A few years back, when the porn industry was going through its modern boom phase, many media critics began enunciating the doom of “soft-core” magazines such as Playboy. They felt that, at least for the tastes of many sexually dysfunctional North Americans, the magazine had nothing to offer readers.
Fast-forward to the present and I’m sitting at home with my girlfriend flipping through the latest copy of Playboy Ukraine. No, we weren’t exactly reading all the articles - I’m not going to try to play this off as if I have a scholarly point to make - but we were checking out the photos, and the overall quality of the magazine.

I made particular note of the fact that, unlike other so-called “men’s” magazines in Ukraine, such as Ego, FHM and Maxim, the pictorials in Playboy don’t offer titillating pull quotes such as (and I’m paraphrasing here), “I always fall for guys with a leather jacket” and “My friends call me the biggest flirt in the world!” and “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for money.”

What’s wrong with these? Well, to me, they smack of the same kind of pandering found in many phone sex ads: photographs of scantily clad woman next to such cheap come-ons signals low-brow in my book. Looking around at many of the boozing, foul-mouthed loafs on Kyiv streets, low-brow anything is about the last thing this country needs. It’s time to raise the bar, and Playboy Ukraine does.

So, I have to hand it to Playboy Ukraine and Chief Editor Vlad Fisun. He’s doing a great job so far of selling sex - just like all the other men’s magazines out there - but doing so in a tasteful, attractive manner. The photos are beautiful (my girlfriend says so), the language of the magazine is intelligent, and Fisun hasn’t gotten his magazine explicitly banned from the British embassy, either.

Pricey Pret birthday

Five thousand hryvnyas is a lot to pay to rent out a room for a birthday party. It’s especially so in a place not terribly well-known for exemplary customer service.

Last Saturday I overheard an argument at the bar of the small deejay lounge on the Andriyivsky Uzviz known as Pret-a-Cafe. An attractive young woman politely asked the bartender to change the music they had been listening to with a CD she was holding before him in her hands. He refused.

“I’m busy,” he said, leaning against the back counter.

“What? All I’m asking you to do is change the CD for this one. We’ve been listening to the other one for more than two hours already,” she replied.

“Forget it. I’m too busy,” he said, not moving. The manager, a heavy set woman of about 30 with dyed blonde hair, was standing by him looking on. The young woman had already asked her to change the music, but the manager fobbed off the responsibility to the none-too-eager bartender, who was growing increasingly frustrated by the young woman.

“You don’t look very busy,” she said. “Come on! It only takes a few seconds.”

When she left in a huff, the old CD still playing away, I inquired to find out about the price of renting a room for a birthday.

The Hr 5,000, it seems, is just scratching the surface. The young woman should have specified that she’d want the music changed over the course of the night. By that logic, too, I guess the club toilets should not be assumed to be in working order, or the lights, or even the heating. In all fairness, the club manager did say that it’s actually cheaper to just reserve tables in a said room and pay per head to have drinks and food brought out over the course of the night. Bizarre.

by Paul Miazga, Kyiv Post Staff Writer