From Playboy Penthouse to High-Rise Playboy: the Bachelor's Evolution by Sally Colwell

96 From Playboy Penthouse to High-Rise Playboy: The Bachelor’s Evolution by Sally Colwell In “Te Lair of the Bachelor,” George Wagner Wagner reads Playboy’s imagined interi- reads Playboy-commissioned designs for a se- ors as elaborate woman-traps: spatial ofspring ries of “masculine” domestic interiors. Playboy, resulting from the cross between technology and says Wagner, “was always dependent on the male sexual predation. According to commen- spatialization of the lifestyle imagined in its taries accompanying artist’s renderings of these pages” (195); the architectural drawings it pub- interiors, each functions as an engine designed lished function as a means of “imagining sites to aid the bachelor in his pursuit, capture, and for the Playboy lifestyle” (198). Tese plans— subduction of women. Te magazine’s exegesis renderings of fantastic spaces designed to meet emphasizes the difculty of the hunt, and the the needs of the magazine’s equally fantastic skill the wily bachelor must bring to bear upon bachelor—appeared in Playboy between 1956 it; its analysis of the spaces it imagines focuses and 1970. Wagner notes that each space sig- on the helpful features each prospective trap nalled by the Playboy foor plans, architectural profers. As a result of this emphasis on the elevations, and commentaries exists only as an methods and mechanics of the capture of wom- immaterial, speculative structure;1 he notes as en, the commentaries Wagner analyses ofer no well the connection between the spatial fantasy clues regarding the method by which either the elaborated by the magazine and the capitalist bachelor or a species of mediating technology ideology both subtending and subtended by it. might eject a woman from the bachelor’s do- “Te bachelor,” writes Wagner, “lives completely mestic space.2 For example, Wagner notes that within the world of commodities and the mar- the description of the Playboy Penthouse Apart- ket” (202); his bachelor pad is both “an icon of ment jumps directly from the fnal moments of a liberated social position” as well as “of mate- seduction, as “[s]of mood music fows through rial acquisition” (204). Te bachelor consumes the room and the stars shine in the casements” gadgets, outftting his home with up-to-date, while the bachelor “snuggles down” with his lat- specialized technology, and all to a single end: est conquest, to his seduction of women. Issue 3: “Pop/Corn” 97 Te Word Hoard Bachelor’s Evolution the start of a new day, [when] the chime the domain of wife and family” (195). As evi- alarm sounds . : reaching lazily to the dence of these fears, Wagner cites Philip Wylie, control panel, you [the bachelor] press the who asserts (in his 1958 Playboy essay, “Te buttons for the kitchen circuits and immedi- Womanization of America”) that “America’s ately the raw bacon, eggs, bread and ground females [have] pushed and heckled their way cofee you did the right things with the night into every private male domain;” Wylie laments before . start their metamorphosis into what he labels “the encroaching ‘tafeta tide’— crisp bacon, eggs fried just right, and steam- the feminization of the suburban domestic ing fresh java. (201-02) realm”—that “[t]he American home, in short, is becoming a boudoir-kitchen-nursery, dreamed Wagner observes that “[t]he woman is never up by women, for women, and as if males did there in the morning, but the eggs and bacon not exist as males” (qtd. in Wagner 197-98). are” (202). Yet given the multiple controls in He describes this trend as “spatial and archi- place to ensure the woman does not leave— tectural emasculation,” announcing gloomily indeed, to compel her continued attendance on that in its wake, “[m]en have become spatial the bachelor—we must ask how it is possible expatriates” (qtd. in Wagner 198). As a correc- that the tenant of the Penthouse Apartment tive to this de-territorialization of an entire sex, fnds himself serving a mechanical breakfast for Playboy proposes within its pages the carving one. Apart from the heavily implied obvious, out of all-male (and all-man!) domestic spaces what occurs between the moments of snuggling in which the members of bachelor nation can down and of consuming crisp bacon? When, nestle mechanically down. Te bachelor “is fan- and how, does the woman leave? tasized as a free agent” whose home is not only Te missing description of her departure “a space of imagined liberation,” but also one represents a substantial lacuna in the catch- “in which technology serves as an extension of and-release program Playboy sets out, since the sexual desire” (199). bachelor’s status as such depends less on his If the space is to continue as a site of lib- ability to snare women than on his ability suc- eration, however, its mediating technologies cessfully to return them to the wild. Indeed, the must facilitate not only the gratifcation of the maintenance of his very manhood demands her bachelor’s sexual desire, but also his discon- exit: Wagner indicates that “the domestic fan- nection from others, especially women. It is tasies of Playboy are meant to compensate” for no surprise, then, that afer identifying desire a number of fears surrounding dominant cul- as the only “palpable condition” of Playboy’s tural constructions of domestic space (197)— architectural enterprise and enumerating both constructions situating a man’s home as “appro- the tangibles and intangibles afer which the priated” by women and children, taken over “as bachelor hankers,3 Wagner specifes the woman WH, Issue 3, 8 January 2015 Colwell 98 “who seems to want to bolt” as the item topping reasonably expect Gurley Brown’s text, then, the single man’s wish list (202). But since the to ofer advice to bolting women—pointers on fantasy of the Playboy apartment-as-seduction- how best to evade the bachelor’s clutches, per- prosthetic depends upon the continued (fan- haps. Tese expectations, however, are thor- tastic) existence of the free-agent bachelor, and oughly confounded: Gurley Brown encourages since the free-agent bachelor only remains so her female audience to facilitate rather than to if he can successfully avoid sustained connec- avoid male predation. She counsels her reader tion with women, the entire Playboy house of to think of herself as a “star sapphire” whose cards is ultimately dependent not on the bach- “apartment is [her] setting,” since “[a] beauti- elor’s desire for the woman who will bolt, but on ful apartment is a sure man-magnet” (qtd. in the bolting woman’s desire to fee. Te collec- Wagner 203). In Gurley Brown’s reading, preda- tive schematic constructed piecemeal by Play- tory seduction is what every unmarried woman boy over a decade and a half, then, signals that should encourage by setting herself up in her a particular construction of female rather than own apartment, since “if you are to be a glamor- male desire founds the entire enterprise. And, ous, sophisticated woman that exciting things unfortunately for the bachelor, at least one of happen to, you need an apartment, and you the supplementary texts Wagner cites suggests need to live in it alone!” (qtd. in Wagner 202). that the bolting woman—whose behaviour Like the exegetes of Playboy’s fantasy architec- must forcefully be shaped through coercion ture, Gurley Brown situates domestic space as a and electronics if our free-agent friend is fnally prosthetic to wield in the service of seduction. to bed her—is at least as fantastic a construction Her explicit advice to women, in the brief ex- as both the technologically-insulated bachelor cerpt of Sex and the Single Girl Wagner quotes, and his Playboy pad. is to facilitate that seduction on their own turf. As a counterpoint to Playboy’s disquisi- Her implicit counsel, however, suggests that any tions on the single man’s ideal domestic space, answer to the question, “Your place or mine?” Wagner ofers his readers Helen Gurley Brown’s will do: her text teaches women to snag men by Sex and the Single Girl (1962), in which the making men think they’ve done the snagging. soon-to-be editor of Cosmopolitan magazine Gurley Brown encourages the single girl to trap imagines the single woman’s ideal apartment. the bachelor by performing her own capture— Gurley Brown partially confrms the power she encourages women to occupy simultane- dynamic inherent in Playboy’s architectural ously both positions in the predator/prey bi- commentary when she advises her readers that nary. men “expect to corner you and gobble you up So what happens when Playboy bachelor like Little Red Riding Hood” (qtd. in Wagner encounters Cosmo girl on his turf rather than 203); seduction-as-predation, then, is Gurley hers? According to his literature, she will at- Brown’s as well as Playboy’s theme. We might tempt to avoid seduction by bolting; according “Pop/Corn” 99 Te Word Hoard Bachelor’s Evolution to hers, however, bolting would be silly. While season two episode, “World’s Greatest Couple,” his apartment may not be the optimum setting Barney grudgingly agrees to let his friend Lily for her “jewel,” it will nonetheless suit. In it, she stay with him for a few days, he informs her that is a glamorous, sophisticated woman in a glam- in his apartment, she is “in the heart of bach- orous, sophisticated place—a woman whose elor country. And, as a woman, you are an ille- magnet has attracted a man, and to whom ex- gal immigrant here. Now, you could try to apply citing things are about to happen! Surely, she for a sex visa, but that only lasts twelve hours— doesn’t wish to bolt .

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