More than Bunnies
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.
On September 27, 2017, when Hugh Hefner died at the age of 91, The New York Times ran several multi-page reflections of his life and legacy, crediting him with altering much of the culture in the late 20th Century.1 With all of The New York Times’ coverage of Hugh Hefner at his death, Gloria Steinem’s 1963 undercover foray into the Playboy Club and her subsequent exposé, “A Bunny’s Tale,” made it into the main obituary. That essay made it into virtually all of the obituaries that ran in the mainstream media. Befitting something so culturally important, not unlike Dorothy’s ruby slippers preserved at The Smithsonian, “A Bunny’s Tale” is archived on the New York University website.
After I started down the road of researching and (eventually) writing this series, using two vintage issues of Playboy as a launch onto feminism in the late 1970s, I unavoidably ran into the nexus between Mr. Hefner and Ms. Steinem and the enduring weight of her essay. At a certain point during my research, I began to think of those Japanese soldiers who’d been found scattered around the Pacific, manning posts that’d been assigned to them in the midst of World War II. Decades later, they remained wholly unaware of Japan’s unconditional surrender in 1945. One of the last holdouts, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, only agreed to return to the mainland once his (then retired) commanding officer flew in from Japan to officially relieve him of duty. That was in 1974.
The comparison may seem harsh. Yet that vision of blind fealty kept coming back to me as I read the essay and then measured it against both the culture at the time, and as it has evolved. The claims of exploitation on their face seemed to fail, yet “A Bunny’s Tale” remains haloed within the women’s movement.
How should we look at “A Bunny’s Tale” sixty years later? An essay that was called “dated” by The Washington Post in 1983.2 “Read along. You decide.
Launchpad
In 1963, Ms. Steinem wrote about the eleven days she spent working as Bunny Marie in Show Magazine. Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique had been published just three months earlier and the moment was ripe for exactly this kind of feminist exposé. The essay was undercover journalism, but also literary journalism; a narrative that offered readers intimate access to the experience of working at the Playboy Club. As noted in last week’s post, her descriptions of the much-too-tight and cleavage-exposing Bunny suit along with the exhausting hours she’d been made to work forever marked Hugh Hefner as a misogynist and demonized the magazine.
Of equal significance, that piece, Ms. Steinem’s first major writing assignment, secured her as the leading voice in the fight against the economic exploitation and objectification of women. For all her work as one of the most prominent names in the women’s movement, the daring subterfuge is what she’s long been known for, indelibly linked to her persona.
To say that “A Bunny’s Tale” launched Ms. Steinem doesn’t begin to describe the trajectory. Called a “landmark account” of Playboy by the History Channel, the essay was a Hollywood-esque rocket to stardom. Within a few years, Ms. Steinem was one of the original staff writers at New York Magazine, working alongside luminary Tom Wolfe and Clay Felker, a key figure in New Journalism.
Less than ten years after publishing her two-part article in Show, a minor-league magazine that’s barely remembered today, she would have the backing of Clay Felker for the launch of Ms. magazine. Mr. Felker funded the first issue.3
Throughout her career, Ms. Steinem has stayed a “household name.”4 A biographical drama of her life, The Glorias, was released in 2020, and she retains her status as a member of the elite media.
No doubt, an essay that pivotal in casting Ms. Steinem into her role as journalist, social activist, and nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism would be hard to discredit. With the backing of the media, the esteem of the essay would be that much tougher to take down.
That media, specifically the “East Coast’ media, is the crew Camille Paglia calls out as holding water for “the Gloria Steinem Wing of Feminism.”5 Is that true? Has the media been propping up “A Bunny’s Tale,” ensuring its enduring relevance?
“The best job I’ve ever had”
The essence of literary journalism is the author having inserted herself in a piece, persuading through emotion as much as through narrative fact.6 That absolutely describes “A Bunny’s Tale” where Ms. Steinem is very much a character in her story, showing her readers what she felt as she worked in the Playboy Club. But the bleeding of emotion into a narrative can be a danger, in the case where emotions are elevated over the facts.7
In the early 1960s, the movement to shift a world view dominated by men was just emerging. Still so new, as per Betty Friedan, it was “the problem with no name,” and like all new things, it was percolating with energy. And like all things percolating with energy, it was susceptible to high emotions.
As with other working-class jobs, waitressing was prey to the hard work and low pay that made for exploitation. Whether work at the Manhattan Playboy Club was the stuff of southern textile mills, akin to Crystal Lee Sutton’s real-life crusade against “paltry wages and bone tiring work” and the inspiration for the film, Norma Rae, is debatable.8
Yet because Ms. Steinem’s outrage was emotive, it yielded substantial attention, easily stoking the ire of women. Ms. Steinem wrote of her swollen and aching feet, from wearing high heels: “I am almost totally absorbed in my feet.” She recounted her appointment with a podiatrist, who told her there was “nothing wrong” with her feet other than “long hours, high heels, and muscle strain.” The History Channel describes the approximately two weeks she’d spent cocktail waitressing as a “grueling stint.”
Women have made entire careers in heels. It’s what Tina Turner was known for.
It would have been the rare entertainer, or cocktail waitress, who wore sensible shoes.
Ms. Steinem also had a lot to say about the outfits the women were made to wear, in particular the “stuffing” that was necessary to enhance the women’s cleavage. This focus seems a little surprising. Pushup bras have been around for years. The heavily padded Miracle Bra was a “blockbuster success” for Victoria’s Secret.9 In 1996, the supermodel, Claudia Schiffer wore a diamond Miracle Bra (valued at one million dollars) for the brand.10 Yet the idea that women were stuffing their Bunny costumes to enhance their cleavage was a huge criticism lobbed at Playboy, as if that wasn’t going on, in various degrees, across the country.
Here’s an ad featuring a Las Vegas showgirl that ran on the same page as Ms. Steinem’s essay, which features a woman in the kind of bustier that was very much a part of the Bunny costume she was critiquing. A closeup of the photo reveals significant cleavage.
Of course, there is the cottontail and yes, that added to the sexual appeal of the Bunny outfit, but not enough to banish it from polite society. As of 2023, the Bunny outfit remains extremely popular among women at Halloween. Minus the tail, the costume isn’t all that different from the choice of many female entertainers, Taylor Swift included, who perform in bustier/bodysuit combos. If the essay didn’t move the needle on how a wide swath of women perceived the Bunny suit, who was the essay speaking to with the claim that cocktail waitressing as a Bunny was blatant exploitation? Or was the essay’s real success simply the demonizing of Playboy. Long hours, padded bras, high heels on cocktail waitresses, used to wage a war against Hugh Hefner by stirring up passions connected to feelings of exploitation. A convenient enemy.
Getting away from the emotion and onto the facts is illuminating.
The performance artist, Laurie Anderson, revealed in a YouTube video what she learned about the “economic exploitation of women,” having gone to the New York Playboy Club many years back, intending to protest. There she met a woman who’d secured work as a Bunny.
“Listen, honey,” Ms. Anderson was told. “I make $800 a week at this job. I’ve got three kids to support. This is the best job I’ve ever had. So, if you want to talk about women and money, why don’t you go down to the garment district, where women make ten cents an hour, and why don’t you go and march around down there.”
Ms. Anderson considered what she’d learned and said to herself, “Hmm.”
“What We’re Getting Wrong”
What did the women who’d worked as Bunnies for longer than eleven days say about the experience?
Kathryn Leigh Scott, an actress and writer who was a Bunny with Gloria Steinem in the early 1960s strongly disagreed with Steinem’s portrayal. Ms. Scott wrote more than an essay in response. The Bunny Years: The Surprising Inside Story of the Playboy Clubs – The Women Who Worked as Bunnies, and Where They Are Now, first published in 1999, is based not only on her experience working at the Playboy Club, it includes interviews with more than 250 former Bunnies. It’s a book full of mini memoirs of Bunnies who’d gone on to become actresses, doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, real estate investors, nurses, scientists, entrepreneurs, and teachers; women who all looked back on their experiences at the Playboy Club as maturing, an important step into the lives they were going to live, an adventure, an education. Both Lauren Hutton and Debbie Harry are among the interviewees.
Here’s the word from Kathryn Leigh Scott on her year working as Bunny Kay in the New York Club:
It had hardly been the kind of exploitative experience Steinem had managed to transform into a cornerstone of feminist folklore.
Gloria Steinem couldn’t identify with the rest of us and didn’t care to.… [S]he would never have considered working as a waitress, let alone a waitress with Bunny ears, except as research for an article. Her viewpoint was that of a journalist—or more to the point, a privileged professional.
Gloria Steinem was the least open to change, to experience the crazy, giddy, exhilaration age of experimentation when a woman, quite possibly, could do anything she damn well pleased. We flouted our beehive hairdos, padded our bosoms, wore false eyelashes, and defied convention in our daring satin outfits.
We were very much in the vanguard of the sexual revolution that presaged the women’s lib era.
Ms. Scott’s counterpoint to “A Bunny’s Tale” is bolstered by the novelist, Christina Clancy’s research for Shoulder Season, a coming-of age novel about one young woman’s summer working as a Bunny at the Playboy Club on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. What Ms. Clancy unexpectedly found were women who looked back on their youthful experiences with great fondness. They’d had “the time of their lives.”11 The second subtitle of the piece “What We’re Getting Wrong,” throws some light on how much “A Bunny’s Tale” and the assumptions it set up have been drilled into the narrative. As Ms. Clancy relates, “When I talk about my novel, I often feel the need to legitimize my subject matter, as though the Bunny has no place in literary fiction.”
It circles back to Camille Paglia’s discernment that the media was pushing for the “Gloria Steinem Wing of Feminism.”12 The story that Bunnies have to tell seem destined to be dismissed. Even though Ms. Scott’s book was published before Hugh Hefner died, it was Ms. Steinem’s version of the Playboy Club that was planted into his obituaries as a necessary bookend to Mr. Hefner’s life and his work. Yet clearly Ms. Scott’s narrative countering Gloria Steinem’s essay wasn’t unknown. A year after Hefner’s death, in a substantial piece on the reopening of the Manhattan Playboy Club that was published in The New York Times (the Style Section’s cover story), reporter Shawn McCreesh interviewed Kathryn Leigh Scott at length.13
“A Bunny’s Tale” began as a discussion on female exploitation. Because of timing or personality, whether by intention or just because life takes odd turns, it's become the enduring link to both a feminist hatred of Hugh Hefner and the stamping of Gloria Steinem into the culture. Far bigger than a two-part series in Show Magazine: it’s the essay that shaped the view of Playboy as uniquely exploitive of women; a "cornerstone of feminist folklore.” That potent combination pretty much ensured the expected woman’s view of Playboy would stay frozen. Has stayed frozen. No room for nuance or a change of perspective. Ever.
Compelling facts calling the essay’s findings into question (which, in turn, ought to have called the expected view of Playboy into question) have been routinely ignored and the hardened vilification of Playboy, and of men who read the magazine, goes on.
And has that demonizing of Playboy, never distinguishing the magazine’s portrayal of male fantasy from triple XXX pornography, been a benefit to feminism?14 Christie Hefner’s observation, that Playboy readers were capable of both admiring and desiring a woman, was one understanding of the magazine that should have been, at the very least, considered. Opening the world to allow changing roles for women didn’t require a wide gulf between the sexes.
Continue Reading
Click here to read the next issue in this series, about the sexual politics of 1979 and the inherent duality of liberation.
Episode Notes
This Week’s Recommended Reading
“Working 9 to 5: Women in the Labor Movement with Ellen Cassedy”
This Week’s Music
"Kim the Waitress (2003 Version)" by The Green Pajamas (on Amazon Music and Spotify)
Just One More Thing
All questions and comments are welcome, but here are some thoughts for this week:
The response to the Ivy League issue was, in large part, disproportionate to where Playboy stood in the culture at the time. To what extent did a “Gloria Steinem Wing” hatred for Hugh Hefner, with all the baggage hitched to it, play into that outrage?
The lengthy obituary was followed the next day by no less than five additional articles. “How Hugh Hefner Invented the Modern Man,” “Hugh Hefner, the Pajama Man,” “Hugh Hefner’s Memorable Interview Moments,” “Hefner’s Mansion Embodied Hedonistic Fun and Darker Impulses,” and “Celebrities Remember Hugh Hefner for More than Just the Articles.”
“In 1983, The Women’s Movement Was Changing. But Gloria Steinem Stood Her Ground,” The Washington Post, October 12, 1983.
Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2008.
Later With Bob Costas, September 21, 1992.
Ibid.
New Books in Journalism, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, “How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalism,” December 4, 2023.
The High Conflict Institute, “When Helping Hurts,” April 18, 2017.
The New York Times, “Crystal Lee Sutton: The Organizer,” December 23, 2009.
Business Insider, “The Rise, Fall and Latest Stumbles of Victoria’s Secret,” August 25, 2023.
Ibid.
Lit Hub, “Sexual Politics and Female Power: Stories from the Playboy Bunny Resort,” July 20, 2021.
Later With Bob Costas, Ibid.
The New York Times, September 9, 2018.
UnHerd, “Don’t Demonise ‘The Male Gaze,’” December 9, 2020.
When I was writing think pieces about girlboss feminism, I was asked why I wasn’t writing about female founders succeeding (instead of the founders getting publicly dragged and shamed)? People want to read about scandal and drama, and Steinem wrote like she was Nellie Bly sneaking inside the asylum
“Getting away from the emotion and on to the facts is illuminating.” Incredible writing, research and commentary, Melanie.