Vanessa Cushing in the News…
In the press · Yahoo · 6 min read
Who Is the Image For? What Playboy’s Relaunch Says About Desire Now
Charli xcx on the cover of Playboy sent women and queer fans to a magazine built around straight male desire. Yahoo asked Vanessa Cushing what actually changes when the audience changes — and what doesn’t.
Written and clinically reviewed by Vanessa Cushing, LPC, NCC, MS — AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist, licensed in Virginia & Florida. The Cushing Counseling team covers Virginia, DC, Maryland & Florida.
The short answer
Sexual imagery has no single fixed meaning. As Vanessa Cushing told Yahoo, who is looking, who is being looked at, who made the image and whose pleasure it was designed to serve all shape how it is experienced — which is why Playboy can look almost identical and still mean something different to a new audience. The frame around an image can widen a woman’s role from desired object to person who desires, without the photograph itself changing at all.
Book a free 15-minute consultation
If the gap between what you find arousing and what you actually want is confusing you, that is a good thing to talk through. Consultations are free and 15 minutes.
What Yahoo was asking
Playboy brought its print magazine back in spring 2026, and its first three cover stars were Karol G, Cara Delevingne and Charli xcx. The comments underneath Charli’s cover were not the ones the magazine was historically built for: people announcing they were buying a Playboy for the first time in their lives, women joking about who they thought they were before that photo shoot.
Playboy’s editor in chief Phillip Picardi told Yahoo the target reader is still men aged 21 to 35, while adding that the magazine makes “a concerted effort to ensure that what we create attracts — and doesn’t turn off — women too.” Yahoo’s question, put to Vanessa Cushing, LPC, NCC, MS, AASECT-certified sex and couples therapist and founder of Cushing Counseling, was the one underneath all of that: when the audience changes, does the image change?
An image is never just an image
“Sexual imagery does not have one fixed meaning,” she told Yahoo. “Who is looking, who is being looked at, who created the image and whose pleasure the image is designed to serve all influence how we experience it.”
That is four separate variables, and most arguments about sexual imagery collapse them into one. A photograph that feels degrading in one context can feel like authorship in another, not because anybody is confused, but because the photograph was never the whole unit of meaning. The circumstances are part of the content.
She pointed Yahoo toward what sex therapists call sexual scripts: the cultural instructions we absorb about who is supposed to desire whom, what counts as sex, and whose pleasure the encounter is organised around. Most people can recite their script in detail without ever having chosen a line of it.
The frame can change without the picture changing
Surrounding lingerie photographs with frank conversation about women’s pleasure, consent and sexual health does shift the context. Vanessa was careful with Yahoo about how much.
“That does not mean the photograph itself suddenly becomes politically progressive,” she said. “But the frame around it can expand the role of the woman from simply being the desired object to also being a person who desires.”
That is the honest version of the answer, and it is more useful than either of the loud positions. Nothing about the visuals has been redeemed. Something about the surrounding conversation has widened. Both can be true, and holding both is usually what it takes to think clearly about your own relationship to sexual media.
Fascinated by sex, selective about sex
Yahoo raised the apparent contradiction of a sex magazine thriving during what has been labelled a sex recession — young adults reporting less sex and less dating, while enthusiastically reviving the hypersexual aesthetics of the late ’90s and early 2000s.
“A person can be fascinated by sexuality while simultaneously being highly selective about actually having sex,” she told the outlet. Those are not the same appetite, and treating them as one is where a lot of self-judgement comes from.
She described the current relationship with Y2K sexuality as “nostalgia and revision at the same time”: a generation inheriting the imagery of an earlier era while bringing a markedly different understanding of consent, queer identity and women’s pleasure to it. Not everyone interviewed agreed that the revision is real — sociologist Bernadette Barton argued to Yahoo that raunch culture never left and that women consuming the imagery does not mean the underlying gaze has changed. That disagreement is worth reading in the original.
Who gives the image its meaning now
Playboy once had the power to anoint a woman as a sex symbol. It no longer holds that monopoly: a star can reach millions directly, and the celebrities on these covers arrive with sexual identities they built themselves.
“The celebrity brings meaning to Playboy just as much as Playboy gives meaning to the celebrity,” Vanessa told Yahoo. And more pointedly: “Playboy is not simply choosing Charli. Charli choosing Playboy helps tell audiences what the new Playboy wants to mean.”
Yahoo also noted the reckoning behind that shift — the 2022 docuseries Secrets of Playboy, in which former Playmates, girlfriends and employees alleged coercion, sexual abuse and exploitation inside Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, and the company’s response that today’s Playboy is not Hefner’s Playboy. Authorship is the whole question here, and it is the question the old version of this magazine mostly answered for the women in it.
Why any of this matters in a therapy room
This is not a media-studies exercise. The same four variables come up constantly in sex therapy, usually phrased as worry.
Someone is troubled that what they find arousing does not match their politics. Someone else cannot tell whether they enjoy a particular act or have simply learned it is what gets approval. A couple is stuck because one partner reads sexual imagery as threat and the other reads it as play, and neither can say why. In every case the work is separating the script from the person: what were you taught to want, what do you actually want, and whose pleasure has your sex life been quietly organised around?
Arousal is allowed to be strange, and it does not have to be politically tidy to be yours. What helps is knowing which of it you chose.
Frequently asked questions
Does sexual imagery have one meaning?
No. “Sexual imagery does not have one fixed meaning,” Vanessa Cushing told Yahoo. “Who is looking, who is being looked at, who created the image and whose pleasure the image is designed to serve all influence how we experience it.” The same photograph can land completely differently depending on those four things.
What are sexual scripts?
The cultural messages that teach us who is supposed to desire whom, what counts as sex, and whose pleasure matters. They operate quietly — most people follow a script they never consciously agreed to, which is why naming it is often the first useful step in sex therapy.
Can the context around an image really change what it means?
Partly. Placing sexual images alongside conversations about women’s pleasure, relationships and sexual health changes the frame. As she put it to Yahoo, that does not make the photograph itself progressive, “but the frame around it can expand the role of the woman from simply being the desired object to also being a person who desires.”
Is it contradictory to be interested in sex but not want much of it?
Not at all. “A person can be fascinated by sexuality while simultaneously being highly selective about actually having sex,” she told Yahoo. Interest and appetite are different systems. Being choosy is not the same as being broken, and being curious is not an obligation.
What if what turns me on conflicts with my values?
That is one of the most common private worries people bring to sex therapy, and it is rarely the problem it feels like. Arousal is shaped by learning, novelty and taboo, not by ethics, and a fantasy is not a plan. The work is understanding where a turn-on came from and deciding what you want to do with it — not auditing yourself for the wrong desires.
Is watching or enjoying sexual media a problem for a relationship?
It depends far less on the content than on the agreement around it. Trouble usually comes from secrecy, from one partner reading it as a verdict on their desirability, or from a mismatch nobody has said out loud. Those are all conversations that can be had, and having them is generally more productive than litigating the material itself.
Keep reading
- About Vanessa Cushing, LPC, NCC, MS — AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist, licensed in Virginia and Florida; the Cushing Counseling team covers Virginia, D.C., Maryland and Florida.
- Press & Publications — Every outlet that has quoted or published her.
- Sex Therapy — Desire, arousal, fantasy and mismatched libido, in plain terms.
- Couples Therapy — When porn, fantasy or mismatched desire has become an argument.
Also on this site
Clinical resources this page draws on
- Yahoo — Posing for Playboy is a celebrity flex again. But this isn’t your dad’s magazine. — Kerry Justich's full feature, with Vanessa's complete comments alongside Playboy's editor in chief and sociologist Bernadette Barton.
Next step
Not sure where to start? Take the free 6-question assessment, or book a 15-minute consultation.
