still talking about the sexual revolution
can I respectfully disagree?
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.
Invariably any discussion about Playboy triggered something in someone.
~ Amy Grace Loyd1
Some names have an instant evocation baked into them. The Manson Family. John Wayne Gacy. Jonestown. Hitler. Stalin. Men have been virtually moving all the levers in history so they’re the ones with names in the truly heinous category. Women are branded “notorious” when stuck with a strong, negative reaction that’s based on the persona the public has chosen for them. Wallis Simpson. Leona Helmsley. Monica Lewinsky. Tonya Harding.
Add to that Playmate.
Amy Grace Loyd, one-time fiction and literary editor for Playboy (2005-2012), was accosted by an elegantly dressed woman at her mother’s home during a dinner party after her position at the magazine was mentioned. “It’s all assholes. Naked assholes!” Writing an essay about the time she spent as editor—and the rich literary history she’d become a part of—Ms. Loyd recalled the incident and defended where she stood on the nudity in Playboy. “When it comes to sexual politics and how and why a woman disrobes and for whom, it’s terrifically complex.” What she did not do, either at the dinner party or in her essay, was specifically defend the women who’d been called assholes. The women whose modeling work footed the bill; paying Ms. Loyd’s salary and enabling her to publish a serialized novel by Denis Johnson.2
Then there’s this from Guernica, part review, part cultural commentary in response to the briefly run 2011 TV series, The Playboy Club. “[W]e’re not ready to see the Bunnies, and Hugh Hefner, express any aspect of women’s lib…[T]he Bunnies will remain in between liberation and repression; living out whatever stigma we’ve attributed to them as they dance in their costumes on the pages of history.”3
It's a bit of a word salad but the message is clear. They may as well put signs in storefront windows: “Women aligned with Hugh Hefner not welcome.”
These are strong, visceral reactions well into the current century. What fomented that much intensity lasting in a world where Girls Gone Wild videos had infiltrated the culture. Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture was published eight years before Ms. Loyd wrote her essay, commenting that, “Playboy is the magazine Americans love to deride...”
According to Carrie Pitzulo, assistant professor of history, Playboy’s place in the culture is cyclical. In the late 2000s, when Professor Pitzulo’s book Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy was published, Hugh Hefner and the magazine were seen as having a reappraisal. Elizabeth Fraterrigo’s Playboy and the Making of the Good American Life (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Steven Watt’s Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream (Trade Paper Press, August 2009) were both generally positive. Brigette Berman’s documentary, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel (2009) was especially favorable.
The negative portrayal of the models was more static. From a detailed critique of Playboy at the magazine’s 50th Anniversary: the Playmates are all turned out on “an assembly line.” When Playboy released The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds; “there is one basic model. On top is the face of Shirley Temple; below is the body of Jayne Mansfield.”4 Playboy was known to favor a type. That shifted over the years, but in each era, there was a type. Women who appeared in Victoria Secrets and Sports Illustrated and on the cover of Vogue were a type. They were called supermodels.
In her essay, Amy Grace Loyd called the women in the magazine the “carnival barkers, [getting] the folks into the tent.” In her opinion, “it was the articles, the essays, the interviews and reviews, the short stories, that kept them there.”
Assembly line. Basic model. Carnival barkers.
That might not be how the magazine was actually consumed. That might not be how the men reading the magazine saw the women.
Both collectively and individually, the women are often remembered with admiration by Playboy readers. Professors James Beggan and Scott T. Allison found discovering Playboy was often a lightning moment for young men, who’d specifically remember the name of the woman in the first centerfold they’d ever seen.5 One writer confided that he’d “developed a respect toward women in part by reading Playboy as a young male.”
Perhaps because both the 25th Anniversary issue and the Playmate were so widely reported on, Candy Loving remains an example, so many years later, of an enduring popularity that would surprise many a feminist.
On beloved journalist Tim Woodward’s retirement in 2011, the magazine section of The Idaho Stateman laid out his entire career including his brushes with celebrity. He’d “interviewed presidents, actors, athletes, even Playboy’s 25th anniversary Playmate.” Candy Loving’s photograph with Mr. Woodward was included. Thirty-four years after first appearing in Playboy, an interview with Ms. Loving was the cover story featured in the Oklahoma Gazette.
Three songs have been written about Candy Loving, including the latest released in February 2023 by Bat Hearse, a band noted for taking their inspiration from Spaghetti Westerns and low-budget Sci-Fi movies. While celebrating the pop culture aspects of Playboy (the magazine was “purchased at a 7-Eleven”), their “Candy Loving” has a bit of social commentary with the repeating lyric, “there’s a heart beating under the cleavage.”
Guitarist and singer-songwriter, Ryan Roxie spoke of his respect and admiration for Candy Loving as an important piece of his movement through adolescence and the song he wrote for her has the feel of a coming-of-age novel in the form of a three-and-a-half minute 45.6 The song was set to a YouTube video, a careful arrangement of photographs and old clips taken from multiple sources, resulting in an additional G-rated tribute to Ms. Loving with nineteen thousand views.
And really, does any of that sound as if the men reading Playboy uniformly regarded the women as they’ve been portrayed by feminists? Or has a knee-jerk reaction simply been embedded into the word “Playmate,” a sign of the ongoing friction with the sexual revolution. That conflict seems the place where the women’s movement gets particularly mired down.
When the National Women’s Political Caucus held its last convention of the 1970s looking forward to the decades ahead, both Christie Hefner and Gloria Steinem were key attendees and the potential for a rapprochement was right there. But in the fight between feminists and Hugh Hefner’s sexual revolution, neither side was giving ground. And so, in the current moment, we’re still talking about the sexual revolution and when we do, we’re not far off from the ideas and talking points of the 1970s. Cue the fact that often, we talk about Playboy.
When Bari Weiss chose a topic for the first debate sponsored by
, held in Los Angeles on September 13, 2023, the question was “Has the Sexual Revolution Failed” with a focus on how the movement impacted women. The panelists in favor of the sexual revolution’s impact: Sarah Haider and Grimes. On the other side were Louise Perry and Anna Khachiyan.Though neither Hugh Hefner nor the magazine were mentioned in the debate, Louise Perry in her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, devotes the first chapter to a scorching critique of both Mr. Hefner and Playboy.7 In fact, “Hugh Hefner” are the first two words in her book. Ms. Perry describes the purchase and use of Marilyn Monroe’s nude photographs, featured in the magazine’s inaugural issue, and sees the lives of Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe as showing “in perfect vignette the nature of the sexual revolution’s impact on men and women…[W]hile Hefner lived a long grubby life in his mansion with his playmates, Monroe’s life was cut short by misery and substance abuse.” The book argues that men like Hugh Hefner championed second wave feminism’s success in obtaining legalized contraception and abortion “to achieve the goal of liberating their own libidos while pretending that they were liberating women.”
Carina Chocano’s You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages is a dazzling exploration on the subliminal messaging on the screen and the page telling girls who and what they were supposed to be. Rising up from a 1970s childhood filled with Barbies and sitcoms modeling trad-wife values, among the imagery that influenced Ms. Chocano, she remembers her grandfather’s leather-bound collection of Playboy and how she’d scoured the pages, wanting to find herself and never doing so. Like The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Ms. Chocano also begins You Play the Girl with Playboy as the first chapter.
Not every woman saw Playboy as it had been defined by feminists. There was overwhelmingly favorable media attention when seven women (“Once a Playmate, always a Playmate”) recreated their cover shots. Social critic Bridget Phetasy, though specifically appreciative of Louise Perry’s work, has called out the faction who use Hugh Hefner as the straw man for every feminist complaint. And, of course, Camille Paglia had an answer to the charge, “the women in Playboy come across as commodities.”
What marks the difference of opinion between a vocal cohort of feminists and the women who posed in Playboy as fractious and not a respectful divide is the triggering response (“naked assholes”). That curse-out wasn’t the view of every woman, but it wasn’t an outlier. Ms. Loyd used her essay in Salon to defend “Playboy’s more thoughtful side,” of which she considered herself a part. That was the focus of her pushback against the disparaging remark she’d quoted. There was no real defense of the women who’d been disparaged, even though Ms. Loyd had worked at Playboy for almost seven years. Perhaps she was self-censoring, given the literary world she was speaking to.
The east coast or elite view of Playboy is a link in the chain, from Hester Prynne to the current standards for cancelling women. As
explores in an interview with , incidents of canceling often erupt within networks of women. More often than not, the basis for an attack by the “online mob” has much to do with a prevailing sentiment; a particular grievance that a group seems to see everywhere.Feminist reaction to Playmates alone did not presage cancel culture, and they are not the only women who’ve ever been unfairly maligned. That fertile topic is the center of Sarah Marshall’s cultural-history podcast, “You’re Wrong About.” But the extent that sheer intensity has been able to sway opinion can’t be ignored. That practice is a significant facet of cancel culture and the effort to stigmatize and silence Playmates was a forerunner there.
Beyond serving as a template for online censoring and groupthink, how is the feminist intensity against Hugh Hefner and the women willingly posing in his magazine—shown in full force during the protests of the 1979 Ivy League issue—living in the present day? That anger so fixed on Playboy and all of its evils, including its male-centric influence on the sexual revolution as harmful to women: what is it doing now?
The focus of 1970s feminists, if not the anger, was certainly a part of The Free Press debate, asking whether the sexual revolution was particularly harmful to women. While the topic was framed as whether the sexual revolution had failed women and men, notably, there were five women on the stage. A decade earlier, The Wall Street Journal published two companion essays specifically asking, “Has the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women?”
No, said Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a consulting editor to Policy Review.
Yes, said the novelist Ann Patchett.
Here’s another debate. One from 1979. One that wasn’t much listened to.
Susan Brownmiller, speaking of Playboy, claimed the magazine “present[ed] women as degraded objects of sexual pleasure. They treat sex as something dirty.”8 On the very same day, in a different newspaper, Candy Loving had this to say, “I like sex to be open. Something that is not dirty. Something that is nice. So I guess I have taken it on myself to stand up to all those people who say all Playmates are stupid and all they can do is take off their clothes because that is wrong.”9
Ann Patchett wasn’t promoting Playboy when offering her opinion on the sexual revolution in her The Wall Street Journal essay. Not at all. But still, her closing is what we should be thinking about when we think about the “great confrontation” from the 1970s between Hugh Hefner and the women’s movement that’s spilled out into the decades that followed:
It is astonishing, really, this ability we have to complicate things. But we have complicated things, and we will continue to do so. The last time I checked, sex was one of the loveliest of human activities, and it deserves our respect. It’s where we came from, every single one of us, and so in that sense, if perhaps no other, we should manage to find common ground.
Continuing reading
The final issue in this series is my salute to the trailblazers.
This Week’s Recommended Reading
“Playboy Bunnies Tell the Best Tales”
This Week’s Music
"And She Was" by Talking Heads (on Amazon Music and Spotify)
Just One More Thing
All questions and comments are welcome, but here are some thoughts for this week:
From Vicki McCarty, Playmate of the Month, September 1979 (“Girls of the Ivy League”):
“I think the tragedy of the women’s movement has been that women are inhibited about showing their sexuality for fear they won’t be taken seriously. To me that’s unfortunate, because I think that it’s important that women be seen not as sex objects but as sexual beings.”10
What say you?
“‘An Opera of Breasts:’ But I Really Did Love Putting the Stories in Playboy!” Salon.com, August 26, 2013
Interview Jeff Cohen, May 12, 2022.
“The Bunny Stigma,” Guernica.com, undated.
“The Girls Next Door,” March 12, 2006, The New Yorker.
“What Sort of Man Reads Playboy? The Self-Reported Influence of Playboy on the Construction of Masculinity,” James Beggan and Scott T. Allison (Journal of Men’s Studies March 2003).
Interview May 11, 2022.
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Polity, August 29, 2022).
Scrantonian Tribune, January 14, 1979.
The San Francisco Examiner, January 14, 1979.
The Vancouver Sun, August 18, 1979.