Playgirl is eight years old and boasts a circulation of 10 million. It’s clearly hit some kind of cultural nail on the head, borrowing Playboy’s patented aspirational hedonism and appropriating it for the fun ‘n’ flirty feminist set. This month, the centerfold is a sun-kissed California blonde named Geoff Minger. He reclines, shinily, on a set of clean white sheets. In one shot—in pointed contrast to the afternoon light on the drawn venetian blinds, the purple flowers on the bedside table—his penis just stands there, like, yeah?

It’s not like the late '70s were some kind of disco Camelot, but there was something kind of soft-focus about them. Jimmy Carter was president, cigarettes were mainstream, air travel was exotic, and for another year or so anyway, sex wasn’t gonna kill you. It’s like I overheard this lady say yesterday, apropos of a Thelma Houston song playing at a cafe: “Everybody was just so beautiful in the '70s! Everything was so shiny and sparkly!” And there’d been plenty of penises in Playgirl’s pages, since its second issue, in the summer of 1973 (readers had complained when there were none in the debut), sandwiched softly between ads for Summer’s Eve and fashion spreads flowing with macrame.

But a full erection! That was something else. Something deliberate, something direct. “From the beginnings of Western civilization the penis was more than a body part,” David M. Friedman writes in his 2001 cultural history of the organ, A Mind of Its Own. “It was an idea, a conceptual but flesh-and-blood gauge of man's place in the world.... It is possible to identify the key moments in Western history when a new idea of the penis addressed the larger mystery of man's relationship with it and changed forever the way that organ was conceived of and put to use.”

So how better to greet this particular new decade than with a (sorry) stiff salute? By this time next year, John Lennon would be dead and Ronald Reagan on his way into the White House. Shoulder pads and neon colors are coming down the runway, and soon to be sporting them, a new archetype: the busy career woman, slinging a diaper bag in four-inch pumps. She’ll still be making a fraction of what her male colleagues bring home, though, and with all the domestic labor on her to-do list, she’ll have less time and patience for fantasy and romance and nonsense. The era of chiffon and divans is over.

In its way, Playgirl, in attempting to define and capitalize upon woman's ever-shifting "place in the world," changed again the way the organ was conceived of and put to use. Hear that distant synth beat? Madonna is coming. Samantha Jones is at her heels. It’s hard to imagine either of them, or anything that came next, in a society where women and men, in theory anyway, weren't equal-opportunity oglers.

Jessanne Collins is an editor at Mental Floss and the coproprietor of Finite + Flammable.

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Carefully considered symbolic acts like these are common in Massachusetts, which should also explain why the only pact I’ve made in my adult life was rendered there. This was a few years later, 2003 or so, a time that felt so much like the future it was hard to imagine the future. In keeping with local (read: khaki) custom, this pact erred on the side of casual. No blood was drawn. It wasn’t even a secret. In fact, in the intervening years I’ve referenced it frequently, when cocktail conversation with an acquaintance old or new revealed a kindred nostalgia. “Listen,” I’d say, with the conspiratorial tone demanded of even the least cinematic pact. “There’s this thing you might be interested in. It’s called Massachusetts 2011.”

There’s no irony or complexity to Massachusetts 2011, probably because there’s not a whole lot of irony or complexity to Massachusetts, period. It was a sort of commonly stated intention, forged individually with several disparate friends, who in turn forged a similar one with some of their own disparate friends. We all loved Massachusetts. Not enough to stay, but enough to feel homesick for it when we left. Enough to design to return to, after we had attempted New York City, dallied about the West Coast, dissertated across the Midwest. We’d give ourselves the better part of a decade to drink and date and do whatever it was one does to pass the days. And then in 2011, we’d come home and pick up where we left off.

Never mind that where we left off was a place of Budweiser and bookstore-clerking, confusion and crushing possibility, a place that would feel cartoonishly distant sooner rather than later. We didn’t know how real life, abhorring geometry, prefers the form of a textbook molecule with its awkward antennas. It seemed reasonable to surmise that by 2011, a date chosen mostly for how far off it felt (that outlandish double digit!), having outgrown our disdain for subpar public transportation and charmless bro bars, we’d be world-weary and ready to rest, like dust in a drafty triple-decker.

Upon leaving New England I learned just how New Englandy I was: kinda frosty, puritanical about painkillers. But when I started thawing out, over New York City’s proverbial overactive steam radiator, I became prone to striving and spinning and other things that used to seem indulgent and alpha and strange. So that’s where I’m at and, for the forseeable future, where I’m staying. Which is to say that—whatever else it will be—2011 will be the year I break the only pact I’ve ever made.

It won’t matter. Everyone else, ensconced and in love everywhere else, will break it too. So, [insert German word that connotes nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened and may not ever]. There’s that. But there’s also this: my newfound devotion to the metaphysics of Massachusetts 2011. At some point, probably on a pensive drive on the Mass Pike, I figured out that my Bay State is mostly an ethos, and a glossy one at that. You may have already started to suspect as much. In my head, Massachusetts is a place of earnest industry and thoughtful gestures, like a mixtape with a liberalish government and a rustic seashore. And pond hockey!

The less likely it becomes that I’ll go back in body, the more I attempt, to varying degrees of success, to live like I already have. Here is what life in “Massachusetts,” the abstract state, entails. Cooking dinner. Tending potted herbs. Reading Russian novels. Knitting wool sweaters. Making art out of last week’s magazines. Rearing rescued kittens. Conversing enthusiastically about important ideas. Weathering winter, even if it means saran-wrapping the windows. Wearing sensible shoes. Proposing a toast to the end of the world.

Jessanne Collins does in general however keep all her other agreements.

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The product coming down Demand’s virtual assembly line—4000 "articles" a day with titles like "Hotels in Fayetteville, NC With Jacuzzi Tubs”; "Kosher Restaurants in Cluj-Napoca, Romania"; and "Hair Styles for Women Over 50 With Glasses"—is the empty-calorie “content” you’ve surely noticed cluttering your Google search results lately. If you’ve been keeping up with media musings on the Walmartification of service journalism by Demand—which runs sites like eHow and LiveStrong—and the other so-called “content farms,” like Yahoo’s Associated Content and AOL’s Seed, you know that this company's business strategy is regarded as “audacious and controversial”; that their content is algorithmically designed be narrow in focus and broad in reach in order to maximize ad potential, and that it’s also generally kind of "crappy"; that by paying insulting rates to the freelancers who churn out this copy, they devalue the work of people who attempt to write for a living; and that they might not be as profitable as they like to say they are.

I knew all of this, too. But I have this compulsive condition, borne out of a cocktail of overoptimism, workaholism, and poverty, in which I troll MediaBistro, rampantly applying for freelance work. NB: without fail, a telecommute gig that advertises flexible hours, free-flowing assignments, and upwards of $20 an hour is too good to be true. This is a lesson I’ve personally learned and seem to be determined to keep personally learning until I retire. And it was in that spirit, one evening late last spring, that I put my skepticism on the same shelf as my discomfort with page-view whoring and the depreciation of my chosen profession, polished up my resume, and uploaded it to Demand’s resume-processing/world-domination cyberhub.

I should mention that I work at a magazine. As an editor. For money. Every day, and sometimes well into the night. This has been going on for about four years, and before that I worked in book publishing while I got a master’s degree in writing. Call me cocky, but I didn’t worry too much about meeting the professional prerequisites Demand thought necessary for the successful copy editing of five-point bulletins on topics like refurbishing vintage saxophones without the use of harsh chemicals. So, several weeks later, when I logged into the cyberhub and found that my application had been rejected, I felt less dissed than puzzled. Could it be that all 11,252 available copy editing positions Demand’s site boasted had been already been filled by applicants more qualified than I? If so, where on Earth was this modest-sized university’s worth of vastly experienced copy editors hiding?

About a week later, the exact same job posting popped up. I reread it carefully, and then cross-examined my resume, where I spotted my fatal flaw immediately. I was a masthead-certified “copy editor” for two full years before I took on a managing editor title. It seemed obvious that, in applying to be a straight-up copy editor, I should sell myself as a copy editor. So that was the title I’d highlighted on my resume. But duh! To qualify to be a Demand Media “copy editor,” the ad clearly stated, an applicant should have a “Minimum of 2 years as an Managing, Line, Features, Section or Associate Editor at a newspaper, magazine, book publisher or publication.”

So I made a tiny tweak on my resume. And by “tweak” I really mean tweak, not lie: I changed “copy editor,” which was my previous title, to “managing editor,” which is my current title, and lo and behold I had a positive response in my inbox within 24 hours. In retrospect, this was just my first brush with the habitually defensive posture Demand assumes in the face of some of the pointed criticism it regularly receives, such as that about the professional credentials of its “content creators.” (It was also emblematic of the way the whole corporation, not just the web content creation factory it manages, seems to be run by an algorithm.)

To wit: the response in my inbox was from a robot. The robot told me that it had decided to move me onto the next stage of the application process for further consideration. If I passed the editing test, I’d be expected to log at least 12 hours a week, minimum, and at $3.50 per article I could expect to pull in $20-30 an hour, with the potential for “higher-value” pieces down the line if I was a “top” performer. I managed to put off daydreaming about the bills I could pay with that extra $200+ a week for the hour it took to go over two short articles. Then I proposed a toast, with two hypothetical bottles of Charles Shaw, to the $7 I would have been paid for the feat if it was not just a test.

A day or so later, the robot booped at me again, welcoming me to the copy editing community. It told me I could prepare myself to hear from a human, who was to act as my human point of contact for questions that required human answers. In the meantime, perhaps I could familiarize myself with the content farm ethos and process and other details by reading these enclosed packets? One was a sprawling 14-page document labelled “A Quick Breakdown of the Copyediting Process,” the other a 12-pager called “Editor Guidelines.”

Meanwhile, there arrived the email from the Actual Human. At least, it purported to be a human. It had a human name, anyway, which we’ll say was Robert. “We work at an accelerated pace, and I don't care if you send a note filled with typos or missing words, as long as I understand your intention. Don't waste time copyediting yourself, and don't fret when you spot a few gaffes in one of your communications,” Robert insisted. Also: “Important: When I do provide advice or render a ruling, please don't reply with thank-you notes. I'm sure all of you were raised with respect for the traditional courtesies, but nearly 500 editors work alongside me, with that total growing weekly. Between this box and the Help Desk, I typically receive 200 queries a day. If each of you sent missives of gratitude, I'd never be able to dig out.”

Okaaaaay.

Robert would be available to answer any content crises that I should encounter, but would close his “answer desk” promptly on Friday afternoons, and I was not to email during this time. Also! Before I was to contact him with any questions, I was to read the section about contacting him in the attached guide; a different 14-page document from the one I’d previously received, this one enthusiastically entitled “Tips for Making a Magnificent Team Greater.”

One soul-crushingly hot day this past July, I set aside an afternoon to comb through this novellas’ worth of explanatory documents. Together, they amassed 40 pages that were sprawling and contradictory and confusing and repetitive and overwhelming and detailed but not really in quite the right way. I did not make $3.50 that day. In fact, I paid $3.50 because it was so freaking hot, I had to seek shelter in an air-conditioned, WiFi-equipped organic coffee shop, drinking organic iced coffee.

“We aren’t here to break news, lay out editorial opinion, or investigate the latest controversy,” Demand’s corporate manifesto declares. “Our audience tells us they want incredibly specific information and we deliver exactly that – in a style that the average consumer appreciates and understands.” In a nutshell, what the company does is to take informational demand and create, in virtual-sweatshop fashion, supply. Basically, if you plug it into Google — “Seasonal mating habits of poison dart tree frogs,” say — it’s got a good chance of eventually finding its way, via a proprietary set of content-churning algorithms, into a list of “topics” to be turned into an article or bullet-point list by Demand’s cadre of stay-at-home moms, independently accredited experts in something or other, magical writing elves, and junior high honors students. Just kidding! These people are professional freelancers, who make $15-30 per piece. Then, the next time you’re researching the seasonal mating habits of poison dart tree frogs, or anyone else on Earth is, since Demand’s properties reach 59 million users a month, said article will top out the Google results.

My role, as a “copy editor,” was roughly akin to that of Lucy’s with the candy wrapper. I was to be an intermediary between the web at large and the raw, reliably weird substance that results from the unlikely union of algorithmically created topic assignments and writers of, shall we say, widely variable competence. The actual nuts and bolts of style consistency and tone were part of it, of course. But they seemed to be peripheral to what I was actually being asked to do, which was to quality-check each piece of content according to a set of generic yet meticulously detailed standards. It fell on my shoulders to ensure not just that no dangling modifiers marred any directories of Jacuzzi-having hotels, but that the piece wasn’t plagiarized, written off the top of some Jacuzzi-having hotel aficionado’s head, based on obvious or non-information, referencing other websites, or plagued by any of the other myriad atrocities that web content can be subject to these days.

The overarching theme of the trilogy of how-to manuals, as far as I could tell using my admittedly rusty elementary reading comprehension skills, was “cut fluff.” A straightforward enough mission, and obviously, a necessary one. I was to ensure that as many sentences as possible began with vivid, actionable verbs. And that I could clearly picture in my head the step a reader was being instructed to take. If a piece was a total mess, I wasn’t supposed to spend time rewriting. Instead, I was to make very specifically worded comments (there were so many notes on phrasing said comments constructively and politely, I could only assume that this had been a point of prior contention) back to the author. The author then had a few days to turn a rewrite around. I’d review it again, and then I could approve it for publication or reject it if it was still too fluffy or sucky. At the time of publication or rejection I’d also rank the veracity of the article on a numerical scale, and have the opportunity to make notes about the author for internal review.

And then? Then I would get paid $3.50.

Given the intellectual investment I’d already put into this process, I judged, badly, that it was too late to turn back. So, I turned to my “queue” of editable articles, and chose the one that sounded like it had the least potential for tears or disaster. It was on crafts to do with preschoolers. Like, macaroni and yarn collages. I dutifully made sure all the verbs were actionable and that the instructions were vividly picturable and that none of the suggestions seemed totally implausible. Might have even gotten some subject-predicate agreement all up in there. Then there was a vaguery I was unable to resolve. It was about the orientation a yellow-painted paper plate should take before the adhesion of tissue-paper “sunbeams.” Wait, was the author saying that the paper plate was upside down at this point? Or was it right-side up!? The classic, dreaded copy ambiguity. I could not, for the life of me, picture it. So I queried the writer, who, some days later, clarified the issue (upside down!).

Accept. Rank. Ka-ching (or, I suppose, kerplunk).

It was an entire week before I could cajole myself to do another one. Then two more before I could do a third. I logged in every few days, full of good intentions, determined to make the most of the time I’d already spent learning the ropes. But then I’d scan a list of titles such as “How to Get Free Plastic Surgery” or “How to Unseal a Cremation Urn,” and I’d get depressed and have to go out on an urgent Charles Shaw run.

Meanwhile, there was a weekly deluge of informational emails from Robert, my human point person, which provided extra extra detail (“How to Hide an Erection” and “How to Be an Escort in Second Life” were deemed examples of inappropriate article titles that should be flagged for review; “At-Home Treatments for Anal Warts” might be okay), occasional heartfelt thanks, and sporadic missives that totally contradicted established paperwork instructions. In something approaching a tizzy toward the end of the summer, for instance, Robert insisted that people stop emailing to let him know they’d be out of town and thus not meeting their weekly quota; earlier we’d been instructed to do exactly that or risk lose editing privileges forever.

By this point it’s fair to say that the issues were mine, and that they were motivational in nature. Here’s the thing. Supposing that copy is composed by someone with a decent grasp of the English language, I can edit it rather quickly. But I’m also, admittedly, a bit of a perfectionist. It’s an industry hazard. I was beginning to seriously doubt that it would be ever be possible to churn out five of these puppies in an hour, which is what it would take to net $20, which was the lowest freelance editing wage I could begin to justify working for. All told, I found that I spent a minimum of half an hour on each piece — even on “How to Start a Successful Pop-Punk Band,” by far the cleanest and possibly most informative of the articles I edited — after editing, fact checking, querying, and navigating the rejection/publishing/ranking process. Leaving out my unpaid training, as it were, this put my average hourly rate somewhere around $7. Peace!

There’s no small shortage of Amway-esque hyperbole on Demand’s site about how awesome life in the freelance “studio” can be. The Demandifesto woos with promises that beyond the basic pay-per-piece, frequent contributors are eligible for perks like affordable health insurance and grants to pursue their creative aspirations. It’s forums are full of beaming profile avatars, cheery bios, and accolades about how great it is to be able to set one’s schedule and get paid like clockwork via PayPal, which, granted, in this day and age of invoice voids, it is.

Except when it just isn’t worth it.

Maybe I’m just lazy? Incompetent? Entitled? To think that earning $3.50 shouldn’t be so much damn work? Or maybe I’m not. The eHow article “How to Price Yourself as a Freelancer” is broken down into three steps. “Determine a ‘minimum wage’ for yourself based on an assumption of 40 hours a week and your barest financial needs according to your expenses and where you live. Use this number as the minimum for negotiations on your price, taking into account ALL the time you are devoting to the job in question,” it advises. This is step 1. Also in step 1? “Resist the temptation to do any work for less than legal minimum wage. Sure, almost nothing is better than nothing if you don't have work, but don't do it: it just makes everything worse for yourself and others in your industry in the long run as freelance employers come to expect more and more for less. There's a reason wage laws exist in the world of permanent employment!” I hardly needed to read on to step 2. Especially as I was distracted by the accompanying banner ad that blared: “Become a Bartender.”

I stopped editing, waiting for my a robot or human or hybrid to find me out and fire me. Nothing happened, for weeks and weeks. Finally, a human I hadn’t been introduced to heretofore wrote to check in. “I notice you’ve only edited three articles,” she said. “Do you plan to resume editing?” When I didn’t reply (I was thinking!) she wrote again, a few weeks later. “Please let me know ASAP if you intend to edit. Otherwise, we'll remove your editor permissions from the site.” I can’t say I wasn’t given plenty of time and a fair chance to change my mind, which made me wonder if their supply of overqualified professional editors with the time and inclination to throw their labor into a web well for 1980s babysitting wages wasn’t dwindling, just a little. I took my summer’s worth of earnings, $10.50, and called it a day.

“Listen Ethel,” Lucy says, back on the assembly line. “I think we’re fighting a losing game.” So it goes in the back end of Demand Studios. In fact, being in there felt a lot like it feels to search the web in the content farm era: There’s more than enough information, but none of it’s really useful. I’m not the first, on either side of the mirror, to make such a critique. Indeed, it’s been made so often that Demand has heard it loud and clear and would like you to know that it does not give a shit. “The critics are outnumbered by the millions of consumers who are satisfied... and the hundreds of content creators who go on record saying Demand Media is a hero for them,” proclaims the Defensifesto. “Unlike many around us, we aren’t worried about the future of the Internet because we are too busy trying to create it.”

If that’s going to happen, it’s not going to be on robot sweat alone. It’s going to take a hell of a lot of human hands. And mine, at least, won’t be among them.

Jessanne Collins is a Virgo with a Gemini moon and a Capricorn rising. Obviously.

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But this is not a lament. I made my own bed (charged it, anyway) and, much like that requisite post-college upgrade from a secondhand futon to a brand-new mattress, I consider my credit history rather priceless. It's like a mathematical LiveJournal: a statement of my psyche (deep denial); an inventory of my twenties (job interview clothes); maybe even something of an anthropological artifact (Sleater-Kinney tickets!). Herewith, a dozen of the transactions that shaped or epitomized my decade, charted (logarithmically) into a Debt / Regret Matrix which plots their principal price tags against the emotional interest they've accumulated. So far.

Jessanne Collins has written for Salon, Radar, The New York Observer, and The Morning News.

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Really, I'd be happy for both of them if I weren't so alarmed at the way history is being rewritten in the midst of the media shitstorm surrounding this moment-and the fact that no news outlet has accurately reported who's really behind Playgirl's big comeback.

Playgirl's 35-year history is incredibly nuanced and totally absurd. Its archives offer an archaeology of American sexual identity before and after the turn of the millennium, and, if it had evolved differently, it could have informed contemporary conversations about what women desire and how we construct our sexualities. But if you've read the media coverage of Playgirl's current resuscitation you wouldn't get this idea; instead, you might catch a whiff of an enduring myth that the earliest incarnation of Playgirl was intended to deconstruct-that women are out of touch with their sexuality and can't even figure out what's hot and what's not.

Most of this coverage, which has run the gossip gamut from People to TMZ to the Daily News and back again, is lazily built around quotes from either Johnston's press corps or the PR gun Playgirl.com brought on in August, a gay nightlife promoter named Daniel Nardicio. In Jacob Bernstein's November 5th Daily Beast article, "Levi Unzipped: Inside Playgirl's Big Stunt," Nardicio, who is the only quoted source, quips that "The women working on [Playgirl] weren't keeping up with the times. They didn't admit that there were a lot of gay men reading the magazine and gay men don't want to see guys with flowing long locks looking like they came from the cover of a Danielle Steel novel."

And on Monday, Nardicio told The Advocate that "Playgirl was kind of stuck because the women who were working for it were old and they thought that Fabio-looking characters with long-flowing hair and uber-tans... were really hot."

OK, so he has a point about the abundance of Fabio-looking characters. I wasn't big on the long flowing locks myself. (For the record, I also wasn't "old"-at 28, I was the eldest member of the editorial staff.) And we never had a problem admitting that there were gay men reading the magazine-we published letters from them all the time. (We got plenty of colorful correspondence from women too, which is one of the main reasons the magazine never "came out"-our gay readers seemed content with, even titillated by, a magazine with hetero overtones; our female readers were not so easily placated with gayer fare.)

So it's not that we were clueless, but here's a little secret: we were almost totally powerless over the aesthetic content of the magazine.

Which brings me to a rather glaring error in Bernstein's piece-and the huge, pulsating point he misses because of the oversight. The company behind Playgirl.com, Trans Digital Media, doesn't, as Bernstein wrote, own the stoner rag High Times. The dorm-room staple is published by a company called Trans High Corporation. (THC. Get it?) Trans Digital Media, on the other hand, is an affiliate of Blue Horizon Media, which does own High Society, a porn title for straight men-think Hustler but more D-list-and half a dozen similar brands with equally mistakable names, like Purely 18 and Finally Legal. All of which churn out (or churned out-some of them could have folded by now, and nobody but lonely truckers in Midwestern gas stations would be the wiser) clinical quality closeups of heavily Photoshopped labia with an industrial efficiency to give any third-world sweatshop a run for its money. In short, Blue Horizon, which owned Playgirl the print magazine, is a hardcore-porn company (with one vanity magalog-Elite Traveler, "the private jet lifestyle magazine"-that it wears as a beard) that's run by and for straight men.

This is why Playgirl failed in the first place. The men in the boardroom had no idea how to market or appeal to either women or gay men-never mind to both at the same time, an unattainable magic act, in my opinion, but one the company insisted on attempting for years. The tragicomedy of Playgirl's particular aesthetic failure starts to make a lot of sense if you consider that it wasn't constructed by anyone who professed actual physical interest in the male physique. If would-be Fabios were standard, that's because "musclebound with a ridiculous mane" is a comfortable caricature of what women find sexually attractive as doodled in the minds of out-of-touch old dudes.

My colleagues and I wished we could've made something relevant and fresh out of the troubled, tousled remnants of what had once been one of the world's most unique and successful magazines for women. I don't know if we would have succeeded-we never got the chance to find out-but in its last few months, despite the brewing recession, Playgirl was actually seeing an increase in newsstand sales. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Playgirl.com, which, I hear, has seen its subscription rate fall since the print magazine was shuttered. Perhaps this is why, in a desperate attempt to breathe new life into their biggest name brand, the same suits who've always worked for Blue Horizon's elusive millionaire owner, Carl Ruderman, hired a new flack and sent him out into the media armed with a high-school hockey player from Wasilla, Alaska.

Nardicio himself brings some new gay-scene credibility to Playgirl, and he certainly knows how to drop names in the right places-all of which conveniently distracts from the fact that exactly nothing has changed in Playgirl's management or mission. It's obvious if you read between Nardicio's own lines: for instance, the photographer he says is earmarked for the shoot happens to have shot a majority of Playgirl's sets since the 90s. The claim that the downtown and dirty fashion photographer Terry Richardson was entertained for the job is probably true-in exactly the same way I've weighed the option of shacking up with Jude Law.

Which isn't to say that the Men of Playgirl, so to speak, are steady on their own feet. They may call the shots but they don't do the grunt work; that's where we came in. And that explains why one of the first people Blue Horizon called when Levi Johnston's name came up was Playgirl's last editor-in-chief, the now 27-year-old Nicole Caldwell. She is one of those very "old" out-of-touch women Nardicio claims Playgirl is better off without-who has been working on contract all along to facilitate the shoot and who has been assigned the Johnston interview.

In short, its business as usual at Playgirl. From day one this has been little more than a publicity stunt orchestrated on behalf of two fallen icons: a floundering brand that's completely lost its identity and a teenager who's trying to define his, in the wake of his incidental introduction to the bright, bizarre lights of American quasi-celebrity. It would be a typical story-a stunt that's taken on a life of its own because of the low standards and laziness we accept in coverage of this type of "news"-but instead its become a particularly troubling one for the myths and misconceptions it's perpetuating about what Playgirl was and what its failure says about female sexuality.

These misconceptions, unfortunately, may be the only lasting legacy this strange moment in American media has. Because regardless of how much we eventually see or don't see of Levi's johnson, this stunt is starting to feel, well, flaccid.

Jessanne Collins has written for Salon, Radar, The New York Observer, and The Morning News.

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