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Consuming Liberation: Playgirl and the Strategic

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Consuming Liberation: Playgirl and the Strategic 1 Introduction: Centerfold Sexuality for Women The controversial 1993 PBS television adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s novel Tales of the City (1978), a fictional take on life in San Francisco in the 1970s, opens with its heroine, Mary Ann (Laura Linney), dropping in on an old high school friend, Connie Bradshaw (Parker Posey). Mary Ann is astonished at the swinging single lifestyle that Connie is leading in San Francisco. Connie’s apartment is littered with books such as More Joy of Sex and The Sensuous Woman, and sex magazines such as Playboy, Playgirl and the Playboy spin-off Oui. As the Bee Gees’ hit “Jive Talkin’” plays on the radio, Connie casually picks up a copy of Oui that describes a “co-ed bathhouse” with “the world’s cleanest orgy.”1 Mary Ann asks her if she has ever been to a bathhouse, to which Connie responds “no, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”2 The mere fact that Connie has access to this information is remarkable to Mary Ann. Along with the sexual self-help books, Connie also has an assortment of men’s and women’s lifestyle magazines on display on her coffee table. These items act as set pieces of a particular cultural moment but also mark Connie as a sexually “liberated” woman of the 1970s. Whether Connie ever plans to patronize the co-ed bathhouse or participate in an orgy, the open display of these magazines designates her as a woman “in the know,” a woman with sexual information and ample opportunity to act on it if she so chooses. The scene works to separate Connie’s character, a woman who left rural Ohio eight years ago, from Mary Ann, who just left Ohio and is fascinated with San Francisco but wary of the new sexual freedoms she finds there. We can also see from this scene that erotic lifestyle 1 “Episode One,” Tales of the City, DVD, directed by Alastair Reid (1993; Acorn Media, 1994). 2 Ibid. 2 magazines were part of a larger project; they were part of how Connie went about constructing her own “liberated” sexual identity through popular culture. While the Tales of the City mini-series is not an archival text, this scene does indicate how important the sex magazine was as a staple in women’s popular culture in the 1970s, becoming part of many women’s everyday lives. In addition, as a close examination of the editorial pages and marketing of such magazines reveals, Connie was the poster girl for the “playgirl”, a woman who craves fun in the form of sexual experience and is not shy about declaring so publically. This dissertation focuses on a virtually unexamined part of U.S. culture, the sex magazine for women. Until now, little has been written about these publications or the women who edited them. Indeed, Playgirl stands in stark contrast to Playboy in the amount and quality of critical attention it has received. Playboy, one of the most recognizable sex magazines for men, has long been the subject of popular media and academic assessments of its cultural meaning and influence. Most recently, the documentary Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, and Rebel (2009) imagines Playboy founder Hugh Hefner as a liberal icon who fought the government, feminists, and the religious right in the name of sexual freedom. The documentary even goes so far as to credit Hefner with helping to foster racial harmony by featuring African American musicians on his syndicated television show Playboy’s Penthouse (1959). Historian Elizabeth Fraterrigo offers a more critical assessment of Hefner’s influence in her book Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (2009). Fraterrigo writes that “Playboy magazine played a significant role in defining an alternative, often 3 controversial, and highly resonate version of the good life” for men.3 Her account echoes others in arguing that Hefner’s magazine was about much more than just naked flesh and that its editorial content set Playboy apart from other publications that offered photos of naked women. Fraterrigo writes that “the magazine actively engaged in a project of refashioning gender, often overtly, sometimes implicitly, for which nude pictures served as just one important element.”4 Playboy, according to Fraterrigo, presented a vision of a swinging single life for heterosexual men steeped in an “ethos of consumption.”5 Playboy served as an obvious model for Playgirl and other sex magazines for women such as Viva, Venus, and Foxylady, but these publications also differed from Playboy in significant ways. While they shared Playboy’s centerfold feature and its focus on lifestyle and consumption, the ways they “refashioned gender” and offered images of “the good life” for women set them apart from publications for men. Like Playboy, which helped men negotiate shifting gender roles in the post-World War II period, Playgirl and its competitors assisted women as they coped with the emergence of second- wave feminism in the 1970s. Sex magazines for women such as Playgirl and its competition offered women sexual information and presented fantasies of sexual agency and experience within the context of the feminist movement. This project argues that what these publications offered in the 1970s was an evolving narrative of sexual liberation that was intrinsically wedded to, and in constant conversation with, the women’s movement. Editors of sex magazines for women were negotiating what they 3 Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. 4 Ibid, 11. 5 Ibid, 7. 4 assumed to be the popular “center” of the movement at any given moment, strategically embracing and challenging it to serve their own marketing goals. What narratives of sexual liberation did these magazines offer to heterosexual women in the 1970s and how did they change over time? How did magazines such as Playgirl address women as consumers of sexual material? How did they imagine their audience through their rhetoric and marketing strategies? How did discourses of sexuality, sexual liberation, and gender equality outside these magazines influence each magazine’s content? Answers to these questions shed new light on women’s relationship to explicit imagery even as parts of the women’s movement organized against sexually explicit images they called pornography. Thus, this dissertation assumes that the fantasy world of sex magazines is never just about creating an imaginary world of images but is always firmly embedded in the social and historical realities outside the pages of the publication. Any attempt to prescribe liberation also delineates limits. A close examination of the editorial pages of these publications maps the complicated relationship Playgirl and its competitors had with the women’s movement and also reveals that sexual explicitness had a place among popular feminist representations in the early 1970s. In addition, this project examines woman-authored sex comics of same period (1970s), which also exhibited a remarkable level of sexual explicitness but narrated a vastly different version of sexual liberation for women, one closely associated with the women’s health movement. Each publication offered an alternative form of feminism, and each tapped into the energy and promise of the sexual revolution and the women’s movement and translated both into narratives of sexual liberation for women in the 1970s. The limits of liberation and sexual agency for women 5 were explored in the 1970s, and one of the key locations this exploration took place was in sex magazines for women and in woman-authored underground comics. Contrasting these two types of publications, reveals how the rhetoric of revolution and liberation entered commercial culture as well as its counterculture. These publications offer two very distinct cultural locations where women’s sexual pleasure was negotiated in the public sphere, and they help make visible the possibilities and inevitable limitations of women’s experience of pleasure and agency. Finally, they reflect the complicated relationship women had with sexuality and sexually explicit material at a time of promise and tumult in U. S. women’s history. Both sex magazines for women and underground comics were products not just of the women’s movement, but also a more permissive sexual culture. The 1970s and early 1980s are often referred to as the “golden age” of pornography, a time when both print and film pornography expanded into new markets in a more liberal cultural and legal climate in the United States. As pornographic representations grew more explicit, the industry became an increasingly visible part of U.S. culture. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the multitude of pornographic magazines that filled magazine racks and newsstands early in the decade. Erotic lifestyle magazines, called “sex” or “skin” magazines at the time, were certainly not new inventions—Playboy had been around for nearly two decades by the early 1970s—but their prevalence as a part of the American cultural landscape was never greater. Beginning in the early 1970s, Playboy faced stiff competition from more explicit start-ups such as Penthouse and Hustler, and in 1973 the publishing industry introduced the first sex magazine for women, Playgirl. In the early 1970s, magazines were putting a major emphasis on the “new” role of women in society 6 and in sexuality in particular.6 The Columbia Journalism Review reported in 1974 that “magazines, more than the daily press, mirror the mood, the mores, and the faddish tastes of society.”7 The fastest growing faddish magazines of the year, the publication reported, were “the nudity books,” the newcomer Playgirl among them.8 In the previous year, “treatment of sexual subjects became even more explicit,” the publication reported, “with such subjects as orgasms and erections becoming commonplace even in relatively restrained publications.”9 The movement towards more explicit nudity, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, might have a silver lining: “it may ultimately so satiate juveniles of all ages with photos of breasts and genitals that they will occasionally read and think of other matters.”10 Playgirl was launched during a period when sexual knowledge and experience for women, particularly within popular culture, became shorthand for female autonomy.
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