BRODESSER-AKNER I love that the Playboy website tries to reset that image with just one photo: Young Hefner, staring straight into the camera, phallic object out of side of mouth. And with this quote: “Life is too short to be living someone else’s dream.”

This would be inspiring, I suppose, if not for the fact that it is now the page for every Playboy link, meaning on some level it’s the middle finger to everyone who’s ever read Playboy. Get your own fantasy. This was mine. It’s over now. Go make something yourself. This is probably not what the post meant, but Playboy has been so clumsy these last few years, when the magazine became something that tried to be modern. How do you make this modern? You know what’s modern? Porn.

SCHUESSLER It’s really too bad about that placeholder, and not just because I want to read both of your articles. Vice ran an interesting story just last month about Playboy’s recent “woke” rebranding under Cooper Hefner, one of Hugh’s sons. The tagline “Entertainment for Men” became “Entertainment for All.” (Well, maybe not all: They brought back nude photos, which had been banished in 2015). Cooper said the battle to allow topless women on the cover of Playboy, just like topless men are allowed on the cover of Men’s Health, was a “feminist fight.”

BRODESSER-AKNER I don’t know. Did we really need Hef to let us be naked? The nudity came with so many conditions: It wasn’t just a woman who conformed to our ideals of beauty. It was a woman who conformed to his ideals of beauty, made even more Hef-perfect in photoshop, giving her digital labiaplasty and making her belly button — her belly button! — more adorable.

MORRIS This is where I should say two things. First, I’m pretty gay. Playboy was a depiction of women that baffled me. As a kid, I couldn’t even make the joke about reading the articles, because I didn’t know there were any. Playboy was kryptonite, and the boys I was around preferred Hefner’s mutant offspring. (As a grown man, I did discover the Playboy Interview, which had the intoxicating, sometimes flabbergasting candor of the show.)

Second, I grew up in a Johnson Publishing household, which published Jet magazine at the time. It still features Beauty of the Week. As much as I thought it’d be fun to type “John H. Johnson was the Hugh Hefner of black America,” that would be untrue, since Johnson’s progressiveness was more evident in that he wanted to elevate a race and showcase all it could be. Hugh Hefner might have had Nat King Cole come by the penthouse, but it took a while for him to invite a nonwhite woman onto his pages. There’s progressive, then there’s progressive.