Mean Girls, Mean Women
the legend of Bunny Marie
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.
There’s almost a Rorschach test quality about writing about Playboy. What comes out in the press is not so much about me as it is about society.
~ Hugh Hefner, The New York Times, September 28, 2017
The 1970s, as a culture trying to absorb both the sexual revolution and the women’s movement, was what we might call a hot mess.
Hugh Hefner’s quote from a 1974 interview (later reprinted in The New York Times) seems a reasonable entry point to start unpacking not only what was out in the media, but also the subtext of rumor and gossip percolating around both Playboy and the models at the time. There were those factions still hanging onto old stereotypes to control brazen women and the 1970s was full of drive-in double features where slashers killed off sexualized young women, a trope rooted in film noir. The femme fatale always was penalized, her comeuppance necessary to return the world to its moral order, as
has written.1 These were our cautionary tales, sent out to permeate the ether in the same spirit as Ellen Goodman’s editorial.A letter-to-the-editor response to Ms. Goodman’s column put the shaming of women in the late 1970s in good perspective:
Years, centuries ago, if a woman committed a “sinful” act, she was branded with the scarlet letter A and lived forever in shame. Today, in the unforgiving and rigid world of feminism, the new letter of shame is a Purple P, which forever condemns the bearer for the crime of posing in Playboy.
The Boston Globe, August 22, 1979
This wasn’t quite the same shaming of Playboy models that had begun in the 1950s. James K. Beggan, a professor of sociology at the University of Louisville who has published extensively on gender issues, including several works on the cultural influence of Playboy, addressed the early public image of playmates. “In the 1960s, a woman who posed in Playboy was considered a little trampy, from the wrong side of the tracks±regardless of where her family came from.”2 That had been the initial premise. “When Playboy first started casting the girl next door, few of them were willing to disrobe for the camera. Nice girls didn’t do it.”3 A society in the throes of the sexual revolution wasn’t always fully on board with women a step or two ahead of everyone else, but they were no longer shocked by them.
The New York Times, writing on Mr. Hefner’s death, said he was first “reviled by the guardians of the 1950s social order … and later by feminists.” Jeff Cohen, who’d been with Playboy for thirty years and retired as the photography editor, was clear that the pushback to playmates from feminists was much greater than the earlier pushback stemming from 1950s social mores.4
Feminist opposition relied heavily on the claim that Playboy models had been dehumanized by the magazine. It was a critique fueling the protests of the Ivy League issue.5 The persistent allegation was folded into attacks on Hugh Hefner as a misogynist, but the narrative that playmates had been dehumanized, keeping catchphrases like “cardboard cutouts” in the public discourse, did as much harm to those women as anything else, robbing them of their identities and rendering their views on feminism irrelevant. That wasn’t the first time feminists had been accused of shutting down the opposition, as transgressive women were regarded. Arguing in favor of art and The Rolling Stones’s “Under My Thumb,” Camille Paglia says she was “bounced fast right out of the movement.”6 A pioneer in feminist dissent, Ms. Paglia uses the word “fascism,” and describes the “Gloria Steinem Wing” of feminism as having silenced her.7
So were feminists correct that the models were dehumanized, or did their constant repetition of the narrative effectively brand (and silence) women considered to have stepped “over the line?” Here’s a comparison of how the models were depicted: by feminists and by the magazine.
“A Bunny’s Tale”
Posing under the name Marie Catherine Ochs (a carefully chosen pseudonym), Gloria Steinem spent eleven days working as Bunny Marie at the New York Playboy Club before chronicling her experience in a two-part series that was published in Show Magazine. The 1963 essay, with compelling descriptions of painfully tight uniforms and exhausting hours and half-exposed breasts, forever marked Hugh Hefner as a misogynist and demonized the magazine.
Gloria Steinem is arguably “the most influential figure” in second wave feminism and her essay, “A Bunny’s Tale” is given the same weight as Betty Friedan’s, The Feminist Mystique, both of them seen as bibles in the struggle for gender equality.8 But if Gloria Steinem, in publishing her essay, invited women to look at Playboy through the lens of misogyny, I invite you to look at “A Bunny’s Tale” through the lens of class. If Hugh Hefner, as she claimed, saw women as objects, Ms. Steinem saw the women at Playboy as nobodies.
Dr. Tracy Vaillancourt, the Canada Research Chair in School-Based Mental Health and Violence Prevention, says that women are particularly sensitive to the nuances of indirect aggression. Also a soccer coach, Dr. Vaillancourt says she can hear the girls “roll their eyes a kilometer away.”9
Listen for the sound of Gloria Steinem rolling her eyes as you read.
At the club to fill out paperwork, Ms. Steinem gives her first impressions (which will be ours). We meet another applicant only referred to as “blue glasses” who doesn’t own a phone (she’ll be waiting at her uncle’s house for a callback), is wearing a coat she’d outgrown, has “plump legs” and says, “I want to be a Bunny so much.” With that, we are told the social status of young women aspiring to become Bunnies while Ms. Steinem also sets the tone for how her readers should look at them. They will not be given names. Throughout her essay it is “blue glasses, baby voice, Trainer Bunny, the un-stuffed Bunny, the Chinese Bunny, the magician’s assistant, etc...”
From the wardrobe mistress: “This place don’t allow you no money for nothing.” (The cadence a reminder of her co-workers’ social status).
Here’s Ms. Steinem’s description of the Bunny quiz: “I decided it wouldn’t pay to be too smart, and wrote down six wrong answers. We scored one another’s papers and read out the results. I was top of the class...”
As to the other women taking the quiz: “[T]he magician’s assistant had ten [wrong], and everyone else missed fourteen or more. Texas missed nearly thirty. When the club says a Bunny is chosen for ‘1) Beauty, 2) Personality, and 3) Ability,’ the order must be significant.”
If Ms. Steinem did believe the quiz was evidence of Playboy privileging a woman’s beauty over her abilities, and if she believed that was enough of a crime to warrant exposure, surely there were ways for her to present her findings without shaming her co-workers. Shaming their level of education. Ms. Steinem is a graduate of Smith College, one of the seven Sister Schools, which in 1963, was the Ivy League of women’s education.
On her final day, Ms. Steinem says it’s more of “the same” and gives snippets of the recurring dialogue she’s been hearing to leave her readers with a lasting impression of the gestalt of the club. That includes a variety of the propositions she’s received from the customers and instructions in basic waitressing. As an example of the friendly chitchat from the women she’d been working with, this is the quote Ms. Steinem chose to share: “He’s a real gentlemen. He treats you just the same whether you’ve slept with him or not.”
The sideways remarks. The socially aggressive nuance. Her tone throughout the essay is so unkind. It’s a way of treating each other that women know intimately and why the quotes from the film, Mean Girls are iconic (“You can’t sit with us!”) Every woman knows this voice.
This was a key narrative of the women’s movement with not only a pejorative view of the women who worked for Playboy (they couldn’t even pass a simple test), but a dehumanized view skillfully woven in; the women didn’t even warrant being referenced by their names. It’s a view that’s endured in the culture. Here it is, randomly appearing in Harper’s as a #Harpersindex “fun fact.”
The word claimed is so needlessly insulting. A canon of second wave feminism gave the culture the language and the permission to talk like mean girls when singling out “certain” women, and so we find snide remarks about those women coming from a magazine with the stature of Harper’s. This is bullying. This is cancelling.
Feel her smile, hear her laugh
Having worked at Playboy for over thirty years, Christie Hefner certainly knew the audience. She believed the men on the other side of those glossy pages understood more often than not that these were real women and not products off an assembly line simply because they posed nude.
How I felt about [Playboy] was consistent with how the readers and the writers and the employees felt about it, which was that it is very easy for men to both desire and admire women [emphasis added].
~ Christie Hefner, 9 to 5ish with theSkimm, May 29, 2018
Playboy was glossy and sexy and designed as a fantasy about lifestyle. A fantasy about pretty young women. But there was an intentional melding of reality with that fantasy. Playboy’s philosophy had sex as a normal part of a woman’s life, specifically advanced as a challenge to the rigid mores that held, “there are good girls and there are bad girls.”10
The-girl-next door archetype was crucial. The models, so often recruited at colleges, were not meant to be professionals but rather a young woman who could be a reader’s neighbor or an assistant in the office downtown; someone from real life who happened to be beautiful. Throughout the 1970s, playmates were consistently written up in their hometown papers. After they’d posed, the young women were sent out by Playboy on publicity tours, frequently showing up at professional football and baseball games and often at “The Wide World of Wheels” where they appeared alongside the stars of Batman and The Incredible Hulk (it was said that the centerfold at the meet and greet with Lou Ferrigno had the stronger handshake).
There was an armadillo race in Texas, where the playmate’s contender came in second. Two models on a promotional tour in Montreal started off a Grey Cup game; one as the holder, the other “providing a well-aimed kick to the ball.” It was not uncommon to see a playmate on The Merv Griffin Show. The gathering on the quad to celebrate Valentine’s Day with Candy Loving was covered by the local news as if it were a school-wide picnic.
These were not only beautiful women who were admired, they were respected. One man, who’d missed the opportunity to meet Candy Loving two years earlier due to heavy crowds, rushed to the mall where she was signing autographs at a bookstore, having gone home first to change out of his postal uniform, as he “couldn’t bear to meet her in his work clothes.”11 That he was at the mall Christmas shopping with his wife and three children was not seen as unusual.
Journalists often discovered their status as reader/admirer was never far from their reporting.
Sent to interview Candy Loving at a pancake house, a young staff writer couldn’t get past the reality of meeting her. “Her hands show the slight wear of years of dry Oklahoma heat. Her hair fell more casually about her shoulders than the studio hairdressers would have liked. And when a News-Press photographer took a few quick pictures of her outside the studio, she was disarmingly shy… Yet there was still something magical about this centerfold-come-to-life.”12
At a car show where fans had lined up for personalized autographs, the reporter well understood why grown men became “flustered” in Ms. Loving’s presence, struggling to make small talk. “[O]ne can smell her perfume, touch her hand, feel her smile, hear her laugh.”13
Peggy Wilkins, a woman from Chicago, reputed to have the world’s largest collection of Playboy magazines, says what attracts her to the publication is the quality of the photographs (large-format film), but also the models. “The women are almost always smiling. It’s not a detached model—there’s a connection with the viewer, a sense of fun.”14
Failing the Bechdel Test
The Bechdel test, measuring the representation of women in film and fiction, initially used metrics of two female characters in conversation on a topic other than men but then added a fourth metric. The female characters had to be named.15
Giving a woman a name is the most basic requirement for seeing her. Playboy gave the women personal histories. Gloria Steinem gave the Bunnies silly monikers. After “A Bunny’s Tale” was published, there’s not much evidence that feminists ever saw playmates as having actual names or identities. Ms. Steinem’s take on Playboy set the stage for how all of the women associated with the magazine would be shut out. Is there any difference between refusing to give a woman a name and keeping the phrase “dehumanized” front and center when referring to the models? In both instances, the result is the same. When Playboy was at the height of its power, when the sexual revolution was finding its place in the culture, the women at the forefront would be as unseen as possible. Never listened to.
The women were so ignored in the culture that, inexplicably, they were even stigmatized by Hollywood. On her struggle to break into Hollywood, Jenny McCarthy found this truth: “If you were blonde and beautiful, you were a bimbo. If you were blonde and beautiful and a playmate, you were a double bimbo.”16
Stigma and invisibility are favored weapons in the world of female bullying and the culture has paid a price for the long-lasting acceptability of indirect aggression. Eradicating that form of hostility—the sheer negativity in how women are allowed to deal with each other—ought to have been a high priority of the women’s movement, as lofty a goal as eradicating the hyper-sexualization of women in a male-dominated society.17 A singular focus on how men treated women meant a failure at addressing the way that women treated women. Actually, by taking full advantage of the stigma against playmates in their opposition to Playboy, feminists did more than simply ignore the issue.
Continue Reading
Click here to read the next issue in this series, where we’ll find out what Kathryn Leigh Scott (actress and former Bunny) thinks of Ms. Steinem’s famous (infamous?) essay.
Episode Notes
This Week’s Recommended Reading
“Mean Girls Day: The Definitive Ranking of the Movie’s Best Quotes”
This Week’s Music
"Harper Valley P.T.A." by Jeannie C. Riley (on Amazon Music and Spotify)
Just One More Thing
All questions and comments welcome, but here are some thoughts for this week:
Is it a surprise that a major “cornerstone” of second wave feminism belittled other women? That it encouraged the ostracizing of other women?
Does the current movement—calling out feminism for male bashing—go far enough to address female aggression?
Crime Reads, “The Femme Fatale: Subverting and Complicating a Noir Trope,” September 13, 2019. Crime Reads, “The Evolution of the Femme Fatale in Noir,” December 5, 2019.
Orlando Sentinel, December 10, 2003.
The Daily News, December 12, 1978.
Interview, May 12, 2022.
The Columbia Daily Spectator, February 1, 1979.
Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism, Camille Paglia (Canongate, 2018).
Later with Bob Costas, September 21, 1992.
“Gloria Steinem’s ‘A Bunny’s Tale – 50 Years Later,” May 26, 2013, The Guardian.
Modern Wisdom, Episode 711 “Dr. Tracy Vaillancourt – The Ruthless Ways Women Compete With Each Other.”
Bachelors and Bunnies; The Sexual Politics of Playboy by Carrie Pitzulo (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
The Cincinnati Enquirer, November 27, 1983.
News-Press, January 12, 1980
The Orlando Sentinel, March 25, 1983
Chicago Reader, “What Sort of Woman Reads Playboy,” February 4, 2010.
“Thelma & Louise: The Last Great Film About Women,” The Atlantic, August 31, 2011.
The San Bernardino County Sun, September 9, 1997.
“Mean Girls Grow Into Mean Women: Let’s Do Better,” August 31, 2018, Military Mom Collective.
In my experience, women would much rather discuss how women have been wronged by men than talk about the insidious ways in which women try to take down other women. Reading the “Trashing” essay published by Ms. in the 1970s was really validating, after I’d burned out on all the infighting in the feminist organization I led
Perfect last paragraph, so true, and never thought of this as connected to/and or starting back during this Playboy era, really good perspective on it!
“ A singular focus on how men treated women meant a failure at addressing the way that women treated women. Actually, by taking full advantage of the stigma against playmates in their opposition to Playboy, feminists did more than simply ignore the issue”.