Pornland

by Gail Dines

  This was a theme that Playboy was to express repeatedly in its early years. Burt Zollo, writing in the June 1954 issue, told Playboy readers to “take a good look at the sorry, regimented husbands trudging down every woman-dominated street in this woman-dominated land. Check what they’re doing when you’re out on the town with a different dish every night.” For those men who had been lucky enough to escape marriage, Zollo warned them to beware of June, the marriage month, since “woman becomes more heated, more desperate, more dangerous.”16

  Dangerous women were also the focus of Wylie’s article “The Womanization of America,” published in Playboy in September 1958. Starting from now-familiar themes, Wylie accused American women of taking over the business world, the arts, and, of course, the home. It was the home, according to Wylie, where men especially ceased to be men: the “American home, in short, is becoming a boudoir-kitchen-nursery, dreamed up for women by women, and as if males did not exist as males.”17 According to Playboy, the position of American men continued to deteriorate; by 1963, an article in the magazine claimed that the American man was being worked so hard by his wife that he was “day after day, week after week . . . invited to attend his own funeral.” This state of affairs could not continue, according to the writer, William Iversen, because “neither double eyelashes nor the blindness of night or day can obscure the glaring fact that American marriage can no longer be accepted as an estate in which the sexes shall live half-slave and half-free.”18

  While the anti-woman ideology of Playboy was not new, what was new was the way it was tied in to an anti-marriage position; American wives were beyond salvation, they had been given too much power and the only solution was to refuse to conform to the ideal of domesticity. However, simply telling men not to conform by staying single would not have been enough in the 1950s, since nonconformity was taken as a sign of either homosexuality or social pathology. What was needed was an alternative to “Gary Gray,” an image of a man who refused to conform but was still considered a man. This man worked hard, but for himself, not for his family; he was actively heterosexual, but with lots of young, beautiful women ( just like the ones that populated the magazine), not with a wife. Such a man, Zollo informed readers in the June 1954 issue of Playboy, did indeed exist and he was the “true playboy”: the well-dressed, sophisticated guy who could “enjoy the pleasures the female has to offer without becoming emotionally involved.”19 Playboy was to become the manual for men who aspired to be playboys, and these men, born and raised in a time of material deprivation (the Great Depression and then the Second World War) and sexual conservatism, needed all the help they could get to learn how to become a big-spending, upmarket consumer of goods and women.

  Part of Playboy’s overnight success can be explained by the lack of competition, since the men’s magazine industry was dominated by magazines that specialized in what was referred to as “blood, guts and fighting.”20 After the war, this industry enjoyed record-breaking profits, with sales increasing 62 percent from 1945 to 1952.21 At the time there was some concern over the increasingly violent content of these magazines. Naomi Barko, for example, writing in 1953, complained that men’s magazines were dominated by “war, big-game hunting, women, speed sports and crime,” a world in which “jobs, families, careers, education and civic problems are never mentioned.”22 What these magazines offered, Weyr argues, was an escape from suburban life, but one based on danger and adventure, rather than sex.23

  The print pornography market at the time was dominated by cheap, under-the-counter pinup magazines, the type that few men would feel comfortable displaying on their coffee table. Hefner was well aware that the financial potential of such magazines was limited in the 1950s, and, moreover, he did not want to create just a “porn” magazine; rather, he wanted to develop an upmarket lifestyle magazine that would have the pornographic pinup as its centerpiece. This was the core of the magazine, but unlike the other porn magazines of the time, this pinup would be delivered to the readers in a package that celebrated the upper-middle-class bachelor life, the type of life that the 1950s male dreamed of leading, be he a college student, a married man living in the suburbs, or an upwardly mobile corporate male.24

  Selling Playboy to the Playboy Hefner’s desire to create a pornographic lifestyle magazine with mainstream distribution, readership, and status meant he had to carefully construct a public image of Playboy as a quality lifestyle magazine that had “tasteful” pictures of women, rather than as a pornographic magazine that carried articles on consumer items and current events. The fact that Playboy was in the business of constructing and reconstructing its image is apparent in the way it marketed itself to various target groups. Hefner’s initial marketing strategy was to sell Playboy as a soft-core pornography magazine to the potential distributors and as a lifestyle “men’s” magazine to the targeted audience. In April 1953, eight months before the first copy of Playboy hit the stands, Hefner sent a letter to twenty-five of the largest newsstand wholesalers throughout the country inquiring about potential interest in the magazine, which was originally to be called Stag Party.25 The letter read: Dear Friend, Stag Party—a brand new magazine for men—will be out this fall—and it will be one of the best sellers you have ever handled. . . . It will include male pleasing figure studies, making it a sure hit from the very start. But here’s the really big news! The first issue of Stag Party will include the famous calendar picture of Marilyn Monroe—in full color! In fact every issue of Stag Party will have a beautiful full page, male pleasing nude study—in full natural color. Now you know what I mean when I say that this is going to be one of the best sellers you have ever handled.26

  While the pictorials were emphasized in the letter to wholesalers, it was the lifestyle section of the magazine that was promoted to readers. In the first edition of Playboy, Hefner told his readers: Within the pages of Playboy you will find articles, fiction, pictures, stories, cartoons, humor and special features . . . to form a pleasure-primer styled to the masculine taste. . . . We plan spending most of our time inside.

  We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors-d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, Jazz, Sex.27

  Notice that when the editors addressed the reader, the pictures were just one of many attractions, rather than the attraction. The reader was invited not to masturbate to the centerfold but rather to enter the world of the cultural elite, to discuss philosophy and consume food associated with the upper middle class. To sell the magazine primarily in terms of its pictorials—how it was marketed to distributors—would have constructed a very different image for the reader to identify with. The markers of upper-class life, which appear causally thrown in as afterthoughts (cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and Picasso), were deliberately placed to cloak the magazine in an aura of upper-middle-class respectability.

  The centerfolds seem very tame by today’s standards, with their carefully concealed pubic hair and coy gazes at the camera. However, in the 1950s, they were considered risqué and some in publishing believed that Hefner was headed for jail. These centerfolds were, however, the selling point of the magazine. As one Playboy editor, Ray Russell, commented in an interview: “We could have all the Nabokovs in the world and the best articles on correct attire without attracting readers. They bought the magazine for the girls. We couldn’t take the sex out. The magazine would die like a dog.”28 But, given the time period, Russell would have been equally correct if he had reversed the order and said that the magazine would die like a dog if they’d taken the articles out. These were crucial in providing a cover and giving permission to the self-defined middle-class American male to indulge in consuming porn, an activity that had previously been defined as “low class.”

  One effective technique that Hefner employed to give Playboy an upmarket image was to develop the literary side of the magazine. For the first few years Playboy’s literary conten
t was chosen, usually, from the public domain, given the magazine’s limited cash reserves. However, as sales increased toward the end of 1956, Hefner employed Auguste Comte Spectorsky, formerly an editor at the New Yorker, to develop the literary side of the magazine. While Spectorsky did turn Playboy into a magazine that attracted the most respected of American writers, he constantly butted heads with Hefner as he became increasingly uncomfortable with the sexual content of the magazine, urging Hefner to put more money and effort into building the literary and lifestyle features. It seems that Spectorsky was not aware of the role that the literary side was to play in legitimizing Playboy and mistakenly assumed that Hefner’s main interest was in creating more of a literary magazine than a pornographic one.

  While the two factions fought over the content of the magazine, they were careful to construct in the magazine an ideal reader who bought Playboy for the articles, interviews, humor, and advice columns. If Spectorsky can be faulted, it is for believing in the image of the ideal reader that Playboy constructed. This ideal reader was, of course, the playboy. Although articles and editorials often made reference to the playboy who read Playboy, it was in the April 1956 issue that Hefner most clearly laid out his image of the ideal Playboy reader. “What is a playboy? Is he simply a wastrel, a ne’er-do-well, a fashionable bum? Far from it. He can be a sharp minded young business executive, a worker in the arts, a university professor, an architect or an engineer. He can be many things, provided he possesses a certain kind of view. He must see life not as a vale of tears, but as a happy time, he must take joy in his work, without regarding it as the end of all living; he must be an alert man, a man of taste, a man sensitive to pleasure, a man who—without acquiring the stigma of voluptuary or dilettante—can live life to the hilt. This is the sort of man we mean when we use the word playboy.”29

  The actual Playboy reader of the 1950s looked nothing like the playboy described above. As for being men of taste, most of the readers had grown up during a time of material deprivation and were not accustomed to high-level consumption. Thus, these men needed to be schooled in the ways of living “life to the hilt” and especially in how to spend money. Clearly, given the experiences of the older generation, these young men could not turn to their parents for guidance on how to spend their discretionary income. A new, modern teacher was needed and Hefner was only too willing to comply, providing an image to men of what constitutes a Playboy lifestyle. This meant the products offered by the magazine were to be of the highest quality: the short stories, the interviews with famous people, the cars, the alcohol, the clothes, the food, the advice about consumer items to buy—and, of course, the women.

  From the very first issue, pages and pages of editorial comment set out to “teach” readers what products to buy in order to become a playboy. In the early years, mainstream advertisers kept a distance from Playboy because of its pornographic content, so the products were discussed in articles rather than shown in advertisements. For example, the first issue presented a special feature on desk designs to inform the reader which desks made the best impressions. Arguing that big desks and heavy cabinets were depressing and old-fashioned, the editors suggest that the new, more sleek-looking desks told clients that “this executive and his firm are as up-to-date as tomorrow, know where they are going and will use the most modern methods to get there.”30 The comparison of the old with the “modern” was a standard theme in the early years of Playboy, and the reader was consistently told that a real playboy bought only modern lampshades, ties, clothes, and ice buckets (the Fiberg ice bucket being the one to “please any playboy”).31

  Playboy was not the only media product to sell the 1950s young adult an ideology of consumption. According to historian George Lipsitz, the main function of television in the 1950s was to provide “legitimation for transformations in values initiated by the new economic imperatives of postwar America.”32 One way to do this, according to Ernest Dichter, the marketing guru of the 1950s, was to demonstrate “that the hedonistic approach to life is a moral one, not an immoral one.”33 While Playboy was one of many media corporations to employ Dichter, it was one of a few whose clear aim was to turn the male into a consumer. Elaine May has argued that the 1950s was in general the period of the “expert,” where increasing numbers of people turned to professionals for advice on just about every aspect of life, from what to buy to how to prepare for a nuclear war.34 Playboy editors certainly played the role of expert, telling readers “what to wear, eat, drink, read and drive, how to furnish their homes and listen to music, which nightclubs, restaurants, plays and films to attend, what equipment to own.”35

  However, as with all advertising, the actual product on offer was not the commodity being advertised but rather the fantasy of transformation that this product promised to bring to the consumer’s life. The high-quality products shown in Playboy would transform the reader into a “playboy” who could then have the real prize: all the high-quality women he wanted—just like the ones who populated the magazine. The women in the Playboy pictorials were designed to be “teasers,” demonstrating to the reader what he could have if he adopted the Playboy lifestyle of high-level consumption. In an interview, Hefner revealed this strategy of sexualizing consumption when he explained: “Playboy is a combination of sex . . . and status . . . the sex actually includes not only the Playmate and the cartoons and the jokes which describe boy-girl situations, but goes right down in all the service features.”36

  Hefner, by sexualizing consumption, provided an extremely hospitable environment for advertisers looking to expand markets in the postwar boom. By the end of 1955, advertisers had overcome their initial fear of advertising in a “men’s entertainment” magazine and were, according to Weyr, “clamoring to buy.”37 During the 1950s and 1960s, Playboy continued to increase its readership and its advertising revenue, and by the late 1960s the circulation figures reached an all-time high of 4.5 million. An article in Business Week in 1969 entitled “Playboy Puts a Glint in the Admen’s Eyes” discussed the enormous popularity of Playboy magazine with advertisers, quoting a media man at J. Walter Thompson Company, the world’s largest advertising agency at the time, saying that years ago none of their clients would have touched Playboy but “today, it’s a routine buy.” The magazine then informed its readers that “last year JWT expenditure in the magazine increased 70%.”38

  Despite the increased advertising revenue that Playboy enjoyed well into the 1960s, its relationship with advertisers was stormy. The main reason for this was Playboy’s somewhat split personality as both a lifestyle magazine and a porn publication. According to Weyr, the advertisers liked Playboy’s readership (mostly white, college-educated, upwardly mobile men) yet disliked its sexual content for fear of being associated with a sleazy porn magazine. In the early years, Hefner and his major associates regularly flew to New York for emergency meetings with advertisers whose clients felt that the pictorials or stories had become too explicit.39 Many of these meetings ended in a promise from the Playboy staff to limit the overt sexual content and no revenue was lost. One such battle occurred over a story by Calder Willingham that appeared in the July 1962 issue. Called “Bus Story,” it focuses on the rape of a seventeen-year-old girl by an older man. However, as in much of pornography, the story is written in a way that sexualizes the brutality: “There are times to be tender and times to be just a little rough. This was a time to be just a little rough. Left forearm heavily across her breasts and left hand gripping her shoulder so hard she winced, Harry used his knees like a wedge, grey eyes hypnotic above her. ‘Open your legs,’ he said in a cold, hard and vicious tone. Lips apart and eyes empty with shock, the girl did as she was told. A moment later, hands limp on his shoulders, a gasp came from her. Then another gasp.”40 According to Weyr, a number of companies, including Ford Motor, threatened to cancel contracts with Playboy and a number of newsstand wholesalers refused to carry the July issue. Fear of losing the advertisers prompted Hefner to write a letter of apology t
o all the major corporations who advertised in the July issue, and he offered to meet personally with their representatives.41 This kind of economic power meant that advertisers policed (and continue to police) the sexual content of Playboy. Thus, built into the magazine was a conflict between the need to attract advertising revenue and the need to keep readers interested by publishing sexual content.

  When there was no competition from other magazines, keeping readers was relatively easy since their only other option was the poorly produced, down-market variety of pornography, which certainly did not offer the reader a “playboy” image of himself. However, as the pornography market began to develop, other magazines adopted the Playboy formula. Chief among these competitors was Penthouse, a magazine that specifically aimed to replace Playboy as the best-selling pornography magazine in the country. The competition between Playboy and Penthouse that took place in the early 1970s not only hurt Playboy financially, it also changed the mainstream print pornography industry by pushing the limits of what was deemed acceptable, both legally and culturally.

  Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler Go to War The first hint that Playboy had some serious competition came in 1969 when full-page ads appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times showing the Playboy bunny caught in the crosshairs of a rifle. The caption read, “We’re going rabbit hunting.” The ads were for Penthouse magazine, which would be on the newsstands later that year. According to Miller, the news was at first greeted with some amusement by the Playboy staff, since by then the magazine’s circulation had reached 4,500,000 a month.42

  Bob Guccione, editor-publisher of Penthouse magazine, aimed to compete with Playboy by copying its format of offering both a literary and lifestyle side while making the pictorials more sexually explicit. He did this by forgoing advertising revenue in the short term, planning to draw in the advertisers after he had put Playboy out of business. In a Newsweek article on Penthouse, London-based Guccione was quoted as saying, “I’m not coming to America to be number No. 2 . . . in five years, Playboy and Penthouse will be locked in a toe-to-toe competition.”43