The new Playboy hard drive, the rise of Internet porn and the death of Hef‘s sophisticated cool

from www.nydailynews.com - In certain Native American tribes, a boy's maturity is marked by a vision quest, wherein he wanders the wilderness, returning to his tribe with newfound wisdom. In my own tribe, the North American Jew, the same is accomplished through the bar mitzvah, a young boy's harrowing journey into a synagogue, from which he emerges with envelopes containing savings bonds.

But one coming-of-age ritual for boys is common across all culture: the passing of the Playboy. This was usually done by an older boy, perhaps 15, who has decided to share the magazine's pictorial wisdom with one several years his junior. The magazine - well-worn, but wisdom intact - was then thoroughly perused by its new owner and his fellow scholars in basements, backyards and closed bedrooms.

Or so I've heard.

But this ritual, already under assault from the digital domain, won't ever be the same after Playboy releases - in time for the holidays - all of its issues, from 1953 to 2009, on a single hard drive this month. You get 250 gigabytes of Playboy for $300. Not a bad deal, I suppose, if you're really, really into Playboy.

But in the end, the Playboy hard drive is little more than a last-quarter surge in a game of market catchup. With roughly 99.99% of the Internet claimed by pornography, just who is still going to a newsstand, face tucked into trench coat, to buy his printed pleasures of the flesh?

Playboy billed itself as "Entertainment for Men," and although the "I buy it for the articles" joke has been around as long as the magazine, it did publish the likes of Updike, Cheever and Nabokov - along with bold female voices like Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Sexton.

The pictures of women were couched in a sensibility that made sex part of an overall pursuit of pleasure both physical and intellectual. And, crucially, that pleasure was hard to access. Only a gentleman, one who quotes Shakespeare and sipped Scotch, could even think of courting Miss July. The rest of us would have to do with the printed chronicle of his conquests, as published by Hugh Hefner.

Today, though, you can summon pornography on your computer screen with depressing, unexciting ease. The thrill of obtaining that first Playboy, like the thrill of actual romance, was in the difficulty of the pursuit. Now, as long as you look at legal porn, in an acceptable place, that difficulty is pretty much gone.

Though I am not privy to Playboy's marketing strategy, I strongly suspect the hard-drive archive is a ploy to become more like the pornography pervasive on the Internet today, and less like the magazine Hefner created more than 50 years ago - a bow to the instant gratification our culture demands. According to the technology website CNET, the Playboy drive is an emulation of FleshDrive's "USB thumbdrives filled with porn." That doesn't sound like the sort of thing that has much Updike on it, but I could be wrong.

In the end, the best thing about Playboy was that it went away. It was passed from college-bound males to their younger brothers, who then moved it along the great chain of being to more awkward and/or youthful members of the male species. Eventually, the pages were torn (or worse) and frayed, the magazine damaged beyond repair.

Also, there were real girlfriends, in real life (again, none of this applies to me). The falling away of Playboy was like the changing of your voice - a natural progression. You had to go out in the real world and try to socialize with real women, no matter how frightening they were.

There was no Facebook to hide behind, no hard drives or websites to allay your most basic - and your most human - desires. There were things you couldn't Google, and you were probably better off for it.