that Playboy Enterprises has ever produced, and keeps her collection in an apartment above the one she shares with her boyfriend.

Wilkins is a connoisseur of the Playboy aesthetic, with its meticulously produced centerfolds, glamor, and emphasis on the girl next door over celebrities. She laments the passing of the magazine's high-quality photography and longer articles, which are all but forgotten. In the world of print, Playboy must compete with the coarser sensibility of men's magazines like Maxim. And online, the alternatives make Playboy seem archaic.

So maybe that is the way forward for Playboy: a retro magazine for cult readers rediscovering a lost-generation of pleasures such as lounge music, retro beer, and retro booze.