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"Pitzulo, Carrie"
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The Battle in Every Man's Bed: \Playboy\ and the Fiery Feminists
In 1962 journalist and future feminist leader Gloria Steinem went undercover to work briefly at the Playboy Club in Chicago as a \"bunny\" waitress.2 Writing for Show magazine, she claimed poor working conditions and sexual harassment of women. [...] the Playboy Foundation provided the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) with funds for its work on women's rights and helped fund day-care centers for working mothers, all indications that Playboy's gender politics, while complex and contradictory, were much more woman friendly than previous historical accounts have acknowledged.
Journal Article
Sexidemic: A Cultural History of Sex in America
In spite of years of established scholarship on the subject, and contradicting his own secondary source references, Samuel asserts that his is the \"first real cultural history of sexuality in the United States since the end of World War II, filling a large gap,\" and he expresses his surprise that \"a dedicated cultural history of sexuality in America over the past two-thirds of a century has yet to be published\" (2). Failing to address race or class at all, Samuel also chooses to leave LGBTQ history out of his definition of \"sex in America\": \"While I frequently cross paths with gay and lesbian culture, the topic is obviously too expansive to fully accommodate in this book, and readers would be better served by consulting one of the many books in the burgeoning field of what is sometimes called 'queer studies'\" (13).
Book Review
Bachelors and bunnies: “Playboy” magazine and modern heterosexuality, 1953–1973
This dissertation explores the ways in which Playboy magazine confronted—and contributed to—changing notions of gender and heterosexuality in the postwar years. This work reconsiders Playboy 's treatment of womanhood, feminism, monogamy and romance, and its idealization of straight masculinity through consumerism. While acknowledging the traditional feminist critique of the magazine, this dissertation argues that Playboy also served as a progressive vehicle for the re-negotiation of gender and sexuality amidst an era of tumultuous change. This work presents new material drawn from unprecedented access to the Playboy company archives, as well as oral histories conducted with Hugh Hefner, top Playboy editors and former Playmates. Bachelors and Bunnies directly confronts the most blatantly sexist elements of the magazine, demonstrating that if one finds fault with Playboy's treatment of women, it should primarily be for some of its early text, rather than for its centerfolds. But in contrast, this work also shows that Playboy revealed a competing sexual morality system in its readers' letter columns, which promoted a consistently compassionate and equitable view of relationships, and insisted upon tolerance for difference—including homosexuality—and a rejection of the double standard. Beyond romance, this dissertation demonstrates that consumerism was crucial to Playboy 's construction of ideal masculinity. From its first issues, Playboy acted as a lifestyle guide for the modern male, focusing on fashion, cooking and decorating. To compliment the consuming bachelor, the centerfold Playmates, portrayed as average, all-American girls who enjoyed their sexuality, challenged the Madonna/whore dichotomy that reigned in American popular culture and thus expanded upon notions of acceptable female sexuality. Finally, Bachelors and Bunnies explores Hefner's relationship to the feminist movement of the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, and ultimately expands our understanding of pop culture and sexuality in the postwar years.
Dissertation