Life

Playboy Publishes a (Consensual) Sex Guide

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

ThinkProgress reported yesterday that Playboy magazine's annual "Guide to College Partying" featured a special emphasis on sexual consent this year. Hells yeah, right?

“Somewhere in the countless hours we spent tallying up co-eds and scoring beer pong, we lost track of the most essential element of the Playboy lifestyle: sexual pleasure," read the introduction at partywithplayboy.com. "Rape is kryptonite to sexual pleasure. The two cannot co-exist."

Alas, it turned out to be a fake. In an update, ThinkProgress' Tara Culp-Ressler says that "a Playboy spokesperson acknowledged the website on Tuesday, but said that it is a fake ... ThinkProgress regrets the error."

Looking at the alleged Playboy guide now, it does seem unbelievably wholesome, PC and feminist. But, hey, Playboy was once the magazine that ran nude centerfolds alongside interviews with Ayn Rand and articles by Margaret Atwood. Stranger things have happened.

The women who created the faux-site include Rebecca Nagle and Hannah Brancato, founders of an organization called FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture. The crew created a slew of other fake websites — one imitating the Huffington Post, another imitating brobible.com — to keep up the ruse. It even ran a fake interview with Hugh Hefner on a fake version of Playboy’s corporate blog.

Last year, FORCE ran a similar scheme directed at Victoria's Secret. The point of these parodies has been to both draw attention to issues like sexual assault prevention and date rape and criticize the targets for not doing so themselves.

This year's 'hacktivism' was aided by college students across the country who "hosted consent-themed tailgating parties, played games of ‘Ask First’ beer pong, and excitedly pushed the prank on Facebook and Twitter," a FORCE press release explains.

“As these college students show, the culture of consent is already out there. As yesterday’s response to the Playboy jam shows, it’s, in fact, already popular. Hopefully, the gap between the messages that people want and the messages that people get about consent and sex will continue to shrink.”