The Porning Report

Hustler to Open Stores in Britain

Porn publisher Larry Flynt and his Hustler (NSFW) empire will soon be invading the U.K. via a chain of his Hustler sex stores.

Flynt has announced a deal with a group of British investors to launch a chain of "erotic superstores" selling his collections of lingerie, sex toys, and "leisure" wear. The first two stores will open in Birmingham and London this summer as part of the Hustler Hollywood chain of sex shops run by Flynt's daughter Theresa. Another three outlets are planned for next year in cities such as Manchester, Nottingham and Cardiff, with Hustler "gentlemen's clubs" to follow if all goes well.

Though Hustler Hollywood U.K. insists that hardcore magazines, "extreme" sex aids (NSFW) and all sex videos and DVDs will be banned from the U.K. stores, the play marks a significant move by the United States' sex industry to expand into Britain, following hot on the spiked heels of another recent thrust of American flesh into the U.K. market, the invasion of the Spearmint Rhino.

Spearmint Rhino is a growing chain of strip clubs that recently opened up in Britain amidst a firestorm of protest and controversy, including a series of legal clashes over licenses and resignation, the employment of an under-age dancer and allegations of drugs abuse.

What this really boils down to is every country's right to decide what is legal for adults to purchase. Can an adult buy a U.S. nudie mag in England? Generally, yes. How about a dildo? That depends on where and what kind. How about a porn movie? Yes, even in gas stations, but apparently not in a Hustler store. What about a lapdance? Well, that seems to be a bit of a sticking point...

"You have a right to buy whatever you want," Flynt recently told Wired.com. "You may not be able to afford a printing press to print it, but you have a right to buy it. That's not something that's often talked about in relation to the First Amendment. But civil liberties and individual rights are all we really have in this country."

True. But what about the civil liberties and individual rights of the Brits?

Cleaning Up The Penthouse Forum

Rappers and rock stars hosting porno movies, the rise in popularity of raw, extreme gonzo where the performers acknowledge the camera and there is no plot, T&A-filled mens magazines, and all sorts of TV and films with porn-themes. One might assume that as this allhappens, skin magazines like Playboy and the already-quite-explicit Penthouse, whose days of soft filter pinups is already long gone, would have to rise to the challenge and up the ante of their content, likewise getting more sexually intense and uninhibited, right? Actually, quite the opposite is happening.

This week, the New York Post reports that Penthouse, which went bankrupt after going hardcore in the '90s, is getting a $50 million makeover to re-launch this fall. Part of the makeover includes cleaning it up, nixing its XXX-rated pictorials in favor of "more tasteful and sensual layouts reminiscent of its heyday in the 1980s." In essence, they wanna grab that burgeoning Maxim crowd, and distance itself from the porn world.

"The new Penthouse is softer, so we can win back readers and appeal to an even broader audience," Marc Bell, the head of an investment group that has committed $85 million or so to revive the mag, told the Post.

Clearly, they believe sexual moderation, is the key to making money again, and one way they can be assured of generating some dough is to re-up their circulation. You see, after their explicit shift in the '90s, the Pentagon banned Penthouse from being stocked on military bases. This, in addition to also being taken off the stands in many "mass-market outlets" as well, caused circulation to drop dramatically from 3 million to just 300,000 copies. Yikes! Clearly investors hope that with a cleaned-up image, Penthouse might stand a chance of returning to newsstands.

It's an amazing thing, really. Though it was one of the magazines that pushed the boundries for porn in print, it's now decided to pull back the reins and reign in the sex. Goodbye money shot, hello merkin. So yes, Penthouse will return to its tamer roots this fall... but it will still likely be the target of many conservative groups who fail to see the distinction between a naked girl on all fours and naked girl on all four engaged in a sex act.

FYI, despite new management, 71-year-old founder Bob Guccione will remain the publisher and "driving creative force" for the fleshy tome. We'll have to wait and see just how graphic the other driving forces in the magazine are come this fall.

Lad Mag Face Off

Two rival U.K. publishing companies are about to enter a fight to the death over the current desires of young men! No, it's not the plot for a new reality TV show.

According to Independent.co.uk, two of Britain's largest publishing houses, IPC and Emap, are betting that they know the secret to what makes young men tick, and they are putting their money where their mouth is by simultaneously launching rival men's magazines with opposing points of view.

IPC believes the modern young man is "picked on" by advertisers and embarrassed by overt female nudity. It's spending £8 million setting up what they are calling its "biggest ever launch." Their magazine title? Ironically, Nuts.

Nuts is based on a two-year IPC research exercise called Project Tribal that indicated that many men are no longer comfortable with the brash lifestyle mags aimed at them that are "Loaded" with T&A and raunch. The portrayal of men as "objects of suspicion" is a thing of the past, they say.

Meanwhile, Emap thinks men are obsessed with sex, football and bawdy jokes. It has also coughed up £8 million for Zoo Weekly, calling it "the largest ever launch into the U.K. men's market." Zoo Weekly is being described as "not a lad's magazine, it's a men's magazine."

"There will be good writing, considered features, pretty girls and football," said editor Paul Merrill.

Pretty girls and football. Um… Any guesses about who is going to win this race?

Catch of the Day

As if the porn-rap connection wasn't already strong as a set of gold fronts with everyone from 50 Cent to Lil Jon signing up to host a gonzo skin flick, now a magazine called Fish 'N' Grits has launched to specifically tap into this burgeoning market.

The mag -- which describes itself as "where music meets porn" -- features rappers alongside black and Latino porn stars graphically discussing their fetishes and wackiest sexual experiences. Wu Tang Clan MC and actor on the rise Method Man ("My Baby Daddy") appear on the cover of the debut issue, and the issue also features producer Kanye West, upcoming porn auteur Lil Jon and his Eastsideboyz, Neptunes prodigies The Clipse, Southern rapper Bone Crusher, ultra-pimp Too Short and the founders of hip hop appeal titans FUBU. Future issues will pair up Lil' Kim with Lexington Steal, and feature everyone from Redman and Naughty By Nature's Treach (who both appeared in the X-Rated "Sex In The Studio"), Snoop Dogg (who has two porno movies out through Hustler), Mystikal (who released a Hustler porn and just got six years in prison for forcing his hairstylist to perform sexual acts on him), strip club enthusiasts OutKast and many others.

The December issue is on stands now.

As the Bunny Turns

Last month, Playboy magazine turned 50 and to celebrate, founder Hugh Hefner sold off half a century's worth of Playboy memorabilia at Christie's auction house . Among the items were nude pictures of Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, and other supermodels and actresses; original manuscripts by writers like Jack Kerouac; interviews with Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand, and Orson Welles; letters from William Saroyan, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury; Hef's little black address books with phone numbers of the rich and famous; his old Mercedes; and two invitations to the New Year's Eve party at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. Wow!

Needless to say, the items went for a pretty penny. Hefner has built an amazing, if graying, empire out of a pen, paper, the written word and a vast array of breasts. He presides over Playboy Enterprises -- whose chief executive is Hefner's daughter, Christie -- which has become a multimedia company, with TV channels in many countries and a great global brand: the black bunny head.

Clearly Hef gets the big picture. He understands branding, marketing and promotion like no other in the skin trade. However, the big picture in 2004 ain't the airbrushed glossy it was a decade or so ago. Playboy Enterprises just rode out several bad years of being in the red. First off, if you want to see hot babes and plenty of skin, there are enough quare inches of skin in non-porn men's magazines like Maxim and Stuff for you to get your flesh fix without having to even surf the free smut available online.

And despite the bankruptcy of Playboy's chief rival Penthouse, similar minded yet harder-core magazines are popping up left and right as the porn industry blossoms. As it does so, the demand for the next big things keeps getting more extreme. Now, in hard-core porn, it's not good enough to simply have sex with more than two people. You have to be like porn queen Belladonna and use a baseball bat, too.

Is the good-natured-grandfather Playboy willing to compete with the new breed of pornographers? Is Hefner willing to roll in the mud with the more-willing-change-with-the-times Larry Flynts or the extreme-by-anyone's-standards Max Hardcores of the world? Or will the Bunny lovin' legend finally roll over and let the younger, sicker, less classy kids take over? Playboy is "quietly" developing more perverse offerings with SpiceTV and its Internet operations. But it remains to be seen if it can continue to grow in that direction and still be the company that sponsors a jazz festival each year.