"When I was a teenager, 'Playboy' was the most interesting magazine in the world, and not just for the playmates. I liked the interviews and the stories, and all that, but nowadays most of the stuff in there doesn't interest me"
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There’s a sly bait-and-switch built into Chester Brown’s nostalgia: he opens with the cliché everyone expects about teenage boys and Playboy, then immediately refuses to let the reader stay there. “And not just for the playmates” is doing double duty - a wink that acknowledges the obvious, and a bid for legitimacy that reframes Playboy as a formative cultural object rather than a dirty secret. Brown is telling you he was the kind of teenager who read the interviews, which is also a way of saying he wanted to be the kind of adult who could admit that.
The real move comes in the pivot: “nowadays most of the stuff in there doesn’t interest me.” It’s deflation as critique. Brown isn’t moralizing about porn, or denouncing Hugh Hefner; he’s describing a drift in relevance and taste, the way a once-electrifying brand can become background noise when you grow up and your appetites get more specific. The subtext is that Playboy’s old cultural bargain - sex plus smart conversation, titillation packaged as sophistication - no longer holds for him, either because the magazine changed, or because he did.
Coming from a cartoonist, the remark also reads like a small manifesto about attention. Brown’s work is famous for its stripped-down clarity and willingness to puncture romantic myths. Here he’s puncturing a different myth: that Playboy was either pure smut or pure “quality journalism.” It was a collage, and his interest was always selective.
The real move comes in the pivot: “nowadays most of the stuff in there doesn’t interest me.” It’s deflation as critique. Brown isn’t moralizing about porn, or denouncing Hugh Hefner; he’s describing a drift in relevance and taste, the way a once-electrifying brand can become background noise when you grow up and your appetites get more specific. The subtext is that Playboy’s old cultural bargain - sex plus smart conversation, titillation packaged as sophistication - no longer holds for him, either because the magazine changed, or because he did.
Coming from a cartoonist, the remark also reads like a small manifesto about attention. Brown’s work is famous for its stripped-down clarity and willingness to puncture romantic myths. Here he’s puncturing a different myth: that Playboy was either pure smut or pure “quality journalism.” It was a collage, and his interest was always selective.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
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