So Playboy is apparently bowing to the reality of the internet age and giving up on naked pictures. In elegizing the magazine’s relevance, the Times makes an interesting aside about its relationship to the feminist movement, stating “Even those who disliked it cared enough to pay attention — Gloria Steinem, the pioneering feminist, went undercover as a waitress, or Playboy Bunny, in one of Mr. Hefner’s spinoff clubs to write an exposé for Show Magazine in 1963.” This isn’t quite wrong but it’s a little misleading: in 1963 Steinem wasn’t a well-known feminist but a young freelance writer just starting to find serious work; the Playboy piece ending up standing in the way of that.
As the Times points out, the original Playboy’s version of the good life – (“cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, . . a little mood music . . .a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex”) now feels if anything a bit quaint. What’s interesting is how, in its early decades, it cast itself as rebelling against two cultural forces that were themselves deeply opposed: first, the traditional domesticity of the fifties, and second, the feminist movement.
As Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her great and under-read The Hearts of Men, the first feature article in the 1953 first issue of Playboy was an attack on alimony. The enemy in the early years were gold-diggers, wives, and all varieties of domesticity. Remarkably, some of the “personal” descriptions of miserable marriages actually sound a bit like what would be published in the radical feminist journals I’m studying 20 years later – except of course that it’s only the men who are miserable, and the wives are laughing at their good fortune to be kept in a life of card-playing and TV-watching.
Not that Hefner and feminists saw any common ground. In 1970, a secretary at Playboy discovered and leaked to women’s lib. groups a memo Hefner had written about an upcoming story on the movement. As Bonnie Dow outlines in Watching Women’s Liberation, some female editors thought the story lacked balance. Hef doubled down: “‘these chicks are our natural enemy'” and it is time to do battle with them . . .What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart.”
Many, many trees have died in all that has been written about how much the anti-porn turn of the feminist movement hurt and divided the movement. But if you look at what Miss America was in 1968, when it was the target of a famous protest, or what Playboy was, you understand why they thought they were on to something, and it’s difficult to imagine the Hef of 1970 would have been any more positively disposed towards a movement with a more nuanced reading of what constituted sexual expression or exploitation. But now Playboy is trying to make itself relevant with a female, sex-positive advice columnist. More has changed than the technology by which 12 year olds get their fix.