For a few hours yesterday, I thought Playboy had undergone a culture change.  A friend forwarded me a link to a website, Party With Playboy, that proclaimed itself to be Playboy’s back-to-school “Top Ten Party Commandments” guide.  The difference between the 2013 guide and all previous party tip sheets, though, is that this year, Playboy was all about consent. 

“This has been blowing up all over my facebook,” my friend wrote.  I was surprised and excited—how cool of Playboy to admit some role in rape culture and put consent front-and-center for bros heading to college! 

It turns out Playboy got pranked.  Baltimore-based artist collective FORCE and students at 25 colleges pulled off the impressive hoax that duped news outlets and thousands of readers.  Instead of backing up the call for consent, Playboy is now working to shut down the site. 

I spoke with FORCE organizers Rebecca Nagel and Hannah Brancato last spring after the pulled off an epic culture jam of the Victoria’s Secret PINK campaign.  Like the Playboy party commandments, their “PINK Loves Consent!”  campaign was a seamlessly designed recreation of a Victoria’s Secret-branded site that featured healthy-looking models showing of sexy undies emblazoned with phrases like “Ask First.” 

“We wanted people who have no idea what consent is to talk about consent,” said Brancato, of that campaign.  Nagel agreed, “We really wanted consent to be a mainstream idea.  As long as consent is a fringe concept that only feminists and anti-rape advocates are talking about, it’s not going to be effective in ending sexual violence and promoting female sexual empowerment.” 

That’s the idea behind the fake Playboy page: to put consent in front of the eyeballs of people who would never go out of their way to attend, say, an anti-rape workshop. 

The fake party guide is written in an approachable that’s both on-tone for Playboy and impossible for any rational person to disagree with.  Here’s a key paragraph:

Somewhere in the countless hours we spent tallying up co-eds and scoring beer pong, we lost track of the most essential element of the Playboy lifestyle: sexual pleasure.  Rape is kryptonite to sexual pleasure.  The two cannot co-exist.  For our revised party guide to live up to our founder’s vision, we had to put a new criterion on top.  Namely, consent. 

The art group and students at 25 different schools used social media to spread its spoof like wildfire—as of this morning, the Party With Playboy page has been shared more than 4,000 times.  The main Party With Playboy site was backed up with fake coverage on other major sites, including Upworthy and The Huffington Post, which altogether were receiving over 3,000 hits an hour yesterday.  Since the site is designed to look like a real Playboy site, including a header, footer, and sidebars that all link to real parts of Playboy’s site, many of those who read and shared the page will likely never realize it’s not from the mind of Hugh Hefner. 

That could be problematic, as people will likely wind up giving Playboy more credit than it’s due.  Thousands of people who read the Ten Party Commandments will be thinking that Playboy has dramatically changed for the better—meanwhile, according to FORCE, Playboy is now actively working to get the consent-promoting site taken down.  But the end goal of this campaign isn’t about changing Playboy, it’s about changing the attitudes of oblivious people who read Playboy.  The campaign will engender some ultimately misguided warm-and-fuzzy feelings about Playboy, but its goal is clearly to get people who don’t go out of their way to learn about rape culture to come away with a better understanding of rape and consent. 

It would be great if Playboy surprises us all by embracing the message of consent, rather than suing for copyright infringement.  But I’m not holding my breath.  In the meantime, a couple thousand people will be heading back to school thinking about consent.