Kathy Keeton

Posted on by Team Penthouse

In a 1973 advertisement for the short-lived Penthouse spin-off magazine for women, Viva, it shows a portrait of Bob Guccione’s wife and executive partner, Kathy Keeton. “Who is this woman?” was the question printed in bold white letters below Keeton’s thin hand, covered in chunky rings.

Keeton was born in South Africa but moved to England to study ballet at the London Royal Ballet Company. After eight years, she left and started dancing in nightclubs and in films. This was when Guccione first heard of Keeton. In the second issue of Penthouse magazine, they printed a scathing review of her exotic performance based solely on a press release.

“Her manager called me up,” Guccione told New York magazine. “Screaming down the phone about ‘How could I be so crude and so insensitive about such a fine artist?’” So, Guccione sucked it up and went to see Kathy’s show.

Regardless of whether he was impressed with her dancing or not, it was her dressing room that won him over. While all the other performers had horoscopes and pictures of pinups taped to their mirrors, Keeton’s dressing station was bare, except for a stack of Financial Times newspapers and a few science books.

Guccione offered her a job in ad sales for Penthouse, promising her ten pounds a week.

Keeton soon proved herself to be a business-savvy powerhouse who protected her partner and his company. She rose to the position of chief operating officer and president of Penthouse General Media, becoming one of the highest paid women in the world, making $335,000 a year at the time.

Guccione and Keeton shared a love of knowledge, science, and art. Besides Viva (where she hired future Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour), Keeton also founded the wildly successful OMNI magazine in the late seventies, and Longevity a decade later, and was the author of two books: Longevity: The Science of Staying Young and Woman of Tomorrow. Like Guccione, Keeton was a strong, ambitious leader who devoted herself entirely to any project she took on.

In the nineties, Keeton was diagnosed with breast cancer and given six weeks to live. She refused chemotherapy and instead relied on hydrazine-sulfate therapy, an experimental treatment discovered by a scientist whom Penthouse had been supporting. Kathy lived two more years before passing away after surgery complications in September of 1997, at age 58.

The loss hit Bob Guccione harder than anything he’d ever faced. For 32 years,“they were as one,” his son Tony recalled. “It was a kind of ‘us against the world’ mentality that soldered them together.” Kathy Keeton was Guccione’s rock, and with her gone, the Penthouse founder was left to face the tumultuous times to come, for his life and business, alone.

Kathy and Bob at work

Bob Guccione, founder and publisher of ‘Penthouse’ magazine, with his wife Kathy Keeton, December 1993. (Photo by David Montgomery/Getty Images)

Jam Not Preserved?

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Pop music has always been about sex, but it’s never been as up-front about it as it is today. Thanks in part to pop listeners’ migration from radio to censorship-free streaming services, songs overtly sexual enough to have earned invitations from a congressional committee back in Tipper Gore’s day routinely hit No. 1 without anyone blinking an eye. Browse through Spotify’s agenda-setting Rap Caviar playlist and you can hear tomorrow’s crossover superstars describing, in diagrammatic detail, sex acts that weren’t even common in mainstream porn when 2 Live Crew was battling federal courts for the right to distribute their music.

Pop’s newfound unconflicted, hang-up-free sexuality is a testament to free speech and sexual expression, not to mention the amount of ground that free speech advocates have gained in the course of the past three decades of culture wars with conservatives. But as pop has shed its modesty, it seems to have also lost touch one of the greatest outlets for its erotic urge.

When was the last time you heard a truly sensual R&B ballad? Not just a song about sex, but a song about lay-you-down-by-the-fireplace, put-your-phone-on-airplane-mode, light-some-candles-and-bust-out-the-massage-oil sex? I guess what I’m asking is, when was the last time you heard an unforgettable fuck jam?

I bet it wasn’t while you were listening to pop and R&B radio. The airwaves used to be as dense with fuck jams as America’s plains once were with bison, from the unbuttoned-shirt virility of 70s soul seductors like Barry White, Isaac Hayes, and Teddy Pendergrass to unabashedly sexual female performers like Aaliyah, Missy Elliott, and TLC who ushered pop’s sonics and sexual identity into the new millennium.

These days, tuning into throwback-loving “strictly for the grown and sexy” urban adult contemporary radio like Chicago V103 and L.A.’s 94.7 The Wave can feel like looking at one of those old photos of huge piles of buffalo carcasses from a railway hunt and marveling that they were ever so plentiful. Out of the 100 songs on Billboard’s year-end Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs list for 2018, only the Weeknd’s “Call Out My Name” and SZA’s “The Weekend” really qualify, and coming in at No. 43 and No. 85, respectively, they didn’t exactly light the world on fire. Ella Mai’s smash “Boo’d Up” is sweet but not sexy. Ty Dolla $ign and Jeremih are continuously pumping out brilliant sex music that can’t seem to connect with a mass audience, while Spotify’s popular Are & Be playlist is continually full of emotionally intelligent but chaste quasi-bohemian bops like Pink Sweat$’s “Honesty.” I’d argue that the last truly fuck-worthy song popular enough to get any randomly selected group of intoxicated people to sing along with it–the ultimate marker of a pop classic–is Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love,” and she put that out in 2013.

Shug

True, there are plenty of songs out there racking up Spotify spins by the multimillions that have all the sonic characteristics of a fuck jam. They’ve got the slow tempos, lush arrangements, even the right kind of lascivious mood, at least here and there. But they’re not really fuck jams because they’re not really about fucking.

About a decade ago, R&B-ish hip-hop records like Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreaks and Drake’s So Far Gone and hip-hop-ish R&B songs like Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” knocked down the last crumbling bits of the wall between the two genres. Rappers, emboldened by Auto-Tune and swimming in promethazine cough syrup, got slower and more sing-y. R&B artists who’d been raised on hip-hop started to emulate rappers. They started writing songs about the things rappers wrote songs about: ambition, material wealth, grudges. And crucially, they stopped making music for the bedroom and started making it for strip clubs, which are all about status and public displays of extravagant consumption, and only a little about sex.

The merger of hip-hop and R&B has been more successful than anyone could have imagined a decade ago. Now only has it swallowed the pop charts almost entirely, it’s produced some of the most adventurous artists to come out of the soul tradition since the seventies heyday of Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye. The Weeknd has introduced a chilly postpunk atmosphere and gothic melodrama to a genre that in the past often felt stiflingly glossy. Rihanna has proven herself to be one of pop music’s most agile stylistic acrobats by putting her instant-platinum stamp on everything from bubbly EDM-pop to hard-edged trap music. Drake, who’s spent his entire career shape-shifting around any attempt to pin him down as either a rapper or a singer, has given us some of the decade’s most indelible melodies and become one of the biggest forces in all of popular culture in the process.

But sex is rarely the main focus of their songs, and when it is, it’s usually not as a source of pleasure unto itself. Most of Drake’s songs are about Drake, and sex for Drake is something to be accumulated, shown off, compared to his peers in an endless game of competitive status anxiety. He delights in his ability to attract sex, and describes the emotional and power dynamics of sex in intimate detail, but doesn’t spend much time talking about the act itself. His sexiest songs aren’t even about fucking. “Passionfruit” is about long-distance obsession. “Marvins Room,” whose title explicitly references Marvin Gaye, is addressed to an ex-lover but is almost entirely all about her new boyfriend.

Same thing for rap and R&B’s other reigning sex icons. Rihanna uses sex for fun and power. Future, possibly hip-hop’s greatest sensualist, uses sex–and slow jams like “Rich Sex”–as an excuse to inventory all the high-end jewelry he wears while he’s having it. The Weeknd used to write about sex as a compulsion on par with his enthusiastic substance abuse, presenting a dark flip side of the archetypal R&B sex fiend that was intriguing until it was done to death by nearly every R&B singer to follow him (along with the emo-inspired SoundCloud rap movement as a whole). These days he’s mostly channeling most of his erotic energy into his automobile collection, which he’s eroticized to the point of paraphilia on songs like “Starboy,” where his lovers are easily outnumbered and outshined by the small fleet of sports cars he lovingly lists. (Weirdly, it’s a trait that he shares with Marc Bolan from T. Rex, whose most iconic songs are all pretty much about how badly he wanted to fuck a car.)

It’s maybe fitting that consumption’s replaced fucking as the object of obsession in soul music’s modern-day descendants. The single-minded focus on grinding toward a particularly materialistic ideal of self-actualization hasn’t only spread to R&B artists–it’s become the defining worldview for an entire generation. The fragmentation of the American job market, the rise of the gig economy, and the way social media has blurred the lines between our personal and professional lives has turned us all into rise-and-grinders desperately hustling to secure our various bags. When you’re trying to stay ahead in a round-the-clock rat race that touches every aspect of your life, your sex life is naturally going to suffer. Today’s young people, the bread and butter of the pop market, are having less sex than previous generations, and voting with their Spotify streams for music that matches their priorities.

And the kind of sex they are having doesn’t exactly fit with the whole slow-jam paradigm. Hookup apps have made sex not just plentiful beyond what past generations of slow-jam sexual connoisseurs could ever have dreamed, but so convenient that we often treat it as just another order-in staple on par with Thai food. By their very nature, fuck jams depend on sex being a big deal–such a big deal that you can only adequately express it through orchestral string sections, sky-high poetic metaphors, or pornographically intricate blow-by-blow reports of exactly how it’s going down. I’ve had fun on Tinder hookups, and even some genuinely good sex, but nothing I’ve been moved to write a song about after.

Maybe fuck jams just aren’t the permanent form we once assumed they were. Maybe they’re like rap skits or hard-rock power ballads, features of the pop-music landscape that seem eternal, right up until they day you look around and notice they’ve disappeared.

It could happen. Surviving R. Kelly seems like it’s going to finally topple the undisputed modern master of the fuck jam, a figure so integral to the past two decades of its evolution that his downfall could manage to bring the whole genre down with him. I suspect that one of the reasons so many people were so resistant to hearing that he’s a sexual predator is that deleting him would mean erasing a huge swath of their personal sexual discography. I wouldn’t blame a listener who feels gun-shy about getting so intimate with a singer again.

Or maybe we’re just in a drought.

There are still some very good songs coming out that don’t promise eroticism only to deliver a catalog of luxury watches. Frank Ocean, who almost everyone agrees is on course to make the era-defining album of his generation, showed on Blonde that he’s got the Prince-like ability to turn any song, in any possible mood or style, into a fuck jam. FKA Twigs is probably on more sex playlists than Sade at this point, and she’s overdue for a return to the spotlight. Tank’s recent single “Dirty” deserves recognition for the sheer depth of its lyrical depravity, including the line “I’ll violate all the meat on your bones.”

And then there’s Ian Isiah, a singer blessed with an angelic falsetto that maintains its strength and suppleness even at stratospheric heights, as well as a polymorphously perverse sensuality that permeates his music. Raised in his family’s church band, he’s a gospel singer with an operatic sense of soaring drama that he uses to elevate the fuck jam into the celestial sphere. His recent Shugga Sextape (Vol. 1) wafts out of speakers on a cloud of diffuse, prismatic horniness that comes as close as music can to capturing the feeling of being on really good, really pure MDMA. The music, arranged by Kanye-approved producer Sinjin Hawke, is seductively futuristic, as is Isiah’s kinky-glam androgynous style, but his reverence for the sacred power of the erotic runs straight back through the entire lineage of seductive soul music, and hints at a connection much older than even that. If the fuck jam as we know it is crumbling, this is what’s going to crawl up out of the rubble and take it somewhere new.

The Dakar-Peru Road with Penthouse | Episode 4

Posted on by Team Penthouse
AND KEEP GOING!

Penthouse Gets Dirty

Sadly, we could not find one person in this big office who speaks the language being spoken here. The Team sent these short clips across, however, so we did feel obliged to include the update. If it helps any, we’re pretty sure they’re saying, “Yep. We still have an engine, and golly do I need a hot bath. By the way, does anyone know where the nearest car wash might be?”

A slight chance exists that we might be off just a tad in that translation.

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The Unholy Alliance

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Big Sister is peeking into your window to find out whether you’re reading anything “sexually explicit which subordinates women.” The men holding up the ladder Big Sister is perched on are none other than the Reverend Falwell and his gang of anti-feminist Moral Majoritarians. And if Big Sister catches you reading any objectionable stuff, she is going to report you to President Reagan and Ed Meese — who have sworn to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, who regard all abortion as murder, and who consider homosexuality a felonious sin.

No, this isn’t a Saturday Night Live takeoff on an Orwellian nightmare. It is an all-too realistic representation of the crazy-quilt coalition that concocted the recently enacted Indianapolis anti-por­nography statute now under challenge in the courts.

The Indianapolis statute—which was drafted by a feminist law professor named Catharine MacKinnon and a radical man-hating author named Andrea Dworkin, and enacted by a conservative city council with the support of a right-wing preacher—goes further in censoring magazines, books, films, and even museum paintings than any law in recent history. It defines pornography to include “the sexually explicit subordina­tion of women, graphically depicted, whether in pictures or words.” Nor does the term “sexually explicit” narrow the prohibition; instead, it broadens it to include nudity like “uncovered exhibition of the genitals or buttocks.”

The ordinance’s drafters readily acknowledge and even boast that it is not limited to the hard-core porn of the peep show and the X-rated variety. (Much of that already has been banned by laws approved by the Supreme Court, though these laws are often not fully enforced.) Rather, the new law is aimed at the mainstream and Main Street media that offend some women: Penthouse, cable television, A-rated movies, and sexist fiction.

The Indianapolis statute empowers “any woman” aggrieved by a book, magazine, movie, or painting to file a complaint with a government agency. If the agency and a court agree that the material is covered by the ordinance—that is, if it contains nudity and subordinates women—the agency may issue an order against it. Simply put, that means a censorship board may ban it, even for reading or viewing by an individual in the privacy of his or her home.

Nor does the ordinance exempt books, films, and paintings with serious literary or artistic merit. Indeed, one of the drafters argues that the more serious and acceptable sexist art is, the more dangerous it is to women.

The specter of feminist censors roaming through bookstores and museums and filing complaints against books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or paintings like The Rape of the Sabine Women, may be farfetched, but it surely is invited by the ordinance’s broad language. And all it takes is one aggrieved woman to start a censorship proceeding.

The current court challenge may well end up in the Supreme Court, as cities throughout the country line up to enact their own versions of the feminist censorship statute.

This “new approach” to censorship seems politically unstoppable. A Wall Street Journal columnist observed that if this ordinance had been drafted by the Moral Majority, it would have been “laughed out.” But since it has the backing of thousands of feminists—including some otherwise responsible leaders—it is being taken seriously by big-city politicians anxious to do something about smut without exposing either their left or right flanks.

It used to be that the perennial pre-election prattle about how smut is destroying our moral fiber would be greeted by sustained applause from the right and a collective groan from the left. Now things are different. The right is still applauding, but the left is in disarray. Many loyal opponents of censorship are unwilling to alienate their friends and allies in the feminist censorship movement. The result is a juggernaut which politicians in cities ranging from New York to Detroit to Madison and Wichita will find hard to resist.

The good news is that a growing number of sensible feminists are becoming appalled at their censorial sisters. Anti-censorship coalitions are springing up around the country. Groups such as the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force have recently emerged in New York, Berkeley, Montreal, and other cities. The women in these organizations are pointing to the dangers inherent in granting the power of censorship to those who regard sex as a dirty word. They are reminding their sisters of earlier episodes in feminist history, as when nineteenth-century American feminists joined with their conservative enemies to enact legislation raising the age of consent for girls, criminalizing prostitution, and closing the saloons. Eventually these early feminists felt used when they were thrown out into the street by their strange bedfellows. As one anti-censorship feminist has put it: “In all these cases, conservatives ultimately exercised more power in determining how laws, once enacted [by the coalition of conservatives and feminists], would finally affect women’s lives—more power than the feminists then imagined.”

History may well repeat itself if shortsighted feminists conspire with their archenemies to deny us all the freedom that nourishes equality. If together they succeed in closing the porno bookstores, the Moral Majority will turn on the feminist censors and start closing feminist bookstores, gay bookstores, pro-choice bookstores—and finally all bookstores except those that sell the gospel according to the radical right.

When I recently debated the leader of the Moral Majority in New England, I asked whether his organization would, if it had the power, ban the writings of Andrea Dworkin—the coauthor of the Indianapolis statute and an occasional user of four-letter words in her books and speeches. He answered without hesitation “We would most certainly ban such ungodly writings. It is not necessary,” he reasoned, “to use pornography to illustrate its evils. It is only necessary to read the Bible.”

The Dakar-Peru Road with Penthouse | Episode 3

Posted on by Team Penthouse

GO!

Honestly, the Team seems to be rather busy, what with trying not to die in the desert, and all, so our updates from South America tend to be in visuals rather than words.

Olga Shooting the Cameras Shooting her

Olga jumping, ready to race

At first glance, we just hope they brought water with them. We’ll keep you posted (in theory). For right now we’re all headed out for a nice frosty beverage.

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The Dakar-Peru Road with Penthouse | Episode 2

Posted on by Team Penthouse
Get Set

Hanging with Stormy Daniels

“I have a wonderful and long-standing relationship with Penthouse and I love to travel so needless to say I jumped at the chance to head to Peru to help promote the Penthouse car at the Dakar Rally Race,” Daniels said. “The trip was even better than I hoped it would be. I had so much fun meeting the race team, posing with the car and interviewing our badass driver Olga!”

The world-renowned off-road endurance rally which is held from January 6 to 17 in Peru, is a 10-stage race that will feature a variety of off-road vehicles in four classes and covers 3,100 miles of sandy dunes, rocky terrain and intense desert heat from start to finish. Rouckova is one of 17 female competitors in the race comprised of 334 racers in total. Although a traditionally male-oriented event, the 2019 Dakar Rally hit a huge milestone with the most female drivers to date, empowering women around the world to showcase their competitive skills.

“We were excited to have Stormy, a female pioneer of challenging endeavors, on location to support Olga. It is a great opportunity to focus on the achievement and great potential of all women who challenge the status quo,” said Catherine Brandt, COO of Penthouse World Media LLC. “The Dakar Rally is a grueling and difficult race and we’re honored to support Olga who is the epitome of courage, beauty, determination and talent. She is a great ambassador for PENTHOUSE and its free-thinking, unstoppable spirit.”

As sponsors, Penthouse World Media LLC, the leading adult media brand and publisher of PENTHOUSE magazine, and Penthouse Clubs Worldwide LLC provide financial and promotional support to Rouckova, by way of marketing and advertising as well as media opportunities during the race.

“I am thankful to PENTHOUSE for their faith and support and to Stormy for sharing her star with us on this exciting day,” Rouckova said.

Born in the Czech Republic, Rouckova is an accomplished quad racer with her four-wheeled motorcycle-like vehicle, having participated in a number of competitions like the FIM BAJA Europe for 3 years finishing every race on the podium, the Merzouga Rally in Morocco, along with obstacle races such as the Spartan race, Army Run, Gladiator Race and many others.

We actually did create a darned impressive gallery of the preparation day for Dakar this year, so feel free to SEE THE GALLERY HERE should you wish. Rest assured that as our journey progresses we will continue to move toward professional as slightly as possible.

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Women of the Gun

Posted on by Team Penthouse

With flawlessly manicured dark-red fingernails, @Kayotickat’s thumb softly grazes the steel frame of a single-action Browning 1911-22 pistol.

It’s an archaic gun with a tobacco-colored grip, yet it looks vogue in her hand. The close-up photo, posted on Instagram, gets its charge from a traditionally phallic pose (a gripped pistol) feminized by Kayotickat’s dangerous flirtation, like the femme fatale handling a cold piece of twentieth-century engineering.

This juxtaposition is the future of gun advertising for younger Americans raised on the internet—those millions who don’t read gun magazines and never visit a newspaper stand (if they even know where to find one). Instagram is where you’ll also find a photo showing an attractive young woman in a floral-print skirt that she’s lifted to reveal her thigh—and the Sig Sauer P238 holstered tightly to it.

The Sig appears in several photos taken by shooting-range safety officer Lisa Brianne, who executes yoga positions with the pistol, uses the gun as a lingerie prop, and holsters it on over her patriotic leggings—all while using hashtags like #GunPorn. These images are politically provocative. Brianne’s sexualizing her relationship with her firearm. She’s inviting you into her bedroom to play with her gun. And she’s how I’m familiar with the Sig.

Peruse the latest issues of gearhead-focused gun magazines, and you’ll find an austere, industrial, mostly sexless aesthetic. The masculine-feminine power dynamics of gun culture are muted in publications like American Handgunner, which favor centerfolds showing stand-alone firearms and their accessories (though a recent rise in concealed-carry permits secured by women has produced the occasional photo of a midriff-baring woman holstering a Glock).

There have been vivid exceptions to this hardware-centric approach, like the photos of syndicated radio host and Second Amendment activist Dana Loesch in a black dress and goth ankle boots, wielding her AR-15 in the pages of Guns & Ammo in 2015. Loesch was the first woman to appear on the cover in 54 years. But this is not the norm.

Glossy gun magazines cater to their most reliable demographic—traditionalists in flyover country who view guns as self-defense power tools or recreational toys. Loesch, a right-wing vamp wearing Alexander Wang, simultaneously appeals to both Midwestern moms and heavy-metal fanboys. She’s a cultural bump stock in a movement that’s inspired conservative women to transform into gimlet-eyed Bond girls. These dark, icy, and chic spitfire dames are the future of Second Amendment activism.

Trinity Merrill is one of the millennials redefining the “gun gaze” on Instagram. She’s a plucky Second Amendment activist who poses in front of the flag and models for pro-military brands like Warrior Flasks. She frequents shooting ranges in Ozark, Missouri, on “Tactical Tuesdays,” wearing cutoff denim shorts with sponsored safety glasses and earplugs. She’s a gun-rights pinup girl, happy to scandalize those liberals who view guns with prejudice and paranoia.

Defiant women like Merrill, who has 125,000 followers on Instagram, are featured on wildly popular Instagram channels like @bassbucksandbabes, @pretty_girls_with_guns, and @country_bombshells.  The bombshells account boasts 273,000 followers, an apparel line, and an endless stream of photographed conservative amazons who lift weights and comfortably handle the dead carcasses of big game.

Joining Merrill in contributing to this increasingly influential universe of girls-with-guns online imagery is the expert archer and outdoor enthusiast Katie Van Slyke, a gun-holster model who can be seen on Freedom Holsters Instagram page with a teal Glock 42 holstered safely near her crotch, an image accompanied by the hashtag “Glock Porn.”

The pose is an act of social rebellion. One like it was widely mocked by liberals in March when Fox News’s Tomi Lahren posted a photo of herself with a 9MM tucked into her leggings. “Not Your Average Gun Girl,” read the hashtag. In the case of Lahren, a blonde conservative woman with a prominent media profile, she would have known how much flak the image would receive—and was ready to revel in the outrage.

Kirsten Joy Weiss commands the most-watched female guns channel on YouTube. While just as physically striking as Tomi Lahren, Weiss is more of a gun gaze’s Ronda Rousey. She’s a gifted trick shooter and multi-title champion whose videos—like a YouTube Annie Oakley—show the sporting side of firearm partisanship. Weiss is a woman able to outshoot most of her male competition. Rather than flirting with gun rights like Lahren, Weiss is demonstrating her prowess as a sharpshooter—the best argument to counter the liberal bias against Americans who engage in shooting sports.

Gun Porn Women

Instagram, the digital playpen of the prized millennial demographic, is the unintentional industry-leader of gun porn. There’s no data on what sort of impact these photos have. The vagaries of gun statistics in the U.S., especially on the internet, make them increasingly irrelevant, but we know that more women are engaging with firearms. We know that more women are frequenting shooting ranges, and acquiring those concealed-carry permits. We also know that more woman are photographing themselves in defiant poses with their firearms.

For the libidinous American male, these images offer a voyeuristic fetish stapled on top of fine-print that’s far more important—the conservative woman’s newly adopted role as defenders of adventurist masculinity.

Social media is where these Second Amendment bodyguards boldly talk back to the anti-gun feminists of millennial media. Social media is where Jackie, who defies feminist homogeneity, has an apparel sponsor and can be seen holding an AK-47 in each hand, wearing a “Right 2A Bears Arms” T-shirt in front of a big fucking truck. Don’t look for the mainstream media to tell her story.

Fierce feminists like Tara, a glamorous and “savage” U.S. Marine who extinguishes the fiction of unattractive female soldiers, are part of a DIY network of women ignored by liberal media outlets because, goes the argument, they are “complicit” in a culture alarmist contend produces mass shootings. This is the same poor logic that blamed first-person-shooter games and Marilyn Manson for Columbine.

While liberal puritans treat masculine, gun-themed pastimes as acts of terror, conservative women run them like credit cards exchanging in cultural currency.

Valerie Serbu, aka @50calval, the self-described “heiress” to the Serbu Firearms fortune, confidently plays with her sensuality behind colossal, magazine-fed, semi-automatic rifles (or homemade flamethrowers) that not only amuse men on YouTube but sell them guns.

Serbu’s ALS ice-bucket challenge video showed her firing a machine gun in a pink bikini. Her @50calval account is as much of a middle-finger to bourgeois liberalism as a satirical YouTube video of teenager Carly LaCroix, a southerner who hilariously mocked a male New York Daily News reporter after he claimed to experience PTSD upon firing an AR-15.

The gun gaze is not exclusive to U.S. gun culture. In Japan, airsoft hobbyists like Isis Osushi take stirring fashion photos at “shooting cafes,” cosplaying as Milla Jovovich and blending gaming culture with toy guns, creating their own, slightly nerdier Nintendo-gun gaze. The Russian Federation uses the gaze as a recruitment tool in the form of cosplaying soldier Elena Deligioz, whose 62,000 Instagram followers are drawn to the glam photos of her in full combat gear, or napping under an arsenal of machine guns. Deligioz is alluring because she’s the ultimate betrayal of everything we believe in—the gun gaze equivalent of infidelity.

In America, where the gun gaze began with cowgirls like Oakley and pistol-packin’ Hollywood molls like Peggy Cummins (Cummins starred in 1949’s Gun Crazy, robbing banks with her boyfriend, always itching to pull the trigger), the gaze now produces the effect of seeing Doris Day wearing an ammo belt, instead of a stitched apron. It slays domesticity with playbacks to images like the character of Sarah Connor from Terminator 2, posing with a cigarette dangling from her lip—the M16 assault rifle acting as an extension of her take-no-shit personality.

Today’s women of the gun are unapologetic, never compromising sex appeal for gender-neutrality or blindfolded misandry. They take something masculine and phallic and rub rouge all over it, pumping it full of roaring estrogen. The new gun gaze isn’t the bikinied, machine-gun babes from the 1980s VHS tapes. It’s a defiant throwback to first-wave feminism, but far more rebellious, where conservative women are taking ownership of the male gaze, instead of being wrecked by it.

The Dakar-Peru Road with Penthouse | Episode 1

Posted on by Team Penthouse
On Your Marks

The Gang Arrives

Our new team fairly quickly felt the crush of trying to produce content in a country you have never visited before, but we did get a fairly detailed outline of their activities up to that point.

  1. Got to Lima and had a taxi take us back to the hotel.
  2. Had a pre production meeting with Olga’s team and Stormy Daniels and her manager (where we gave them the Penthouse merch).
  3. Left with Olga›s team to base camp while Stormy Daniels stayed behind to get ready.
  4. Arrived at the beach and took photos and video, including a lot of b-roll.
  5. Stormy showed up and did some video work for us before we transitioned into photos.
  6. We did the Christening of the car with Stormy popping a bottle of champagne.
  7. Continued, doing photos of Stormy and Olga with our Penthouse merch.
  8. Got on the beach to get last photos of Olga in her race outfit.
  9. Arrived at hotel around 8:00 p.m.
  10. Confirmed sticker delivery to hotel around 9:00 p.m.

For the record, we still did not feel sorry for them. We will say this, however: Should you ever get a chance to have champagne with Stormy Daniels, we would encourage you to take advantage of that opportunity

Also, we have learned that vehicles built to roam on sand dunes have themselves some serious tires.

The Penthouse Road Racer

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The Working Girl Diaries

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Men think of sex workers as wealthy goddesses, but we’re actually working class. Like most middle-income Americans, we’re afraid to discuss money, but twice a month, my column “The Working Girl Diaries” will cover porn stars’ wallets. From how class affects porn stars’ financial habits to how much we spend on lube and kitty litter, I’ve got you covered. There is no taboo (economic) topic I won’t touch. You used to think of me as the Weiner girl, but now I’m the Barbara Ehrenreich of sex!

Once upon a time, porn stars earned most of our income from hardcore video shoots and kitschy pictorials. Girls could make a small fortune in the golden age of porn, because production companies, most notably Vivid, paid contract girls monthly salaries to shoot exclusively for their house. These financials changed in the aughts when ingenious streamers, including heavyweights XTube and PornHub, offered all the porn a man could desire—for free. Long before Netflix decimated movie studios, tube sites toppled the porn giants.

According to the Archives of Sexual Behavior, only 10.5 percent of men pay for porn, making it difficult for sex workers to subside on shoot fees. Adult performers were some of the first working-class Americans to face the gig economy, which Forbes defines as the “increased tendency for businesses to hire independent contractors and short-term workers, and the increased availability of workers for these short-term arrangements.” But whereas Uber drivers are struggling to survive, porn stars are thriving again.

Performer Charlotte Sartre has exemplified how porn workers have reinvented themselves. Although she still shoots for old-fashioned production companies, she relies on video for less and less of her income. Videos now function as ads for her more lucrative offerings: homemade clips sold on her clips4sale; her manyvids; her merch store, Gothcharlotte.com where she sells T-shirts, signed photos, and signed DVDs; and prostitution services. Several times a year, Sartre sells sex at the Alien Cathouse Brothel. As former Alien Cathouse owner Dennis Hof wrote in his memoir, The Art of the Pimp, porn performers can charge more than other prostitutes because men place a higher value on an evening with a star.

Like most sex workers, Sartre’s income varies drastically, but she brings in an average of $8,000 a month. Much of her income goes to expenses. “Before I do absolutely anything else, I save 33 percent of my income for taxes and emergencies,” Sartre says. “I also spend $155 every two weeks getting tested for porn. For brothel testing, it’s about $90 per week.” This month, she also will pay $150 for pet supplies. “I have a lot of cats and tarantulas,” she says.

Working Girl Diaries - Charlotte Sartre

Kendra Lee Ryan, another diversified porn star, sees varying income, estimating she earns roughly $6,000 a month from porn shoots and much more from escorting. The later has led to banking problems. “I got Paypal, Google Wallet, and Venmo taken,” she says. “I fought Venmo and got it back, but that’s it.”

Ryan’s not alone. “I’ve also had my Cash App deleted without warning or reason after only using it to pay rent,” Sartre says. (Cash App, Venmo, Paypal, and Google Wallet did not return requests for comment.) When Sartre has walked into banks, tellers have asked her invasive questions. “Even when depositing normal checks without anything suggestive in the notes or company names, I feel pressured to lie about what I do and say I’m a musician,” she says.

As a precaution, performer Sofia Rose keeps two bank accounts and a third account in her husband’s name. She still worries. “I’ve spoken to the branch manager several times at my local bank and asked him point blank about this,” she says. “He said, ‘This is Vegas, and no one is really paying attention.’” No reassurance is enough.

Porn stars’ business models have evolved, but the industry’s public relations problems have remained the same. Women’s studies scholar Dr. Heather Berg believes our banking issue stems from bad public policy. “Dozens of banking and finance services have terms of service agreements that exclude sex workers,” she says. FOSTA/Sesta has intensified the problem. FOSTA/SESTA is a law meant to curb sex trafficking, but sex workers say it unfairly targets them and doesn’t differentiate between consensual sex workers and those who are trafficked. “If the End Banking for Human Traffickers Act goes through, it will be even harder for sex workers to access their own funds,” Berg says. “These policies are marketed as a way to reduce trafficking, but they actually make sex workers more vulnerable to violence and exploitation.”

Senators Kamala Harris and Senators Bernie Sanders have endorsed FOSTA/Sesta in the name of women’s rights. Instead of helping women, they’ve hurt female porn stars’ ability to make money. Although sex workers have excelled in the gig economy, our occupation remains stigmatized. Some people may see sex work as easy money, but porn stars are small business owners. If we are going to survive in this gig economy, we have to keep diversifying and stay on top of the politicians. (No pun intended.)

Open Wide and Say Ahhh

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Dear Readers,

Last spring, we were lamenting the state of media over margaritas at a Mexican restaurant across from the Scientology Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles. We discussed how sex, humor, and provocative opinions had suddenly vanished from the web. Judging by Twitter, it seemed like everyone was outraged about everything, from Kathy Griffin to Roseanne to Backpage to the NRA. But in private (and on Signal), the populous was confessing their allegedly unpopular opinions about the war on free speech, sex, and humor. It was as though we all knew we had to act a certain way to save ourselves from being cancelled, but behind closed doors, we could let nuance flourish.

Everyone was acting like a neutered partisan puppy, and we did not want to hang out at the pound anymore. The only way to change this was to create a platform where people could speak their complicated, sometimes contradictory, but always genuine points of view. We planned a new media outlet, then we discovered the publication existed—and Mish already worked there.

To millennials and Gen Zers, a penthouse is the nice suite on the very top of a high-rise that takes up a whole floor. But to those who were born before 1985, Penthouse was an iconic men’s magazine run by New York artist and gold chain-covered eccentric Bob Guccione. Under his direction, Penthouse toed the line between where Playboy pussied out and Hustler went too far. Penthouse was controversy with an intellectual purpose. Guccione valued literature and provocative, thorough journalism as much as he did art and gorgeous naked women. As Camille Paglia told the Hollywood Reporter, unlike Playboy Bunnies, Penthouse Pets were erotic, powerful, sensual women, or “femme fatales.” Penthouse was always a publication that valued salacious sleight of hand, stunts, and press—even negative—more than anything else. Penthouse went to weird places, nabbed daring stories, and wasn’t afraid of crazy headlines. It was simultaneously Gawker before Gawker and Richardson before Richardson, but with investigative reporting good enough for the New York Times. (When the Unabomber mailed his manifesto, he sent it to three publications: the Times, the Washington Post, and Penthouse.)

In the Ronald Reagan era, Guccione’s project took on a more important meaning. The Republican administration had launched a war on sex, trying to outlaw everything from porn magazines to bareback gay sodomy. At several points, conservatives united with radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin on a joint kamikaze mission to annihilate Penthouse. In response, Guccione doubled down. Through his combination of art, tits, ass, and sass, he defended all Americans’ right to read, think freely, and jack off.

The eighties hold many similarities to today’s scary times. Online journalists work day and night to “cancel” people who offend others. In between posting selfies on Instagram, millennial feminists have begun worshiping Dworkin and her sexphobic, censorious sidekick Catharine MacKinnon. In Washington, D.C., self-proclaimed progressives Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders have voted in favor of FOSTA-SESTA, a bill that targets sex workers in the name of “human trafficking.” The eighties are back, baby!

Although Mish is a former feminist blogger and Mitchell is a gold star gay man, we fell in love with Guccione’s methods and styles. He was more high/low than any homosexual, more open-minded than any modern feminist. For the past six months, we have tested Guccione’s model to see if it would work in the twenty-first century. First, Mitchell wrote the definitive profile of Stormy Daniels, which was picked up by the Rachel Maddow Show, the Wall Street Journal, the Hollywood Reporter, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Paper, People, Page Six, In Touch, Spin, the Daily Mail, the Daily Beast, Jezebel, HuffPo, Bossip, and more. VICE called it “one of the most hotly anticipated pieces of political journalism of the year.” A few months later, we published Leah McSweeney’s critical op-ed about how Asia Argento and Rose McGowan hijacked the #MeToo movement. Although Mira Sorvino, Rosanna Arquette, and other female celebrities attacked Leah, roughly 500,000 people read the story. (The starlets backed down after the New York Times confirmed that Argento had paid off a boy accusing her of rape. Embarrassing!) For our experiment’s grand finale, Penthouse tweeted the first annual New Puritans List. Ranging from conservative looney tune Laura Loomer to woke avenger Michael Avenatti to President Trump to Kirsten Gillibrand, the article rankled America’s most obnoxious, pearl-clutching censors. Penthouse released the list in segments on Twitter, and it went viral.

For over a quarter of a century, we have kept our vintage pictorials and journalism in a vault. This goldmine will finally be released online. More importantly, every weekday we’ll be publishing two or more pieces about the most provocative topics of our time: the culture wars, cancel culture, free speech, sex workers’ rights, controversial pop-culture figures, high/low art, music, erotica, and sex and relationships. Of course, we’ll also be publishing artistic images of our gorgeous Penthouse Pets and other accomplished women.  

At penthousemagazine.com, we are filling a hole (or three) that desperately needs plugging. To complete these goals, we’ve recruited our favorite cultural critics: Sydney Leathers, Claire Lehmann, Michelle Lhooq, Leah McSweeney, Miles Raymer, Mandy Stadtmiller, Art Tavana, Toby Young, and more that we’ll announce in the coming weeks.

We hope you’ll join us on this journey. Bottoms up!

XO,

The Editors 

Jordan Peterson

Posted on by Team Penthouse

For those who have been living under a rock the last year, Peterson is the 56-year-old Canadian psychology professor turned overnight political sensation when his YouTube video about Bill C-16 made waves throughout the media.

Peterson was rallying against new Canadian legislation (which has since become a law) that said anyone who does not call a trans person by their preferred pronoun could be legally punished. Peterson objected to the bill on free-speech grounds.

Cold, dry, and deeply Canadian, Peterson and his argument enraged transgender activists and progressive lefties who called for his resignation and stormed the University of Toronto campus, accusing him of every thought-crime they could think of.

Their attempts at silencing Peterson backfired—big time. Almost instantly, he became a North American political sensation. The New Yorker profiled him, a much-discussed New York Times article featured him as part of the Intellectual Dark Web, and Peterson soon found himself debating politics, religion, and culture with public intellectuals like Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, Dave Rubin, and Camille Paglia. He also famously jousted about workplace feminism with English TV reporter Cathy Newman in a 30-minute interview so potent it has attracted more than eight million YouTube views.

Peterson’s latest book, 12 Rules for Life: An Anecdote to Chaos, is a best-seller and sent him on a sold-out world book tour. Young men have flocked to Peterson and his message of love, independence, and personal responsibility. Still, the left sees him as an evil, sexist, transphobic monster hiding under the guise of free speech to push his “fash,” “alt-right” ideas. The best part about most of Peterson’s critics is that they are too dumb and lazy to read his book before barking their criticisms.

Because if they did read 12 Rules for Life or bothered to listen to some in-depth interviews with the man, they would see that Peterson isn’t some tyrannical right-wing pundit—he’s a classic liberal, a Canadian from the rural prairies, a teacher, a scholar, and a family man who loves his kids so much he gave up eating everything but meat and greens to help his daughter with her potentially fatal autoimmune disorder.

Like a great father, Peterson doesn’t want to give you a fish. He wants to teach you to fish, so you can eat fish forever. Then he wants you to know what could happen if you fish too often and understand the consequences your potential overfishing could have on the world.

12 Rules for Life is a self-help book for young men that promotes a conscious, respectful version of masculinity, one reinforcing universal truths such as “we are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be,” and “your misery is the weapon you brandish in your hatred for those who rose upward while you waited and sank.” In today’s ultra-PC climate, notions like this have been lost and replaced with identity-politics group-think and victim terminology, so Canada’s greatest dad has been a breath of fresh air.

Peterson wants young people to take responsibility for themselves as individuals, to become informed about the world, and to create meaning in life so that they can be fulfilled and contribute positively to society. If that’s what fascism means to the kids today, then I guess, yes, I’m a “fash.” I’m a big, fat fascist. Thanks, Dad!

Subtext is Everything

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Before we get into this month’s topic, I have a bit of bad news, good and decent Penthouse subscribers: I am bidding thee farewell….

Well, I’ll still be writing stuff for this glorious porno mag, I’m just done with this column. After all, how much can one guy rant about hating practices, persuasions, and people? By my calculations: about thirteen months.

Over the last year or so, I’ve used these pages to air my gripes with marriage, voting, sensitivity, merit, and a bunch of other subjects that I hope my opinions on had readers thinking, Interesting point, and not, What an asshole. To be fair, it was probably a little of both.

But since my fear of being repetitive far outweighs my respect for commitment, I’m bringing this thing to an end. Anyway, enough with the salutations. I was never very adept at expressing sentiment. Let’s get back to my specialty: bitching and moaning.

As stated, this column has always focused on the broader cultural ideas and concepts. But since this is the final entry to “You Let Me Down,” I wanted to try something different. For this piece, I’m shifting my focus from the surface to the subtext.

Subtext. I don’t think the term has ever been more relevant than here and now. When it comes to our favorite modern-day way to talk to one another—text messages, email, and social media; you know, the types of discussion where you don’t have to hear another person’s pesky voice—the subtext is swinging harder than ever. But I don’t think many of us are recognizing it.

The proper definition of the word is “an underlying and often distinct theme in a piece of writing or conversation.” Current methods of conversation are, almost exclusively, executed through writing, and there is a theme: We’re completely full of shit! We don’t mean what we say and we don’t say what we mean.

So, I took it upon myself to take some of this digital-age jargon and translate it into what I think the users of it are actually saying. Below you’ll find a list of phrases, words, and hashtags that we casually throw around on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. Underneath each is their subtext and, of course, the two are quite different. But as they say, “The devil is in the details.” And if you ask me, what you’re about to read is a list of truly iniquitous language.

INTERNET LANGUAGE TRANSLATOR:

“You’re my new fave.”
Translation: You haven’t offended me yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

“I love you soooooooo much.”
Translation: I like you but also think you’re too dumb to recognize empty flattery.

“Definitely.”
Translation: This will probably only happen over my dead body.

“#Woke”
Translation: My opinion is fact and your facts are opinions.

“I’m gonna do me.”
Translation: Fuck you and everything you stand for, now get the fuck outta my way.

“#Winning”
Translation: If I don’t distract myself with constantly keeping score I might cry.

“Living my best life.”
Translation: Something amazing happened to me today and I’d like to rub your lousy nose in it.

“#Amazing.”
Translation: This was fine.

“You’re being aggressive.”
Translation: I don’t agree with what you’re saying but I can’t think of a counterargument.

“#Blessed”
Translation: I’m trying to come off as spiritual because saying “I’m so lucky” sounds gross.

“Respect my boundaries.”
Translation: Please speak only in a fashion that I am accustomed to and fully approve of.

“I can’t even…”
Translation: Why isn’t the entire universe catering strictly to my sole wants and needs?

“#NoFilter”
Translation: Be jealous of how pretty I am or at least my sickening level of self-esteem.

“LOL”
Translation: Your attempt at humor has been recognized, even though it didn’t even cause me to smirk.

“Can’t wait!”
Translation: Honestly, I have nothing better going on.

“#Cancelled”
Translation: I like to pretend people are TV shows and I’m a TV executive and I get to put a stop to them if I feel like it.

And finally…

“I’m a conservative.”
Translation: I need you to listen to me while also not paying attention to what I’m actually saying yet still acting as if you did and totally agree with it.

“I’m a liberal.”
Translation: I should warn you, despite my claims of being centered and level-headed, I’m extremely prone to explosive temper tantrums.

The translations of those last two expressions carry the most weight for me. I appreciate the ones that proceeded them, but, outside of scorning emotions, they’re basically harmless. The way this concept applies to conservatives and liberals is the red flag.

As we continue to decay into a nation of church parents and teenagers—one group hollering, “Because I said so!” and the other reacting purely with emotion—it’s apparent our words carry less and less meaning with every passing day.

We continue to warp and misuse our words, mostly out of spite, while remaining split in two, right down the middle, everybody screaming, nobody considering the gray area. The thick-headed elders don’t get “these kids today” and these kids are too spoiled and bratty to stop and listen. Your only hope to be a rational spectator. That way you’ll more likely be prepared to run for the hills and take cover when the shit hits the fan.

It’s one thing to lose faith in our institutions, corporations, and beliefs, but once hope is lost for language, the end’s around the corner. So don’t get involved. You’re better off becoming a weird, grizzled hill person. It probably won’t be so bad out there in the bush.

As for me? I’m an untrusting man in what I consider to be an untrustworthy world. As this chaos ensues, I won’t be too disappointed, just thankful that a long practice of anti-optimism has me not witnessing the fall of what I once thought to be great, but the exposure of the mess I always knew it to be. It’s subtext if you will.

I’ve always thought everything sucked. But who cares? Because I decided long before thirteen months ago that You Let Me Down.