http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/3810991<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Transcript:<\/p>\n
Noah: <\/strong>Playboy and Society by Noah Herbin, Maggie Bell, and Hameed Weaver. Produced on the eighth of May, 2017, in the JRC recording room.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nMaggie:<\/strong> When asked to define \u201chard-core pornography\u201d in the 1964 Supreme Court case Jacobellis vs Ohio, Justice Potter Stewart declared, \u201cI shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand\u2026 But I know it when I see it\u201d (Andrews 2012, 457). Yeah, me too, Stewart. But the problem with this thinking is that, in order for the courts and, (I don\u2019t know, say\u2026) 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\u2019re focusing our conversation today on perhaps the most widely-known and widely-contested pornographic source in American culture: Playboy Magazine<\/em>. While we recognize that there\u2019s more to this magazine than meets the eye (literally), it\u2019s 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\u2019re 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 <\/em>is centered around a dialectical relationship in which the pornography industry and American culture are always and at once informing and influencing each other.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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As media strategist, writer, and LGBTQ activist Jeffrey Escoffier (2017) writes, because there\u2019s 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 \u201cpornography\u201d, 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<\/sup> century. According to scholars of literature such as Walter Kendrick and Melissa Jones, pornographic novels began as backlash against \u201can increasingly polite and increasingly discursive society\u201d (as cited in Jones 2013, 89).<\/p>\nMoreover, as historians Patricia Cohen, Timothy Gilfoyle, and Helen Horowitz describe in their book The Flash Press<\/em>, it was at this time that men\u2019s weeklies began popping up in New York City, filled with, among other material, \u201ca titillating brew of gossip about prostitutes\u201d aimed at helping men of all ages to navigate \u201cthe new world of unrestricted pleasure and commercialized leisure in the city\u201d (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<\/em>, 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<\/em> in the mid-20th century (Hessinger 2010, 485).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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Hameed:<\/strong> From its inception, Playboy<\/em> 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, \u201cthe importance of individuals\u2019 relationships to consumer goods as a key to understanding their sense of self, community, and even national identity\u201d 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<\/em> in 1953. Hence, the greatest evidence of society\u2019s influence upon Playboy<\/em> 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.<\/p>\nHowever, in combining erotic imagery with literature, social commentary, and in-depth interviews with prominent American figures, Playboy <\/em>has also played a significant role in shaping modern sexuality, pornography, and most notably, definitions of masculinity and femininity. Playboy<\/em>, along with similar magazines such as Penthouse<\/em>, evolved alongside and highly influenced cultural perceptions of proper gender roles. For example, in \u201cHow Magazines Created a New Culture of Manhood\u201d, Livia Gershon (2017) describes how:<\/p>\nIn 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\u2019s prescribed role was out in the world, providing for his family. That changed in the mid-twentieth century. And, as Bill Osgerby writes, \u2018nothing better captures the new ideal of masculine consumption better than men\u2019s magazines.\u2019<\/p>\n
The creation of men\u2019s magazines helped form the \u201cnew man\u201d, a man who considered the home as masculine of a space as the outside world. Hefner, in describing his lifestyle, wrote \u201cwe plan [on] spending most of our time inside. We like our apartment\u2026 We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d\u2019oeuvre 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\u201d (as cited in Gershon 2017). And as we can see from the wild popularity of Playboy<\/em>, many men agreed.<\/p>\nIn other words, Playboy<\/em> didn\u2019t 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\u2019s bodies, which proved a point of contention with feminists, most blatantly, in the era of the Sex Wars.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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Maggie:<\/strong> According to sociologist and Professor of Law at Northwestern University James Lindgren (1993), \u201cthe debate over pornography has revolved around three issues: (1) whether pornography causes harm, \u00a0(2) whether pornography has been adequately defined; (3) whether pornography should be prohibited even if it’s harmful and definable\u201d (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.<\/p>\nIn 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<\/em> founder, owner, and publisher Hugh Hefner, sought to protect their economic interests.<\/p>\nHowever, this seemingly simple explanation for Hefner\u2019s involvement is complicated by his personal politics, which proved to be quite progressive years before the peak of the Sex Wars. Hefner once said, \u201cI was a feminist before there was such a thing as feminism. That\u2019s a part of the history very few people know\u201d (Pitzulo 2008, 259). Okay\u2026 we\u2019ll 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), \u201cthe Playboy <\/em>Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the magazine\u2026 contributed thousands of dollars to abortion rights organizations before Roe v. Wade overturned antiabortion laws in the United States\u2026 [and it] provided the [ACLU] with funds for its work on women\u2019s rights and helped fund day-care centers for working mothers\u201d (259-260). In other words, the history of Playboy<\/em>, in terms of gender politics, is a lot more complicated than we allow ourselves to believe.<\/p>\nOn the other hand\u2026 Playboy<\/em> has perpetuated many, arguably, degrading images of women, which didn\u2019t 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 \u201cmisogynistic portrayals of women\u201d in the pornographic media\u201d (McBride 2008).<\/p>\nThe 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\u2019s 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 <\/em>fought back. For example, in a 1986 article from Off Our Backs<\/em>, the longest surviving feminist newsjournal in the United States, author Carol Anne Douglas explains how Playboy <\/em>teamed up with both Penthouse<\/em> 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<\/em> also sued for the commission to retract its classification of the magazine as \u201cpornography\u201d, which likely served as a means for retaining some level of integrity and avoiding the regulations laid out in the report (ibid.).<\/p>\nWhile 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<\/em> continued to flourish. But it wasn\u2019t 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<\/em> than the federal investigation spurred by the Sex Wars. It may even prove to be Playboy\u2019s downfall.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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Noah:<\/strong> Although Playboy<\/em> 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\u2019s rolled along into the 80\u2019s and 90\u2019s, people stopped buying print Playboy<\/em>s. As Jonathan Coopersmith (1994), a historian and professor currently working at Texas A&M describes in his essay \u201cPornography, Technology, and Progress\u201d, \u201cthe average monthly circulation of the three main ‘men’s magazines’\u2014Playboy<\/em>, Penthouse<\/u> and Hustler<\/em>\u2014gradually declined from a 1976 peak of nearly 12 million to 4.7 million copies in 1996\u201d (100). Naturally then, we must ask, \u201cwhy is this?\u201d Did everybody just decide to stop viewing porn? Highly doubtful. The fact is, where the Sex Wars failed, the march of technology\u2019s progress succeeded. Over the course of the late 20th<\/sup> century, various recording and broadcasting technologies matured, allowing a new, more amateur-driven video porn industry to emerge. Coopersmith (1994) continues, \u201cIn an example of the true d\u00e9mocratisation of technology, the development of the Polaroid instant camera and the camcorder allowed people to produce their own pornography free from anyone else seeing\u201d (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 \u201cThe Polaroid Swinger: Changing the Market in an Instant\u201d, \u201cIn the summer of 1965, first in Canada, then in the United States, Polaroid made a lunge for the mass market\u2026 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 \u201cYES\u201d and then zipped off your finished black-and-white picture\u201d. The Swinger was cheap, priced at only 19.99, and easy to use, it was an instant success.<\/p>\nBut as might be inferred from the Swinger\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 <\/em>product of big corporations, such as Playboy<\/em>. With these cheap recording technologies, anybody could produce their own porn. Coopersmith (1994) describes how \u201cIn 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]\u201d (107). With these products, anybody<\/em> could produce porn. But according to Coopersmith (1994) it really seems like everybody <\/em>was producing porn. He writes, \u201c7852 new pornographic films appeared in 1996 compared with 471 Hollywood films\u201d (102). We owe the standardization of Super 8 film used by camcorders to the amateur porn industry, a market that was certainly booming!<\/p>\nBut 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\u2019s, there were for the most part two ways that one could consume porn: through print media such as Playboy<\/em> or in public pornographic theatres. Pornographic theatres served an important niche — a hotspot for engaging in sexual-encounters, but Coopersmith (1994) shows how \u201cby 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\u201d (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 \u201cPornography provided the profits that enticed stores to offer video cassettes\u2026 \u00a0According to a 1986 Merrill Lynch study, X-rated tapes constituted over half of all sales of pre-recorded tapes in the late 1970s\u201d (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.<\/p>\nRemember Betamax? No? That\u2019s because of video porn. During the late 1970\u2019s, a unique market opportunity presented itself for two different video technologies: VHS and Betamax. According to Carey R. Ramos (1979) in \u201cThe Betamax Case: Accommodating Public Access and Economic Incentive in Copyright Law\u201d, \u201cThe 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\u201d (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<\/em>, so too has the rise of internet porn led to the decline of physical media porn sales.<\/p>\n[music]<\/p>\n
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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<\/em> has come full circle. In 2015, Playboy<\/em> the original creator of \u201cnudie mags\u201d, announced that they would take all nudity out of their magazines. Finally, the desperate cry of \u201cI only read it for the articles\u201d might hold a grain of truth.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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