Velociworld

PORNODIGM SHIFT

Eric brings us the sad news that Penthouse magazine is folding its pages, just months after Screw went down.

When I was a lad you could benchmark the whackbooks thusly:

Playboy: the girl bared everything but her crotch.

Penthouse: the girl showed her crotch.

Hustler: the girl fingered her crotch.

Screw: the girl placed a foreign object in her crotch. Then she showed you her anus.

Now you can go on the internet and watch a girl with a strap-on hedgehog a peccary while chugging a glass of penguin urine. How do you compete with that kind of consumer targeting?

Just like the Democratic Party, pornography has become such a conglomeration of granular self-interested fetishes that you can't please a magazine circulation of any size. Everybody wants their own particular kink represented. The onanists don't want to look at the leather freaks, and the bullwhippers could care less about the fecalarians. None of them wants to hang with the homobestialists.

Hello. I think I'm onto something here. How about a magazine that's divided into 10 or so different sections, each with a particular perversion? That's cross-marketing on a scale I can appreciate. Terry McAuliffe could be the publisher. You could call it, I don't know, Velociworld or something.