The Press: Playkids

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In any case, the men's magazines are no more intended for juvenile consumption than Peyton Place—and few of them are really as gamy. Most of them run a Playboyish mishmash of racy cartoons, club-car jokes, nonfiction pieces that swagger leeringly from foreign affairs ("Those Sympathetic Geishas'') to history ("Nero, the Most Ribald Roman of Them All"). Many of their short stories are culled at no cost from such classic rogues as Boccaccio and Chaucer, who is identified in the April Modem Man as "The Passionate Pageboy." The average playkid reads less like pornography than a gay-dog college magazine put out while the dean was napping.

Smut from a Hat. In their eagerness to please the boys, publishers agree, some magazines have shed the last vestiges of good taste. To avoid prosecution, some smut publishers deliver their magazines by truck and operate through fictitious corporations. "Too many guys are working out of a hat." complains Chicago Publisher George Von Rosen, who owns 13 magazines ranging from an art monthly for teachers to Cabaret (circ. 200,000), a three-year-old monthly stag magazine. "Today they're printing a magazine. Tomorrow they're making paper boxes."

For the publisher who wants to keep on publishing, there are already some strong economic incentives to stay within the confines of good taste. He must pass postal inspection if he hopes to send his magazine through the mails. He is subject to informal censorship from dealers and newsstand chains such as New York's Union News Co., which refuses to handle offensive magazines. Another effective censor is success. Esquire (circ. 786,156), the good grey dean of men's magazines, now serves up cheesecake only as dessert with such sober fare as its current "special report" on the U.S. Army's "shockingly weak condition." As readership and advertising linage have shot up, even Playboy (circ. 795,965) has toned down its gags and dressed up its girls. Other playkids also show signs of growing up. They are bidding for original art and short stories by new authors; Playboy's fiction rates (maximum: $2.000) are among the highest in the industry. Writers, artists and photographers are responding; hard hit by the collapse of five mass-circulation family magazines in the past two years, they have found that one way to keep the wolf from the door is to act like one.