Abstract:
In this podcast, the authors describe the history of Playboy Magazine, in order to track larger patterns in the history of American pornographic magazines from the 19th century through the late 1970s. They examine both primary and secondary sources to argue that the history of Playboy is centered around a dialectical relationship in which the pornography industry and American society are always and at once informing and influencing each other. In doing so, they find that Playboy arose within an emerging sexual consumption culture and used its influence to shape a new, more debonair masculinity. However, wrapped up in this vision of a new masculinity remained the same antiquated subjugation of women’s bodies, which proved a point of contention with feminists, most blatantly, in the era of the Sex Wars. Additionally, the authors find that, although Playboy successfully evaded any ruinous legal or social sanctions during the Sex Wars, it was the introduction of personal cameras and recording devices that ultimately rendered the magazine irrelevant within the pornography industry. Hence, the podcast ends with a brief discussion of what it means when America’s first pornographic magazine is no longer visibly pornographic.
Author bios:
Maggie Bell is a soon-to-be graduate of Grinnell College, with a degree in sociology and linguistics. While not a major in history, she is drawn to the discipline because she believes that the human experience is connected by time. Hence, in order to understand ourselves and to shape our future society, she argues that we must know and learn from our past. Moreover, Maggie is particularly drawn to the history of sexuality because she’s always been good at talking about things that you’re not supposed to say aloud. For this project, she focuses on pornography because, by providing visual representations of sex acts, the sources take a lot of the guessing out of the work and help us to understand the social meanings of historical sex. When she’s not digging up America’s dirty secrets, you can find her binge-watching Netflix in bed, running among cornfields, forcing her partner to take selfies with her, or buying bougie things that she doesn’t need. She takes her coffee cold and dark, with cream and sugar.
Noah Herbin is a third year student at Grinnell College, currently majoring in History with a concentration in technology. Although he has taken many history classes during his time at Grinnell, he was particularly drawn to the History of American Sexuality because it is a topic that has been, historically, taboo. Reflecting on his high school education, he states, “Baby making was not exactly covered in the average AP history course. Presumably the great people of history went back to their homes after some great history making and had some great sex, but most classes don’t discuss that.” He became interested in this project on the history of American pornography because he finds porn a fascinating topic that should stimulate the modern historian’s sense of curiosity, not just his anatomy. Typically, you can find Noah reading history and fantasy books, pumping iron at the gym, eating food that isn’t the best for him, and viewing magazines that could be considered fine primary sources for this project.
Hameed Weaver is a broke soon-to-be graduate of Grinnell College. During his four years here, he’s accumulated a lot of debt while studying French. Outside of la salle de classe, Hameed is playing soccer, performing improv, or making music in his room. Post-Grinnell, Hameed aspires to be a world-renowned producer and DJ. He took this course on the History of American Sex because he couldn’t get into Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, but this class touches on many of the themes taught in intro to GWSS (only in a lot sexier manner). In this project, Hameed discusses the boom in sexual consumption and the broader image of Playboy as a magazine and lifestyle.
Listen to our podcast below:
Credits:
We want to thank Gina Donovan for her guidance and review of our short podcast assignment, which helped build the skills necessary for this one. Additionally, we appreciate the comments and critique from our classmates, who review a short clip of this project in class during its initial recording phase. Finally, we could not have done this work without the daily inspiration, consideration, and guidance of Professor Carolyn Herbst Lewis. She’s made us better historians and better humans.
Bibliography
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Beschloss, Michael. “The Polaroid Swinger: Changing the Market in an Instant.” The New York Times. July 02, 2015. Accessed April 30, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/upshot/the-polaroid-swinger-changing-the-market-in-an-instant.html.
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Douglas, Carol Anne. “Pornography: The Meese Report.” Off Our Backs 16, 8 (1986): 4-5.
Escoffier, Jeffrey. “Sex in the Seventies: Gay Porn Cinema as an Archive for the History of American Sexuality.” Journal Of The History Of Sexuality 26, no. 1 (2017): 88-113. Historical Abstracts with Full Text, EBSCOhost (accessed March 19, 2017).
Gershon, Livia. “How Magazines Created A New Culture of Manhood.” JSTOR Daily, April 5, 2017. https://daily.jstor.org/how-magazines-created-a-new-culture-of-manhood/.
Gilfoyle, Timothy J. “Prostitutes in History: From Parables of Pornography to Metaphors of Modernity.” The American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (1999): 117-41. doi:10.2307/2650183.
Hessinger, Rodney. Review of Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York, by Donna Dennis. Journal of the Early Republic 30, 3 (2010): 485-487. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/390629.
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Johnson, David. “Physique Pioneers: The Politics of 1960s Gay Consumer Culture.” Journal of Social History 43, 4 (2010): 867-891.
Jones, Melissa J. “Spectacular Impotence: Or, Things That Hardly Ever Happen in the Critical History of Pornography.” In Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England, edited by Bromley James M. and Stockton Will, by Traub Valerie, 89-110. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. (citation?)
Lindgren, James. “Defining Pornography.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 141, No. 4 (1993): 1153-1275.
Lubey, Kathleen. “Making Pornography, 1749-1968: The History of The History of the Human Heart.” Elh 82, no. 3 (2015): 897-935. Historical Abstracts with Full Text, EBSCOhost (accessed March 19, 2017).
Lubin, Gus. “There’s A Staggering Conspiracy Behind The Rise Of Consumer Culture.” Business Insider, February 23, 2013. http://www.businessinsider.com/birth-of-consumer-culture-2013-2.
McBride, Andrew. “The Sex Wars, 1970s to 1980s.” Outhistory, 2008. http://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/lesbians-20th-century/sex-wars.
Pitzulo, Carrie. “The Battle in Every Man’s Bed: “Playboy” and the Fiery Feminists.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 2 (2008): 259-89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30114220.
“Playboy Channel Sign-off June 1985”. Filmed June 1985. YouTube video, 4:00 minutes. Posted February 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iqb5dCQnWtw.
Ramos, Carey R. “The Betamax Case: Accommodating Public Access and Economic Incentive in Copyright Law.” Stanford Law Review 31, no. 2 (1979): 243-63. doi:10.2307/1228556.
Rooks, Noliwe M. “Scattered Pages: Magazines, Sex, and the Culture of Migration.” In Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture That Made Them, 1-24. Rutgers University Press, 2004. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hj55m.5.
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Transcript:
Noah: Playboy and Society by Noah Herbin, Maggie Bell, and Hameed Weaver. Produced on the eighth of May, 2017, in the JRC recording room.
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Maggie: When asked to define “hard-core pornography” in the 1964 Supreme Court case Jacobellis vs Ohio, Justice Potter Stewart declared, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand… But I know it when I see it” (Andrews 2012, 457). Yeah, me too, Stewart. But the problem with this thinking is that, in order for the courts and, (I don’t know, say…) historians to understand the ways in which pornography has and continues to impact our society, we need to have some mutual conceptual understanding of what it is. So, in order to create this shared meaning, we’re focusing our conversation today on perhaps the most widely-known and widely-contested pornographic source in American culture: Playboy Magazine. While we recognize that there’s more to this magazine than meets the eye (literally), it’s the sexualized and intermittently erotic images of women that have caught the eyes of American men, feminists, and courts for the past 60 years. Consequently, in the next few minutes we’re outlining the history of Playboy, from its emergence to the struggles over obscenity during the Sex Wars and finally its collision with the technological revolution, in order to demonstrate how the history of Playboy is centered around a dialectical relationship in which the pornography industry and American culture are always and at once informing and influencing each other.
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As media strategist, writer, and LGBTQ activist Jeffrey Escoffier (2017) writes, because there’s such scarce documentation as to the nature and social meanings of specific sexual acts, we end up knowing a little about historical sexuality and even less about historical sex (96). Hence, pornography is essential to the history of sex and sexuality because it provides us with physical representations of sex acts. Now, we know pornography existed before Playboy, but author and professor of English Kathleen Lubey (2015) points out that it also existed before “pornography”, as a genre, was established (900). While it likely dates back further, pornography is most widely recognized by historians as having emerged in the 19th century. According to scholars of literature such as Walter Kendrick and Melissa Jones, pornographic novels began as backlash against “an increasingly polite and increasingly discursive society” (as cited in Jones 2013, 89).
Moreover, as historians Patricia Cohen, Timothy Gilfoyle, and Helen Horowitz describe in their book The Flash Press, it was at this time that men’s weeklies began popping up in New York City, filled with, among other material, “a titillating brew of gossip about prostitutes” aimed at helping men of all ages to navigate “the new world of unrestricted pleasure and commercialized leisure in the city” (Cohen et al. 2008, 1). Needless to say, Anthony Comstock jumped right on the weeklies publishing and worked with moral reformers to shut the industry down, as evidenced in the famous Comstock Law. However, as Professor of Legal History at Rutgers University Donna Dennis argues in her book Licentious Gotham, the crackdown on obscenity only made people want the pornographic weeklies more, and the flash press became a vital part of the increasingly commercialized print industry in the late 1800s and 1900s, creating a social context conducive to the creation of Playboy Magazine in the mid-20th century (Hessinger 2010, 485).
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Hameed: From its inception, Playboy was the product of a larger social trend of the increasing consumer culture in American society. As historian of US politics and culture David Johnson (2010) writes, “the importance of individuals’ relationships to consumer goods as a key to understanding their sense of self, community, and even national identity” can be traced as far back as American colonialism (868). However, as senior correspondent for Business Insider Gus Lubin (2013) adds, it was in response to the threat of overproduction in the post-WWI era that corporations began developing conscious marketing strategies aimed at shifting American consumption culture from one based on need to one based on desire. This strategy became even more essential to the post-WWII economy and, when paired with the growing interest in sexual consumption culture, created a social context perfect for the founding of Playboy in 1953. Hence, the greatest evidence of society’s influence upon Playboy is that it enabled its very formation, and from a humble $1,000 loan from his mother, Hugh Hefner was able to build a multi-million dollar brand and international cultural phenomenon.
However, in combining erotic imagery with literature, social commentary, and in-depth interviews with prominent American figures, Playboy has also played a significant role in shaping modern sexuality, pornography, and most notably, definitions of masculinity and femininity. Playboy, along with similar magazines such as Penthouse, evolved alongside and highly influenced cultural perceptions of proper gender roles. For example, in “How Magazines Created a New Culture of Manhood”, Livia Gershon (2017) describes how:
In the nineteenth century, middle-class American manhood meant, above all else, the ability to work, earn, and participate in the public sphere. The home had become a feminine place for consumption and childrearing, while men’s prescribed role was out in the world, providing for his family. That changed in the mid-twentieth century. And, as Bill Osgerby writes, ‘nothing better captures the new ideal of masculine consumption better than men’s magazines.’
The creation of men’s magazines helped form the “new man”, a man who considered the home as masculine of a space as the outside world. Hefner, in describing his lifestyle, wrote “we plan [on] 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, Nietzche, jazz, sex” (as cited in Gershon 2017). And as we can see from the wild popularity of Playboy, many men agreed.
In other words, Playboy didn’t just sell nudity to American society, it sold a lifestyle, and an alternative notion of masculinity at that. However, wrapped up in that vision of a new masculinity remained the same antiquated subjugation of women’s bodies, which proved a point of contention with feminists, most blatantly, in the era of the Sex Wars.
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Maggie: According to sociologist and Professor of Law at Northwestern University James Lindgren (1993), “the debate over pornography has revolved around three issues: (1) whether pornography causes harm, (2) whether pornography has been adequately defined; (3) whether pornography should be prohibited even if it’s harmful and definable” (1218). With that in mind, I argue that the Sex Wars of the late 1970s and 1980s represent the pivotal moment in the history of pornography, because they are where these three issues collide.
In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan commissioned Attorney General Edwin Meese to conduct an investigation into the impact of pornography on the American public, specifically in regards to women, in order to decide whether it was harmful and should be banned from public consumption. Although pornography had been a topic of debate across American society for over a century, it was at this point that an ideological divide split American feminists, which led to some pretty unlikely alliances. On one side, the leaders of the pro-sex feminist movement, like Carol Queen and Gayle Rubin, collaborated with the male-dominated sex industry in order to fight, what they believed to be, the conservative bias of the Meese Report (Jakobsen 1995, 137). Their motivation was vastly different, yet their goal of preserving the legal ability to produce porn was the same. Whereas the sex positivists battled to protect freedom of sexual expression, the leaders of the sex industry, such as Playboy Magazine founder, owner, and publisher Hugh Hefner, sought to protect their economic interests.
However, this seemingly simple explanation for Hefner’s involvement is complicated by his personal politics, which proved to be quite progressive years before the peak of the Sex Wars. Hefner once said, “I was a feminist before there was such a thing as feminism. That’s a part of the history very few people know” (Pitzulo 2008, 259). Okay… we’ll need to dissect that comment more fully in an entirely different podcast, but evidence shows that he kind of did do some feminist-y things. For example, according to historian Carrie Pitzulo (2008), “the Playboy Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the magazine… contributed thousands of dollars to abortion rights organizations before Roe v. Wade overturned antiabortion laws in the United States… [and it] provided the [ACLU] with funds for its work on women’s rights and helped fund day-care centers for working mothers” (259-260). In other words, the history of Playboy, in terms of gender politics, is a lot more complicated than we allow ourselves to believe.
On the other hand… Playboy has perpetuated many, arguably, degrading images of women, which didn’t go unnoticed during the Sex Wars. Another surprising coalition was that built between leaders of the antiviolence feminist movement, like radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, and leaders of the conservative Christian movement, such as Ardeth Kapp and June Griffin (Jakobsen 1995, 133). This camp argued that all pornography, in every instance, is both obscene and detrimental to the well-being of not only the women performing it, but also to that of the men consuming it because they internalize the “misogynistic portrayals of women” in the pornographic media” (McBride 2008).
The Sex Wars reveal the central theme in the history of pornography and, more specifically, Playboy, which is that it is shaped by the dialogue and interaction between the porn industry and American society at large. The Meese Report is evidence in and of itself that pornography had an influence tangible enough in society to warrant the attention of the highest branch of government. At the same time, Playboy’s history was altered by the fact that prescriptive societal morals and the American government were threatening the future of the porn industry. When this happened, Playboy fought back. For example, in a 1986 article from Off Our Backs, the longest surviving feminist newsjournal in the United States, author Carol Anne Douglas explains how Playboy teamed up with both Penthouse and the Magazine Publishers Association to sue the Meese Commission, which had essentially blackmailed stores into removing these magazines from their shelves (Douglas 1986, 4). Interestingly, Playboy also sued for the commission to retract its classification of the magazine as “pornography”, which likely served as a means for retaining some level of integrity and avoiding the regulations laid out in the report (ibid.).
While the debate got hot and heavy for a while, the force of the pro-sex movement, along with the growing commercialization of sex in advertisements for almost every American industry, slowly extinguished the flame of the Meese Report and Playboy continued to flourish. But it wasn’t done fighting, because a technological revolution was on its way into American society, and it would prove to be an even greater threat to Playboy than the federal investigation spurred by the Sex Wars. It may even prove to be Playboy’s downfall.
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Noah: Although Playboy was able to shrug off any form of legal punishment, they were not able to fend off increasing irrelevance. The fact of the matter is, as the late 70’s rolled along into the 80’s and 90’s, people stopped buying print Playboys. As Jonathan Coopersmith (1994), a historian and professor currently working at Texas A&M describes in his essay “Pornography, Technology, and Progress”, “the average monthly circulation of the three main ‘men’s magazines’—Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler—gradually declined from a 1976 peak of nearly 12 million to 4.7 million copies in 1996” (100). Naturally then, we must ask, “why is this?” Did everybody just decide to stop viewing porn? Highly doubtful. The fact is, where the Sex Wars failed, the march of technology’s progress succeeded. Over the course of the late 20th century, various recording and broadcasting technologies matured, allowing a new, more amateur-driven video porn industry to emerge. Coopersmith (1994) continues, “In an example of the true démocratisation of technology, the development of the Polaroid instant camera and the camcorder allowed people to produce their own pornography free from anyone else seeing” (103). Although the first Polaroid camera was unveiled in 1948, it was both bulky and prohibit expense; a technology not yet ready for the consumer. But in 1965, as Michael Beschloss (2017) describes in “The Polaroid Swinger: Changing the Market in an Instant”, “In the summer of 1965, first in Canada, then in the United States, Polaroid made a lunge for the mass market… The lightweight (21 ounces), fixed-focus Swinger was intended to be easy to use. You looked into the viewfinder, turned a red knob, clicked the shutter as soon as you saw the word “YES” and then zipped off your finished black-and-white picture”. The Swinger was cheap, priced at only 19.99, and easy to use, it was an instant success.
But as might be inferred from the Swinger’s name, it was not just used as a camera to take pictures at the beach. It catered to an entirely new market, Amateur Porn. Playboy’s cameramen could afford incredibly expensive cameras, but the Swinger allowed the average couple to record their own sexual acts, both cheaply and discretely. No longer would amateur porn makers have to face the embarrassment of taking their erotic pictures down to the local pharmacy to get developed. The invention of the portable camcorder in 1982 only increased this phenomena. Porn was no longer an exclusive product of big corporations, such as Playboy. With these cheap recording technologies, anybody could produce their own porn. Coopersmith (1994) describes how “In 1978, Fortune writer James Cook claimed that camcorder manufacturers like to think that [camcorders] will be used to enable people to watch more cultural and sports events. [laughing] They are only kidding themselves. It is an open secret that the biggest market is [visual sex]” (107). With these products, anybody could produce porn. But according to Coopersmith (1994) it really seems like everybody was producing porn. He writes, “7852 new pornographic films appeared in 1996 compared with 471 Hollywood films” (102). We owe the standardization of Super 8 film used by camcorders to the amateur porn industry, a market that was certainly booming!
But the march of technology did not only change the nature of porn production. It also radically changed the way that individuals consumed porn. Before the 70’s, there were for the most part two ways that one could consume porn: through print media such as Playboy or in public pornographic theatres. Pornographic theatres served an important niche — a hotspot for engaging in sexual-encounters, but Coopersmith (1994) shows how “by the late 1970s, however, the film industry could see that cable TV and video cassettes were the wave of the future. These were the first communication technologies that changed the world of pornography” (102). People could now consume video porn in the privacy of their own homes, either on TV or VCR. TV porn was for the most part still dominated by the big porn industry. But VCR porn was much more inclusive and profitable for amateur producers and the middleman. Coopersmith (1994) describes how “Pornography provided the profits that enticed stores to offer video cassettes… According to a 1986 Merrill Lynch study, X-rated tapes constituted over half of all sales of pre-recorded tapes in the late 1970s” (Coopersmith 1994, 105). VCR porn proved to be quite the market force; demand was so high that it actually influenced the dominant form of video recording.
Remember Betamax? No? That’s because of video porn. During the late 1970’s, a unique market opportunity presented itself for two different video technologies: VHS and Betamax. According to Carey R. Ramos (1979) in “The Betamax Case: Accommodating Public Access and Economic Incentive in Copyright Law”, “The Betamax represents a unique technology that poses novel legal problems. The essence of that technology is the ability of the owner to transcend the time constraints of the television programming schedule by viewing a particular broadcast at nonscheduled times” (245). With Betamax or VHS, people could not only view video porn in the comfort of their own homes, but could also watch a specific video at any time they wanted. Sony, the owner of Betamax decided to disallow Porn recording; VHS on the other hand welcomed it. Ultimately in large part due to this, Betamax went the way of the Dodo. But just as camcorders and VHS led to the decline of print porn such as Playboy, so too has the rise of internet porn led to the decline of physical media porn sales.
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Today, we live in the mature epoch of the internet age. Porn of any genre is just one click away. Ultimately, in a bid to stay relevant Playboy has come full circle. In 2015, Playboy the original creator of “nudie mags”, announced that they would take all nudity out of their magazines. Finally, the desperate cry of “I only read it for the articles” might hold a grain of truth.
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