by Ariel Levy
An actress or a mother sure, but a lawyer or an executive not necessarily. Putting your tush on display is still not the best way to make partner or impress the board. The only career for which appearing in Playboy is a truly strategic move is a career in the sex industry. In How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Jenna Jameson writes, “Beginning with nude modeling is a nice way to ease into it.” Many women who appear in Internet or home video porn were “discovered” in Playboy. Playboy discourages this practice, and several former Playmates have been barred from the mansion after breaking the unofficial rule against appearing in pornography (never mind the fact that Playboy itself operates the soft-core Spice television network). Still, porn directors continue to use Playboy and Penthouse as casting catalogues. Women who appeared in Playboy have also been recruited to be live-in hookers in the Sultan of Brunei’s brother’s harem.
The more basic way Playboy undermines the female sexual liberation Hefner claims to promote is this: The women who do go into careers outside the sex industry will never be seen by the millions of men—and the growing number of women—who read Playboy as actresses or mothers or lawyers or executives; they will never be seen as themselves. They will only ever be seen spread out, in soft focus, wearing something slight and fluffy and smiling in that gentle, wet-lipped way that suggests they will be happy to take whatever is given to them. They are expressing that they are sexy only if sexy means obliging and well paid. If sexy means passionate or invested in one’s own fantasies and sexual proclivities, then the pictorials don’t quite do it. A model named Alex Arden, a former Penthouse cover girl, told interviewers from VH1:
When you get yourself into the really contortionist position that you’ve got to hold up and your back hurts and you’ve got to suck in your stomach, you’ve got to stick your hips out, you’ve got to arch your back and you’ve got to stick your butt out all at the same time and suck in and hold your breath, you don’t feel sexy. You feel pain. And you feel like you want to kill [the photographer].
The well-known nudie photographer Earl Miller, for his part, said, “Our job is to go out and bring ’em back alive or dead or whatever…we gotta get the picture.” Porn queen Jenna Jameson echoed Arden’s sentiment when she wrote about her early test shoots for mainstream men’s magazines: “I had to arch so hard that my lower back cramped. When I see those photos now, it seems obvious that sexy pout I thought I was giving the camera was just a poorly disguised grimace of pain.”
Doesn’t sound like something you would do for fun. There are some women who are probably genuinely aroused by the idea or the reality of being photographed naked. But I think we can safely assume that many more women appear in Playboy for the simple reason that they are paid to. Which is fine. But “because I was paid to” is not the same thing as “I’m taking control of my sexuality.”
To hear Hefner tell it, you would think Playboy was a veritable cornucopia of different models of sex appeal—handicapped! aging! buff! But they gave me a big stack of magazines to flip through and the only variety I saw was the kind of variety you get when you look at a wall of Barbie dolls. Some have darker hair (but most are blonde), some have an ethnic- or professional-themed costume, but they all look very distinctly poured from the same mold. Individuality is erased: It is not part of the formula. When Playboy’s Olympian pictorial was out, for example, if you logged on to Playboy.com you were presented with several boxes to click on for previews; the choices were “athletes,” “blondes,” and “brunettes.” It reminded me very much of shopping online for pants: “tweeds,” “stretch,” “jeans.”
Why can’t we be sexy and frisky and in control without being commodified? Why do you have to be in Playboy to express “I don’t think athleticism in women is at odds with being sexy?” If you really believed you were both sexy and athletic, wouldn’t it be enough to play your sport with your flawless body and your face gripped with passion in front of the eyes of the world? Rather than showing that we’re finally ready to think of “sexy” and “athletic” as mutually inclusive, the Olympian spread revealed how we still imagine these two traits need to be cobbled together: The athletes had to be taken out of context, the purposeful eyes-on-the-prize stare you see on the field had to be replaced with coquettish lash-batting, the fast-moving legs had to be splayed apart.
That women are now doing this to ourselves isn’t some kind of triumph, it’s depressing. Sexuality is inherent, it is a fundamental part of being human, and it is a lot more complicated than we seem to be willing to admit. Different things are attractive to different people and sexual tastes run wide and wild. Yet somehow, we have accepted as fact the myth that sexiness needs to be something divorced from the everyday experience of being ourselves.
Why have we bought into this? Since when? And how did this happen?
Raunch culture feels perhaps the most alien to aging hippies like my parents—they are all for free love, but none of this looks loving to them; it looks scary, louche, incomprehensible. And, in a way, the emergence of a woman-backed trash culture is a rebellion against their values of feminism, egalitarianism, and antimaterialism. But even though this new world of beer and babes feels foreign to sixties revolutionaries, it is actually also a repercussion of the very forces they put in motion—they are the ones who started this.
Two
The Future that
Never Happened
Susan Brownmiller was never big on making concessions. In 1976, shortly after she appeared on the cover of Time magazine as a woman of the year, an interviewer asked her about marriage. Brownmiller, one of the earliest, most articulate, and most involved members of the women’s liberation movement, replied, “I would like to be in close association with a man whose work I respect,” but said that it had not happened. “I am not willing to compromise,” she explained. “Other women are—their needs may be greater.”
She did not mean “compromise” in the contemporary sense of settling for a man with too little money or too much hair on his back. The struggle for women’s equality was the core of her life, and at that time feminists viewed marriage as an arrangement that usually corralled women back toward the subservient lives their mothers had lived, instead of forward into the glorious futures they imagined for their daughters. “It is a horrible truth,” Brownmiller told her interviewer, “but the one thing we know now, that men didn’t want us to know twenty, thirty, forty years ago is that it is not our fault. It is their fault.”
Brownmiller was a fine-featured brunette who had dropped out of Cornell and come to Manhattan to be an actress. She appeared in two off-Broadway performances, but ultimately the stage wasn’t for her—she didn’t want to play roles, she wanted to speak for herself. Activism within the women’s movement proved to be a far better outlet for her self-described “theatrical bravura” and “sense of radical drama.” A Brooklyn girl by origin, Brownmiller had always been a high achiever. “Being good at what was expected of me was one of my earliest projects,” she wrote in her 1984 best-seller, Femininity. “Excellence gave pride and stability to my childhood existence.” After she passed through “a stormy adolescence to a stormy maturity,” Brownmiller settled into an apartment in Greenwich Village and a career in journalism.
Brownmiller’s unshakable clarity of conviction drove her professional life as well as her romantic life. In the women’s movement, the two were inextricably linked—the personal was political. In a famous article called “Sisterhood Is Powerful: A member of the Women’s Liberation Movement explains what it’s all about,” which ran in the New York Times Magazine in 1970, Brownmiller wrote, “Women as a class have never subjugated another group; we have never marched off to wars of conquest in the name of the fatherland…those are the games men play. We see it differently. We want to be neither oppressor nor oppressed. The women’s revolution is the final revolution of them all.” Brownmiller wasn’t interested in tweaking the system already in place. “The goals of liberation go beyond a simple concept of equality,” she wr
ote. What Brownmiller and her radical sisters really wanted was a total transfiguration of society—politics, business, child-rearing, sex, romance, housework, entertainment, academics. And they really believed they would make that happen.
Though she would later admit, “I was not there at the beginning,” in the very first sentence of In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, Brownmiller actually got involved in women’s liberation quite early in the movement’s development. In September 1968, she attended her first meeting of the group that would become New York Radical Women. Like most of the other attendees, Brownmiller had an activist history; she had already spent two summers in Mississippi volunteering with the civil rights movement. But in the civil rights movement—as in the peace movement, as in the Students for a Democratic Society, as in the New Left in general—women played a supporting role. “Background, education, ideology and experience all primed the New Left women for equality. Yet their experience in the national movement was confusing, grating,” writes social historian Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. “Men sought them out, recruited them, took them seriously, honored their intelligence—then subtly demoted them to girlfriends, wives, note-takers, coffeemakers.” It didn’t help when Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael made his notorious comment to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: “The position of women in SNCC is prone.”
So women began to meet without men—as a sisterhood—for “consciousness-raising.” It was a technique they borrowed from Mao Tse-tung and the “speak bitterness” groups used to energize peasants during the Chinese revolution, which every good radical was reading about in William Hinton’s Fanshen, an account of rural villagers in Shanxi province absorbing the liberating message of communism and casting off the shackles of bourgeois hierarchy. Interest in feminism had already been invigorated in 1963, when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and subsequently founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). But the women attracted to consciousness-raising were a new breed. “Friedan, the mother of the movement, and the organization that recruited in her image were considered hopelessly bourgeois,” Brownmiller wrote. “NOW’s emphasis on legislative change left the radicals cold.” Friedan and her disciples had fought for succinct advancements, like the desegregation of the New York Times help-wanted ads, which were once arranged by gender to distinguish “women’s work” from real careers. But Brownmiller, characteristically, was seeking something more momentous and unwieldy: nothing less than the overthrow of the patriarchy, which had to start in the minds and bedrooms of Americans as well as the workplace—change from the inside out.
Brownmiller remembers the evening of January 22, 1973, after the Supreme Court handed down their ruling on Roe v. Wade and legalized abortion in this country, as the moment at which she felt the most optimistic about the movement’s success. “The momentum was extraordinary, and it culminated with that case,” she says, three decades later. “We had the feeling that every woman was listening to us. It was a wonderful feeling—that you had captured the attention of the nation. The Supreme Court could have said, You’re just these fringe women in combat boots. But they didn’t.”
After the ruling was announced, the vanguard of the women’s movement in New York City headed to the feminist restaurant Mother Courage on West Eleventh Street to celebrate their greatest victory to date. It was the same month Richard Nixon pulled the last U.S. troops out of Vietnam. It was only a few blocks away from the town house blown to bits by the Weathermen, a radical antiwar group that formed out of the ashes of what had been the country’s largest grassroots protest organization, Students for a Democratic Society. The Weathermen had accidentally exploded their own town house while developing bombs they intended to detonate at Fort Dix and other Establishment targets such as the U.S. Capitol building, which they successfully hit in the winter of 1971. Years later, former Weatherman Bill Ayers told documentarians Sam Green and Bill Siegel, “I was committed to being a part of what I thought was going to be a really serious and ongoing rebellion; upheaval that had the potential of not just ending the war, but of really overthrowing the Capitalist system and put [ting] in its place something much more humane.” Revolution was in the air and triumph seemed imminent.
Mother Courage was a former hole-in-the-wall luncheonette that partners Jill Ward and Dolores Alexander had gutted, decorated with feminist art, and furnished with plain wooden tables. The food, by all accounts, was edible. “We served a mix of Italian, French, American,” Alexander says. “I used to joke that it was Continental.” Mother Courage was a mediocre restaurant, but it was a cultural sensation. At that time, they were famous, with an international reputation as the place where feminists came to congregate. “We started the restaurant because it was a way to live feminism and be able to afford it,” says Alexander, who had also been the first executive director of NOW. “It was an overwhelming success. Everybody from all over the world came in. We had Kate Millet and Gloria Steinem and Susan Sontag…Friedan never came in, thank God, because we were feuding. But we had everyone. Everyone who was anyone.”
That night at Mother Courage, Susan Brownmiller had the veal, drank a lot of wine, and talked to everyone. “Those were glorious times,” she says. “We didn’t know abortion would be threatened for the next thirty years.”
“It was more than jubilant,” says Ward. “People just started streaming in. They wanted to rejoice with other women and the place was packed. It was electrifying, it gives me shivers even thinking about it.” It was a moment of sororal magic; a time when the shared struggle for women’s liberation seemed not only worthwhile but destined to succeed. “It was the type of boisterous excitement where you’re jumping up and down for joy,” Ward says. “Because it had been such a hard, long battle and everyone was involved either directly or tangentially—whether you were involved with NARAL or letter-writing or consciousness-raising groups, whatever it was. I think the abortion victory was the primary, pivotal moment.”
In little more than a decade, a great deal happened that would transform the lives of American women forever. The birth control pill was approved by the FDA in 1960. Congress passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, which made it illegal to pay a man more than a woman for doing the same job. The Civil Rights Act, passed in 1964, banned discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and religion and, among other things, made it illegal for businesses to reserve specific jobs for men or women or to fire a woman for getting pregnant. The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966, and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) formed in 1969. (Later, it became the National Abortion Rights Action League, which it remains.) The first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves was published in 1970 and became the quintessential sex guide for feminists and progressives. The landmark anthology Sisterhood is Powerful, edited by the feminist poet Robin Morgan, came out that same year. In 1972, the Supreme Court extended the right to birth control to unmarried people with their ruling in Eisenstadt v. Baird, and the Equal Rights Amendment passed both houses of Congress. (The ERA, which read “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex,” missed ratification by only three states ten years later.) Finally, in 1973, there was Roe.
Many of these events were counted as victories by two revolutionary movements, both of which had a tremendous impact on the reshaping of American womanhood: women’s liberation and the sexual revolution. In significant ways, these movements overlapped. Many of the same people were involved with both causes, and initially some of their key struggles were shared. But ultimately a schism would form between the two movements. And some of the same issues that drove them apart would likewise prove irreconcilably divisive within the women’s movement itself.
One of the fundamental initial goals of the women’s liberation movement was to advance women’s sexual pleasure and satisfaction. The first public articulation of this agenda came from Anne Koedt, a comrade of Susan Brownmil
ler’s at New York Radical Women, who published an essay called “The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm” in a mimeographed pamphlet of their writings that the group put out in 1968. They called it Notes from the First Year and sold it to women for fifty cents and to men for a dollar. “The vagina is not a highly sensitive area and is not physiologically constructed to achieve orgasm,” Koedt wrote. “We must begin to demand that if a certain sexual position or technique now defined as ‘standard’ is not mutually conducive to orgasm, then it should no longer be defined as standard.” At the time, it was a radical and deeply threatening declaration.
It was substantiated eight years later by the feminist social scientist Shere Hite in her best-seller The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality. Hite distributed 100,000 questionnaires asking women across the country detailed questions about their sexual practices and, in particular, about how they achieved orgasm. Seventy percent of the 3,019 women who responded said they could not have an orgasm from intercourse, which flew in the face of the teachings of Freud and the generally accepted assumption that missionary position intercourse constituted universally satisfying sex. It was a major blow to the male ego, not to mention the male penis. But the larger reimagining of sexual pleasure as a crucial part of life—one worth fighting for and talking about—and the sense that sexual freedom was ultimately political, were shared tenets of both the women’s movement and the sexual revolution.
Hugh Hefner, who introduced Playboy in 1953, was also trying to reimagine gender roles and influence sexual mores. We may have come to think of him as a glorified dirty old man, but back then Hefner had a cause. (Everyone did.) He was fighting “our ferocious antisexuality, our dark antieroticism,” as he told Look magazine in 1967. In addition to publishing Playboy—which Hefner thought was “like waving a flag of freedom, like screaming ‘rebellion’ under a dictatorship”—he funded court cases to challenge laws that hindered his vision of healthy sexuality.
