After recently coming across some now-historic Playboy centerfold playmates online – models we adolescent boys worshiped – I was struck by how average they were in retrospect. Not surgically enhanced nor abnormally thin waists nor even fashionably tall, as we’ve come to expect. Even their hair looked like the girls we knew – or dreamed of knowing.
Looking back, let me say it was the smile, more than anything, that got us.
And then, in the midst of the sexual revolution of the hippie era came a feminist rejection of Hugh Hefner’s free-love philosophy, even as events pushed far beyond his now pathetically comic hedonism. Quite simply, he went one way and we went another.
Yes, the glossy periodical was a rich patron for short-story writers and novelists, interviewers, and cartoonists, no matter the reality they were window dressing all along. Still, in many ways, Playboy appeared as a hip rival to the more staid New Yorker. For a while, it was even Chicago versus Manhattan in the realm of publishing.
And then Penthouse and Hustler attacked Hefner’s little empire from the other side of the respectability divide.
Oh, how long ago that all seems!
These days I’m reflecting on the magazine’s admission it can no longer compete with the nudity that’s readily available online for free and its decision to go more respectable, as Esquire did decades earlier. No more centerfold? Wasn’t that the magazine’s identity? What else has been stripped away?
In light of today’s world of publishing, let me say, Best wishes!
Especially considering Tinder and the rest of the new social-media lifestyle.
Jnana's Red Barn 
It really is from another era. Didn’t Hefner say he wanted the models to be like the girl next door?
That was the claim. And then, somewhere along the line, they started to be Hollywood hopefuls — and what we see in movies and on TV rarely resemble what we see in real life.