Since the dawn of time, pornography has been in the forefront of exploiting new technology as it appears. The uptake of emerging technology from the earliest cave paintings, etchings, postcards, photographs, ASCII art and the Interweb have all been driven by amusing illustrations.
Now, predictably and depressingly, porn has caught up with the iPhone. And not just any porn, but the worst kind of fantasy porn – Playboy. For this venerable publication, run by a ghastly old roué who you really want to punch in the face, specializes in the most deviant images of women imaginable, airbrushed to plastic perfection, no warts and all.
This isn’t honest-to-badness proper pornography, for these porcelain-skinned icons of perfection would surely melt or break in even the most restrained lovemaking.
But the mag’s success has been founded on providing an excuse to angry reader’s wives for men whose porn stashes have been discovered at the back of the closet – the articles on vintage fire trucks, cars and boats which intersperse the spreads of silicone honeys not quite revealing all.
And it is precisely this abject failure to lay bare which makes Playboy acceptable to the prudes at the Apple App Store, for whom nakedness – let alone raw, untouched nakedness – is anathema. So, for $1.99, sad losers can now download Playboy each month, vintage fire trucks and all.
Quite why anyone would wish to view the contents of this singular publication on a tiny LCD screen remains a mystery, even though said screen is wipe-clean. This isn’t really the sort of thing you want to be seen looking at in a bar or on the subway, is it?
We need a campaign for real porn. Playboy just doesn’t cut it and while we can see that the average iPhone user is unlikely to get any action in real life, surely a $1.99 phone app is hardly a substitute.
