Daughters of the 1970s

testing the limits of what's permissible

This is a serialized longform essay about two pivotal issues of Playboy magazine in the late 1970s. Click here to read the introduction to the series.

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When bristling over the Ivy League issue, Ellen Goodman had used the word “privilege.” David Chan recognized the on-campus protests as “a mix of misguided feminism and snobbery.”¹

Privilege. Snobbery. Class.

Class, not sex, is the great taboo in our culture. Sociologist Paul Blumberg calls it, “America’s forbidden thought,” and yet this off-limit topic was at the heart of the Ivy League protests, entwined within the women’s movement’s case against Playboy and the stereotyping of the women who posed nude. How was that still relevant in 1979? The entire 1970s had happened and yet a stigma shaped from the puritanical mores of the 1950s was in some ways as strong as ever. At least that’s what it looked like. The object of the stigma was the same, the women who posed in Playboy were being judged, but like many a virus, it had mutated, keeping some of the original characteristics but also becoming darker and more potent over the decades.

Before digging into stereotypes and labels (that’ll be next week), we’ll start with a look at the 1970s and its ever-shifting moral guardrails. The era was defined by the women’s movement and the sexual revolution finding their way towards permanency and frequently clashing. Playboy wasn’t always in the mix, but for feminists, it was always in their sightline.

There’d been a great deal of success for second wave feminism in the workplace and other male-dominated institutions. But for all the advances in taking on the asymmetries of social and political power—the rape crisis centers and women’s shelters, the inroads from Title IX, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act—the lords in the entertainment industry maintained a stronghold on how women were presented in the media and across pop culture. This was the 1970s. With the continued Vietnam War protests and Watergate and an extreme distrust of government and authority, men were screen rebels and rulebreakers. Full on anti-heroes. As for women, the studios found a way to manipulate the basic script on gender roles (giving a nod to the women’s movement) while taking full advantage of an expanding permissiveness gained from the sexual revolution. There are many examples, but is any better than Charlie’s Angels? A crime drama featuring three independent women who often wore bikinis.

Launched in 1976, the series was an instant phenomenon beyond its one-hour weekly time slot and the show’s stars exploded in popularity, saturating the culture in every possible medium. The three women were beautiful and impossibly glamorous, both on- and off-screen, but their highly sexualized TV personas were the creation of a male-controlled media. With her iconic poster, Farrah Fawcett took pinups out of garages and service stations and into the bedrooms of fourteen-year-old boys.

A Barbie-like “Farrah” wearing an extremely sheer jumpsuit was marketed to young girls in the form of a fashion doll. One year after the toy’s release, the real-life Farrah Fawcett graced the cover of Playboy.

Charlie’s Angels was a microcosm of the social climate of the late 1970s and the tension between the women’s movement’s and a late 20^th century America experiencing so much unrest yet still resistant to change. The male gaze, however one defined that phrase, wasn’t going to be removed from the culture and in fact the entertainment industry was pushing the limits courtesy of the sexual revolution. To placate feminist critics, they’d simply layered in a (thin) façade. Who knew that better than Farrah Fawcett? “When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.”²

A close second to Charlie’s Angels in pushing the boundaries of female sexuality in mainstream entertainment were the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. The DCC made their debut at Texas Stadium in 1972 and their immense popularity led other teams to form their own squads. Like the stars of Charlie’s Angels, the NFL cheerleaders were quickly embraced by the public (the DCC followed the trend with their own poster that also sold in the millions). The cheerleaders’ mass popularity rivaled the attention given to barrier-breaking athletes like Billie Jean King (who won the internationally televised “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973) or Roberta (Bobbi) Gibb, who snuck into the Boston Marathon in 1966, disguised in her brother's sweatshirt.³ In the '70s, women in sports was still about entertainment for men.

In a world of gratuitous sexuality on TV (Hollywood); gratuitous nudity in film (Hollywood again); bikinis and thongs somehow made relevant in a magazine otherwise devoted to physical competition (Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue); the lingerie industry transforming into a launchpad for supermodels (Victoria’s Secret); close-ups of cheerleaders and pretty girls in the stands (“honey shots”) a staple of televised sports; and “video vixens” the unsurprising result of pairing MTV with heavy metal; Playboy embraced the male gaze for what it was.

Much had changed in the twenty-five years since the first issue. As Playboy liked to point out, its “earlier emphasis on play and pleasure had become increasingly intermixed with concern for the rights of the individual and a free society.”⁴ Still, the desire for women was very much the magazine’s essence. No one wanted a society where women were judged solely or disproportionately on their looks, but as Christie Hefner answered Playboy’s critics:

“It would not be a better place, a better planet if we tried to remove the sexual attraction that is at the heart of humanity.”⁵

Dominant feminists in the 1970s saw the magazine through a different lens. A symposium at NYU Law School focusing on pornography included images from Playboy, which were cited as degrading to women.⁶ That the magazine was fairly mainstream had no sway over feminists. Even in the 1970s, with the march of the sexual revolution and Deep Throat having been a pop culture sensation, Playboy was still regarded among the worst of the worst. Per Gloria Steinem, Playboy was “more pernicious than other porn magazines [having bought] a few respectable bylines.”⁷

This had all the echoes of 1984’s daily “two-minutes of hate,” the public period where the State’s aggrieved citizens unleashed their anger and vitriol on a convenient enemy, having been directed to see that one person as the fault for all of their problems.

The 1970s were fraught for feminists. Despite everything they’d worked for and their successes with shows like Maude (the ultra-personification of women’s lib), the women’s movement’s hard-won achievements had also been spun into Charlie’s Angels. Billie Jean King’s internationally-televised triumph was given the same space in the sports world as honey shots. In an era of increasingly relaxed standards in the media, nudity, it seemed, continued as the standard for making Playboy the convenient enemy.

At the end of the decade, a few NFL cheerleaders posed for Playboy, in a pictorial that would test the limits of what was permissible, not just for feminists, but in mainstream entertainment.⁸

Every woman who’d posed nude or semi-nude in Playboy was fired. For the San Diego Chargers, that wasn’t punishment enough. Because one woman appeared topless, the entire Chargette squad was disbanded. These were women hired for their sex appeal and given game day costumes of go-go boots, tight body suits and glittered top hats.

As it happened, the pictorial with the NFL cheerleaders was in the December 1978 issue with Farrah Fawcett on the cover (see photo above). For Ms. Fawcett, who did not appear nude in the magazine, the Playboy cover was part of her publicity and branding, and had no impact on her stature. She was still fielding offers from the three major TV networks.⁹

This isn’t a challenge to Ms. Fawcett’s career or persona, but a consideration of the difference in how she was treated and how the cheerleaders were treated. Whether nudity was the distinction or the fact that she was already a celebrity can’t really be known but it does seem that mainstream entertainment decided on its boundaries.

The redline was drawn by men who owned football teams and had money and power and full say over the amount of sexuality they wanted to offer up to sports fans. While the honey shot had become a mainstay of televised football games, Suzanne Mitchell, director of the DCC from 1972 through 1989, said it plainly. NFL cheerleaders were to be sexy, but not too sexy.¹⁰

That was the quandary. This was about female agency and powerful men still controlling a woman’s expression of her sexuality.

One of the women’s movement’s many goals had been to wrest control of female sexuality from male dominance. But second wave feminists weren’t only battling Hugh Hefner. From the start, they’d also had to contend with women who heard the feminist arguments against Playboy and then made up their own minds by posing in the magazine and working as bunnies. Those women had disobeyed.

While feminists claimed their issue was with Playboy, in a culture that had always found a way to punish women who were highly sexualized, critiquing the magazine without denigrating the women who posed was a tight needle to thread and feminists made no effort to do so. The stigma against Playmates was convenient; it was the cudgel Ellen Goodman picked up and brandished.

Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, says that malicious gossip is how we “make sure that our friends and neighbors are toeing the line…[H]aving a mechanism like gossip allows [a society] to police other people’s behavior.”

That malicious gossip/stigma/stereotyping may have seemed a useful tool for feminists to control women who transgressed. Looking at the NFL cheerleaders, this was the very thing Tina Fey warned against in Mean Girls. “You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It only makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores.”

The firing of NFL cheerleaders was, of course, the height of hypocrisy. Grown men having a pearl-clutching reaction to the pictorial was such an obvious hypocrisy, the entire controversy was revisited in Sidelined, a 2018 documentary. But it also made a joke out of any protest against a male-dominated culture and the hyper-sexualization of women, since here it was, a male-dominated culture flexing its muscles about just how much sexuality they would allow. With this blatant power grab by men, female agency became the obvious focal point and yet second wave feminists didn’t have a word to say about it. Feminists had set up their fight against the patriarchy based on a narrowly defined version of female agency exemplified by the content in Ms. magazine. Agency for Playmates had never been on their radar—nude modeling was considered transgressive. So when the limit of sexuality was fixed with Playboy on the outskirts, that might have looked like a gain, but the way it played out, even a gain was a loss. Powerful men were still controlling women.

It raises the question of whether a main goal of the women’s movement, seeking a culture that did not over-sexualize women, was served by the intense focus on Playboy. If the male gaze was so hard to wrest from the culture, should that have been a goal? Maybe finding an appropriate time and place for the male gaze was a better goal, rather than its elimination. What was the better time and place? Playboy, high on the shelves of a 7-Eleven? Shows that were derided as “jiggle television” and the marketing to preteens that came with it?

Feminists closed out the 70s dismissing Playboy with the same constant hammering (it was inherently offensive), clouding over the difficult but necessary debate on whether society as a whole was both hyper-sexualizing women and pressuring women of all ages with exacting models of physical beauty. Those blinders also led to a narrowing of how young women saw transgression represented. There was no “diversity of viewpoints” within mainstream feminism.¹¹ It wasn’t only the patriarchy stopping women from breaking the rules they wanted to break and rebelling the way they wanted to rebel.

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Continue Reading

Click here to read the next issue in this series, about the legend of Bunny Marie.

Episode Notes

This Week’s Recommended Viewing

Dustin Hoffman on Tootsie and his character Dorothy Michaels

This Week’s Recommended Reading

“Spinal Tap in ‘Bitch School’”

Just One More Thing

All questions and comments welcome, but here are some thoughts for this week:

Were NFL team-owners, who’d cultivated and marketed cheerleaders and their sexuality to male fans, hypocritical in firing women who moved beyond “sexy but not too sexy?”

In today’s episode notes, both Dustin Hoffman, speaking of his role in Tootsie, and the members of Spinal Tap on “Bitch School,” get right to the point with their critiques (one commentary, one parody) on the exacting standards of physical beauty for women. Any thoughts on why as men, they were able to take aim so efficiently?

1. The Record, February 14, 1979.

2. Independent, “Charlie’s Timeless Angels: Women Who transformed Television,” August 30, 2006.

3. Decades later, when she was then president of Wellesley College, Diana Chapman Walsh remembered every detail: “Like a spark down a wire, the word spread to all of us lining the route that a woman was running the course. For a while, the ‘screech tunnel’ fell silent. We scanned face after face in breathless anticipation until just ahead of her, through the excited crowd, a ripple of recognition shot through the lines and we cheered as we never had before.” (Wellesley College News Release, April 10, 1996)

4. Playboy’s 25^th Anniversary Celebration (TV movie 1979).

5. Christie Hefner, 9 to 5ish with theSkimm, May 29, 2018.

6. The Tampa Tribune, February 7, 1979.

7. “Career Built on Guts, Family Ties – and Skin,” Chicago Sun Times, Cheryl L. Reed, staff reporter. Cited in bakerblumfamilytree.com

8. America’s Girls, Episode Three, “Naked Ambition”

9. The Daily News Leader, December 10, 1978.

10. Daughters of the Sexual Revolution, The Untold Story of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders (2018).

11. Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism (Vintage 2018).