Skin Trouble

In square footage of exposed epidermis, the cover of this month's Playboy is hardly remarkable: a couple of bare arms and a single unholstered breast. But those appendages belong not to one comely lady but to two, and their embrace suggests something more than a hello. Inside are ten color pages of female couples in various stages of sapphic bliss. Has Playboy, the bible of macho heterosexuality, gone lesbian?

Not exactly. The magazine has in the past run occasional shots of women fondling each other, and Playboy Publicist Lee Gottlieb says: "The experts tell me that two women making love to each other is a male turn-on." But Playboy's lesbian offensive is a new escalation in the war of the lower depths. Plump, expensively produced variants of Playboy are spreading like herpes sores, and enthusiasts can choose from an estimated 35 different titles. The big three --Playboy, Penthouse and Oui--alone sell some 10 million copies a month, double the circulation of the entire skin-magazine industry a decade ago. But profits are chancy, competition for readers is getting hotter, and the magazines are becoming ever more erotic. Last week Eastern Newsstand Corp., a distributor with 105 outlets in New York, Chicago, Cleveland and Atlanta, responded to complaints by displaying skin magazines in plain paper wrappers.

Gauzy Nodes. Father Rabbit Hugh Marston Hefner, who started Playboy in 1953, crossed the pubic-hair Rubicon three years ago, but only after goading by Bob Guccione, whose Penthouse first appeared in 1969 full of gauzy nudes with hirsute private parts. Since then, the two antagonists, as well as such panting competitors as Gallery, Genesis, Dude, Club, Game, Cavalier, Adam and Hustler, have been leaving less and less to the imagination. Playboy has expanded its Playmate of the Month spread from two or three pages to as many as nine. Penthouse routinely features male-female and female-female couples. Hefner's Oui (circ. 1.3 million), which set out three years ago to out-raunch Penthouse, is a virtual consumer guide to self-abuse, sadomasochism, bondage and other subjects that were once the province of hard-core porn.

The war has not been going too well for Playboy. Advertising revenue is down 7 1/2%, and newsstand sales are down nearly 17%. For the first time, Playboy's circulation (5.8 million, v. 3.7 million for Penthouse) has fallen short of its 6 million-copy guarantee; the magazine last month began offering partial refunds to advertisers. Playboy, however, still makes money, while Hefner's nonpublishing sidelines mostly do not. Playboy Enterprises, Inc., the parent firm, last week announced its third consecutive losing quarter. Playboy is considered by its competitors as still relatively mild. "Bondage is where the action is right now, but we have been slow to pick up on it," complains one Playboy editor. No need to, argues Editorial Director Arthur Kretchmer: "We still have the class act of the magazine business. The answer is not more skin."

Few rivals would agree. "I no longer regard Playboy as a serious competitor," says Bob Guccione. He is hardly unbiased. But Penthouse photographs display a sophisticated eroticism that Playboy's more bare and square style has seldom been able to match. Moreover, critics praise its crusade on behalf of Viet Nam veterans and its tough investigation of Mob activity at California's La Costa resort. Counterattacking, Playboy this summer hired away James Goode, the editor most responsible for Penthouse's investigative success. Guccione, unfazed, plans to bring out a magazine next March called Bravo, described by someone who has seen the dummies as "a lot raunchier than Penthouse, devoid of political content or investigative reporting." Not that all is going well. Guccione's Viva, a classily pornographic Cosmopolitan launched two years ago, has lost some $3 million.

King Raunch. The upstart that other editors are worried about, however, is Hustler, a kind of blue-collar Playboy that bids to become the king raunch of the skins. Since Hustler was founded 14 months ago by a Columbus, Ohio, restaurateur named Larry Flynt, its claimed circulation has leaped to 1.3 million, which may make it the hottest book in the skin trade. It is also revolting. Recent issues have featured an erotic nude takeout on a fourteenish girl, a how-to piece on oral intercourse and six color pages of a woman being ravished by a snake. Says Flynt: "Neither Hefner nor Guccione wants to admit that people are buying skin mags for a turn-on first and for editorial quality second."

But there is evidence that the field is becoming lethally crowded. As titles proliferate, newsstand space is tough to get. The prime market for skin magazines--males aged 18 to 34--is not growing as fast as before now that the postwar baby bulge is slipping through that bracket. And, horror of horrors, the sexual revolution that the skin books helped foment has gone so far that it becomes harder and harder to captivate an increasingly jaded audience. As Playboy and its eager rivals become ever more daring and explicit, the sultans of skin may find they have won the battles but lost the war.

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