what will you do with your freedom?

Closing out the 1970s

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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We will never recapture the importance of Playboy in the ’60s and ’70s because we changed the world. We live in a Playboy world now, for good or ill.

~ Hugh Hefner¹

The 1960s and ’70s upended American culture, with changes spurred on, in part, by Hugh Hefner and his sui generis magazine. 1979 was the final year of those two momentous decades and there was an air about it. Writing of the months he’d spent working for an oil-exploration firm overseas, George Saunders pondered on the books he’d purchased. Without them, he’d have been “reduced to reading the same 1979 Playboy over and over.”² Not just any issue of the magazine. A 1979 Playboy.

The year was an inflection point.

It was the year Billy Corrigan turned twelve, his transition into adolescence. “1979” became the title of the Smashing Pumpkins’ most successful release. The song is a riff on the duality of youth; all the pain and all the angst measured against carefree teenage happiness.³

Reading the lyrics and inspiration for “1979” had me thinking of duality as a wind down for this long essay. The theme had crept in from the start, looking at two issues of Playboy and how they reflected back on the exact same culture from opposite angles so that each revealed something distinct: something seemingly incompatible with the other side. And yet, the two great movements of the time—the sexual revolution and second wave feminism—were in some ways dual movements, owing much to a shared source: oral contraceptives.

Duality is in all things. Cosmology. Math. Physics. Captured in the universally understood concept of yinyang: “opposite, but interconnected mutually perpetuating forces.” Balance pleases us. Light and dark. Sorrow and happiness. The scales of justice. This is how we know the world and make sense of the parts that disturb and challenge us.

As we parse through 1979, the close out of twenty fractious years, it’s a theme to keep in your pocket.

1979.

It had been twenty-five years since Hugh Hefner introduced his magazine to the world. But the Silver Anniversary issue with all its publicity was more than a celebration; it was a show of how deeply entrenched Playboy was in the mainstream. The Women of the Ivy League issue and the surrounding protests was a show of how deeply feminists wanted Playboy booted out.

These were opposite sides and, in their way, interconnected. But they were warring.

Playboy was then at the apex of power. Though battling feminists, there was enormous possibility. The era of Christie Hefner was just emerging.

Feminists were experiencing what would prove to be a lethal internal struggle. The “sex wars” had one faction who saw pornography and the sexual objectification of women as the root of all inequality. On the other side was a more sex-positive libertarian politics. As the Ivy League issue made clear, Playboy wasn’t getting much of a bounce in popularity with feminists, despite that infighting. In fact, 1979 was ushered out with the War on Pornography, Playboy naturally dragged into the mix.⁴

Despite her years of acrimony and debate with Hugh Hefner and his magazine, it seems that unlike a great many other feminists, Gloria Steinem did not speak out publicly against Playboy amid the Ivy League protests. However, as the year was ending, Ms. Steinem did have much to say.

Ms. Magazine, the landmark feminist publication Ms. Steinem founded, released its own “back-to-campus” issue in September 1979—the first ever. Along with an excerpt of Adrienne Rich’s “Commencement Address to Smith College Class of 1979,” still considered iconic, there was a survey of “What Undergraduates Are Saying About Sex, Fads, Feminism—and Future Leaders.” The results of that survey included a statement that, “the issue on at least 15 campuses was the danger and often the fact of rape.”

Here’s the paragraph immediately following that sentence on male violence:

Ivy League women were particularly incensed by Playboy photographer David Chan’s quest for female students to pose for a soft-core porn photo spread on “The Girls of the Ivy League.” One student reports that when the Harvard Crimson declined to run Chan’s ad, the editor at the Brown Daily Herald published an open letter to Chan inviting him to advertise for models in the Herald.

One could draw a straight line from those twin paragraphs in Ms. Magazine—campus rape culture placed back-to-back with David Chan—to the War on Pornography. It was just one month later when Ms. Steinem led a march through pre-Rudy Giuliani Times Square protesting pornography as “rape on paper,” Playboy included.

Daily News, September 17, 1979

Noted feminist Susan Brownmiller claimed the magazine “present[ed] women as degraded objects of sexual pleasure. They treat sex as something dirty.”⁵ “Rape on paper,” of course, took the male gaze into the dark corners and murky recesses of unhealthy niche behavior. As if looking at nude women in Playboy, models who were the next level of pinup following the Vargas girl, wasn’t the norm for roughly fifty percent of the population.

Here’s a side note on the norms of society. When I found references to the September issue of Ms. magazine, I went straight to the internet to order a copy. There were none available. Not one. It took months to track one down on eBay. There’s only a handful in circulation on the vintage magazine market. While Googling “Ms. magazine September 1979,” links to Playboy’s Ivy League issue kept popping up. There are a great many copies of that September 1979 magazine available, given the robust sales when released. That’s how “niche” the male behavior at issue was.

Yet in spite of this reality, the 1970s closed out with the collective understanding that Playboy was a part of the pornographic machine fomenting violence against women. In the decade that followed, feminists would align with the conservative Meese Commission, who did a broad investigation into pornography and among other things, tried, unsuccessfully, to get Playboy off the shelves of 7-Eleven.⁶

But that was the tenor of the times. The great movements of the 1960s and ’70s with all of their emphasis on personal freedom saw the autumn of 1979, the last days of the era, with a feminist fervor to quash, once and for all, the magazine that had changed the world.

Photo Credit: Michael Anagnos

There’s a duality inherent in liberation. Erich Fromm explored the quest for freedom and its conflict with the terrible fear of isolation. Once the barriers to self-determination are removed, there are decisions and hard choices, and the temptation to slide back under the sway of others.⁷ Freedom is weighty and often, the easiest choice is to conform and stay within the warm embrace of the pack.

Women were breaking from a male-dominated world, but were feminists open to full liberation? Or was the promise of sisterhood and community predicated on rigid standards: demanding adherence in order to belong. Not everyone was Camille Paglia, willing to take her place as a dissident.

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Continue Reading

Click here to read the next issue in this series, which revisits the sexual revolution in the current moment—there’s also some perspective from the men who read Playboy and their takeaway.

This Week’s Recommended Reading

The higher meaning of joy riding

This Week’s Music

Closing Time by Semisonic (on Amazon Music and Spotify)

Just One More Thing

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

What’s your most potent memory of freedom?

1. “Hugh Hefner, Visionary Editor Who Founded Playboy Magazine, Dies at 91,” September 27, 2017, Washington Post

2. “Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra.”

3. Consequence.net, September 3, 2018.

4. “Women’s War on Porn,” August 27, 1979, Time.com.

5. Scrantonian Tribune, January 14, 1979.

6. “Bizarre Bedfellows,” Reason, July 2005.

7. “The Paradox of Freedom: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist, Erich Fromm on Moral Aloneness and Our Mightiest Antidote to Terror,” The Marginalian, undated (Maria Popova).