So the short story is I waffled around for a lot of years, doing a lot of things, working in retail, in book publishing, going back to school. I went earnestly out in the world to go get the job I thought was out there waiting for me, and it just wasn't. And then right as I was graduating and starting to look for work, the industry - the world, really - kind of changed. So I studied the industry and I did my internships, and all that. Or as we called it back then, just media.
#First playgirl magazine professional#
I'm sure a lot of people have this experience at a lot of moments in history, but my story is that I grew up being a good student and doing all the things good students are taught to do in order to become a competent and competitive professional in some field someday. How was it that you, with your "expensive liberal arts degree," as you put it, with capital-"s"-serious journalistic aspirations, ended up an editor at Playgirl? I spoke to Collins by email about what went wrong with Playgirl and what it would take for a women's porn magazine to succeed. It's bordered by those invisible lines we draw, and then erase and draw again." It lives between seduction and the tease, in every step it takes to identify what it is we don’t have yet and every step it takes to make it ours. It's built out of thin air, on anticipation and possibility.
"Its shape is impossible to trace, its lines invisible. is something that takes real work to sell," she writes. It's also an earnest and insightful look at sexuality and female desire in particular. "Desire. The book doesn't just dish on the inner workings of the infamous publication, though. Collins was greeted with a blowup doll in her cubicle on her first day of work. There was nothing sexy about the job - not the photoshoots with overly toned hunks and not the office, which was shared with "middle-aged, overweight, mushachioed" men who edited trashy men's magazines and would brainstorm headlines out loud in neighboring cubicles (“Sex Toy Sluts Ram It Deep?” "All Girl Dildo Fuck?"). Her boss had "an artsy black-and-white photograph of a gentle ocean wave cresting over an unkempt vagina over his desk," she writes. She remembers one that read, "'I would like to pose in your prestigious magazine as a lumberjack and beside a nest of hornets." "Always, it made me need to immediately wash my hands." Among those were the often bizarre submissions from everyday men who wanted to appear in the magazine. Sometimes the pages were tacky or crumby with substances better not wondered about." The mail was "totally creepy, a little bit heartwarming, and super tragic," she says. "Just as frequently, it was heart-inflected in the manner of a giddy teenager. "Frequently, the handwriting on the envelopes what one might call 'serial killer,'" she writes. Those "tickle gizzard" fans - "the wankership," as she puts it - would flood her desk with letters. Turns out the editors of the much-ridiculed magazine were often asking themselves the same questions as the general public: Who reads this? In her new e-book, "How to Be a Playgirl," a bite-sized memoir of her time at the nudie mag, she writes, "Who were these people, who were turned on by words like tickle gizzard?" These were just a few of the words on the "13-page thesaurus of synonyms for penis" that Jessanne Collins collected as an editor at Playgirl magazine, which now only exists as an online brand and rare print publication.
Blue vein meatroll, liver turner and purple-helmeted warrior of love.
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