Playboy coming to India

International Herald Tribune
In this, the land of the ancient Kama Sutra, the holy temples are sexually explicit and the dirty magazines are clean. In a little-noticed milestone for the world of adult entertainment, Playboy said in December that it would seek to do in India what it had never done before: publish a magazine with its usual fare — except for its name and its nudes. The Indian version of Playboy would be Hugh Hefner meets Henry Ford: You can have any bunny you want, so long as she's clothed.

"This is quite a departure for us," Christie Hefner, Playboy Enterprises' chief executive, told reporters. There are two stories behind that departure. One is the usual emergingmarket land grab: When profits flatten in the West, companies pivot to India and China.

Here in India, the members of a rapidly growing middle class are prime targets for the slimmer cellphones, shinier suits and sweeter colognes peddled by marketers. In Playboy's case, US magazine sales shrank by 1 per cent in 2004, while foreign revenue grew by 13 per cent from 20 overseas editions published in countries from Brazil to Serbia.

For now, at least, the Indian version of Playboy would have just a handful of competitors. Man's World is a local lad's magazine with lots of advice and little titillation. Maxim, a British publication of the same genre, recently announced plans for an Indian edition.

Foreign magazines' interest in India is understandable. As media growth flattens in the West, India's is booming. It has nearly 200 million magazine readers and is the second-largest newspaper market in the world, behind China, with 79 million copies sold daily. The print advertising market is $1.5 billion a year and growing.

But there is a second story behind Playboy's discovery of India, and India's cleansing of Playboy. The magazine once saw itself as America's classy usher toward a sexual revolution. But, with that revolution won and with Playboy's societal impact fading as fewer men read it 'for the articles', India offers a chance for Playboy to renew itself as a magazine of high living in a country that celebrated sex in antiquity, then grew prudish and now is loosening up again. Playboy refused to comment on its plans for India aside from calling them a 'departure'. But its willingness to reinvent itself to comply with legal and cultural norms here suggests a special interest in the country's possibilities. And as it languishes in American critics' eyes, its India plans raise a question: Will its clothed incarnation here foster a rethinking of the magazine itself?

Christie Hefner has said the Indian version of the magazine 'would be an extension of Playboy that would be focused around the lifestyle, pop culture, celebrity, fashion, sports and interview elements of Playboy'. But the magazine would not be 'classic Playboy', she warned. "It would not have nudity," she said, "and I don't think it would be called Playboy." India in the 2000s is a lot like America in the 1950s, the place and time of Playboy's birth, some believe. The country is on the cusp of a sexual revolution, with stirrings of change in private that have yet to gain public acceptability.

Meanwhile, the democratisation of affluence is creating a new class of would-be male connoisseurs, keen for tutelage in the high life of cigars, cognacs, women and gadgets. Sex is bubbling. In an attitudinal sea change, one-quarter of urban, unmarried women have sex, one-third read erotic literature and half go on dates, according to a survey by AC Nielsen and India Today magazine. Bollywood, that mirror of the Indian zeitgeist, now does what it refused to do five years ago: depict an on-screen kiss.

But India has yet to have its own 1960s, in which sexual change accompanied broader upheaval. Despite the transformation within the bedroom, the country outside it is in denial. The police in Chennai recently shut down a nightspot after local media published photographs of clubgoers kissing. Then came a judgment by Mumbai's highest court that films not rated 'U', for 'universal', cannot be shown on television; among the disqualified are the Harry Potter movies. More generally, Indian conservatives say the country should resist Western sexualisation.

India is ripe for change, and Playboy Enterprises is looking for changes. The magazine was once its crown jewel. But subscription numbers have fallen since the 1970s, and the company said in a presentation to analysts in December that publishing profits were expected to decline, largely because of rising paper prices and advertisers' move to newer media, including the Internet. The magazine's decline has affected the performance of the parent company, which had losses in 2002 and 2003 and a small profit in 2004: $10 million on sales of $329 million.

Playboy Enterprises has responded by taking to new, or just different, media: video gaming; subscriptionbased adult content on the Internet; video on demand, television and DVDs; concept stores; and even a club in Shanghai with a discotheque and spa. Publishing now accounts for just one-third of company sales. And in a more poetic signal of a changing of the guard from the original magazine, the cover of its 2004 annual report features the outline of Playboy's trademark bunny logo — formed by the cable of a video game handset.
_______

Copyright 2006 International Herald Tribune.