You Play the Girl

by Carina Chocano

  The models’ aura of stuffed-bunny obliviousness, by the way, was precisely the vibe Playboy was going for. In 1967, Hugh Hefner told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that he’d called the models Bunnies because

  the rabbit, the bunny, in America has a sexual meaning; and I chose it because it’s a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping—sexy. First it smells you, then it escapes, then it comes back, and you feel like caressing it, playing with it. A girl resembles a bunny. Joyful, joking. Consider the kind of girl we made popular: the Playmate of the Month. She is never sophisticated, a girl you cannot really have. She is a young, healthy, simple girl—the girl next door . . . We are not interested in the mysterious, difficult woman, the femme fatale who wears elegant underwear, with lace, and she is sad, and somehow mentally filthy. The Playboy girl has no lace, no underwear, she is naked, well-washed with soap and water, and she is happy.1

  I didn’t read this as a kid, of course, but I still think the message got across. Playboy’s “idea of woman” was a naked fairy-tale princess: a young, dumb, defenseless, trusting, easily manipulated woodland creature. She gave herself entirely because she was too inexperienced to know any better. She was a fresh animal, well-washed with soap and water. She could not learn, grow, or change. She could not really exist in a temporal sense. All she could do was to try to preserve and display herself. Experience made her difficult. It got her banished to her witchy cottage in the forest. She had to remain a dumb bunny, an unconscious body, frozen in time and preserved in amber, for as long as she could in order to survive. The “sexy lady” is the only kind of lady that openly exists in the sunshine of the symbolic realm. She is the only kind of lady that warrants being looked at, paid attention to, or acknowledged. In order to be listened to, a lady should be nice to look at. There should be no doubt as to her sexual desirability, but this will undermine her argument, no matter how sophisticated. We are not interested in sadness, sophistication, or experience. We secretly believe that female subjectivity is filth.

  When you are a kid—when I was a kid, anyway—you believe in superlatives and data, and find a great deal of comfort in this orderly vision of the universe. So you set out to rank and rate and sort and classify everything you can. When I was in first and second grade, I thought that the Miss America, Miss World, and Miss Universe pageants were actual statistical rankings of the prettiest women in the country, the world, the universe. (I wasn’t sure how Miss Universe could claim the title without competing against aliens from other planets, but I was willing to suspend my disbelief.) I understood that being pretty wasn’t the most important thing, as no doubt some adult had dutifully informed me at some point, but it was obviously the only thing that anybody cared about where girls were concerned. You surmised this just by existing. Being the prettiest was the pinnacle of womanly achievement. It ranked you, if you were pretty enough, as the number one girl in the universe. Yet if prettiness made you visible, it also made you strangely invisible. It made you recede into an undifferentiated, standardized mass.

  Before Hugh Hefner came along, porn was furtive and hidden. After Hefner, it was everywhere; mainstream, pop, classy, cool. Hefner considered that his big innovation was realizing that Playboy wasn’t actual porn so much as lifestyle porn. He wasn’t selling pictures of girls, he was selling a particular male identity via consumption of girls as consumer objects. This identity was similar in many ways to the identity being sold to ladies in ladies’ magazines, only with naked ladies themselves as the expendable products whose constant consumption would bring happiness. This is why Hefner reportedly worried less about competitors like Penthouse and Hustler than he did about “lad mags” like Maxim and FHM. For all their surface differences, the Playmates didn’t suggest individuality so much as variety, an endless cornucopia of consumer choices. As a second-grader, I could fully grasp the orgiastic appeal of beholding something like this. The pleasure of positioning oneself in front of a new sixty-four-color crayon set, complete with built-in sharpener, was impossible to overstate. Like casting a proprietary eye over the display at Baskin-Robbins, it was a heady feeling that quickly gave way to entitlement. I felt nothing short of outrage when the number of flavors fell short of the promised thirty-one. That I always chose the same flavor anyway, and wore out the same-color crayons while barely touching some of the others, was not the point. The possibility of infinite choice was the point. The too-muchness was the point. Knowing the Burnt Sienna was there at your fingertips. Empowering you was the point.

  Of course, looking at naked girls in Playboy didn’t make me feel powerful. On the contrary, it made me feel like I was getting a glimpse into a parallel universe where I was at once invisible and excruciatingly visible, negated and exposed. There was no inverse equivalent. I was unaware that just around that time, an academic named Laura Mulvey was coining the phrase “the male gaze.” That language would remain unavailable to me for another two decades. At the time, all I had to help me make sense of it were things like the Frog and Toad story “Dragons and Giants,” the one where Toad gets separated from Frog and runs into a giant snake at the mouth of a dark cave, and the snake sees him and says, “Hello, lunch.”

  In 2003, Hugh Hefner told CNN that it was only in retrospect that he realized that what he’d created was actually “the first successful magazine for young, single men” organ­ized around a singular “artistic” idea. A naked girl was placed in a setting, and the suggestion of a male presence was introduced in the picture. “There would be a second glass, or a pipe, or a necktie,” he explained, which would suggest “the possibility of seduction.” For Hefner, presence of this item communicated the idea that “nice girls like sex, too.”2

  Playboy was instrumental in helping to combine the good girl and the bad girl into a single entity—what New York Radical Women cofounder Robin Morgan called “the unbeatable Madonna-whore combination.” The culture bombarded women with mixed messages, putting them into impossible, crazy-making psychological double binds. “To win approval, we must be both sexy and wholesome, delicate but able to cope, demure yet titillatingly bitchy or should we say ill-tempered,” wrote Morgan. Pageant queens and Playboy Bunnies sent to entertain troops in Vietnam were “death mascots” in an immoral war. “Where else,” Morgan asked, “could one find such a perfect combination of American values—racism, militarism, capitalism—all packaged in one ‘ideal’ symbol, a woman?” As Morgan wrote in the group’s manifesto, part of the reason for the 1968 Miss America protest was to call attention to the media’s uncritical promotion of “the degrading mindless-boob-girlie symbol” and the “ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously.” Five years before the protest, in 1963, a young journalist named Gloria Steinem had spent almost two weeks undercover as a Bunny at the Playboy Club and had written an article about it for Show magazine, revealing the terrible working conditions of a job that could bill itself as “the top job in the country for a young girl” and could be taken seriously. I don’t remember noticing any pipes in any photos, but even if the item left casually lying around had been, say, a pack of Bubble Yum or a little book of tiny, puffy Sanrio stickers, I still wouldn’t have held myself at a cool remove as I cast a proprietary eye over the girlie. The question of where I fit into the picture was too existentially traumatizing. Was this what girls turned into? Would I? Did I want to? What if I did? What if I didn’t? Which would be worse? The idea that nice girls like sex, too, never once crossed my mind while looking at a Playboy magazine. It had crossed my mind when playing with my Malibu Barbie and my brother’s G.I. Joe, but there was nothing about the girls in the photographs that implied they were getting anything out of the experience. My cousin and I had been trained to redirect our subjectivity and to accept the mindless-boob-girlie symbol and her ludicrous standard of beauty as our standard of femininity long before we cracked our first Playboy magazine. We recognized the Bunnies from other images we’d seen. They were naked Barbies with princess personalities, just
the pretty, passive, vulnerable, unconscious young girls we’d been trained to recognize as our personal ideal; the sleeping beauties. Christie and I thought it was funny that a magazine called Playboy had no boys in it. What a ridiculous oversight! Who was in charge? We were seven or eight or nine years old. We took everything literally. We were wrong, of course. What Playboy actually had was no girls in it.

  As a little kid in the seventies, I was never not aware of how feminism defined itself against the ethos of Playboy, but until recently it never occurred to me to think about how Playboy defined itself against the ethos of feminism. I thought of the Playboy version of masculinity as eternal, as the status quo that scrappy feminism suddenly stood up against. I didn’t know that they were parallel universes born of the sexual revolution, in one of which women demanded agency and control over their own bodies, as well as sexual and reproductive rights and freedoms, and in the other of which some men extended their sense of entitlement to the casual use of women’s bodies as entertainment. The old, patriarchal, Victorian notions of protecting young girls’ “virtue” and reputations fell away, and new, commercially exploitive patriarchal notions stepped into the void. Fashion modeling went from being a boring, low-paying workaday job for average-size women that showed customers how clothes fit, to a glam fantasy world full of underage girls made up to look like adults. Playboy helped by reinventing beautiful, naked, sexually available girls as the ultimate luxury item for the ultimate alpha man.

  Playboy was in its heyday between 1966 and 1976, and the women’s movement was in its heyday between 1968 and 1977. In 1969, Playboy assigned a story on women’s lib to a freelancer named Susan Braudy who, after extensive reporting, wrote a sympathetic account of the movement. This infuriated Hefner. He responded in a memo: “These chicks are our natural enemy . . . We must destroy them before they destroy the Playboy way of life.”3 Braudy refused to alter her story to fit this point of view, so she pulled the piece, and Playboy ended up running an article called “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig” in its stead. A Playboy secretary leaked that story to the press and was fired after Hefner discovered who did it.

  For me, trouble with Playboy was not that it had pictures of naked girls in it. It’s that in its Looney Tunes universe, it had only predators and prey. Women who believed themselves to be equal were men’s “natural enemy,” as in all the binary dyads—Sylvester versus Tweety, Coyote versus Road Runner, Elmer Fudd versus Bugs Bunny.

  In her 1967 interview, Fallaci asked Hefner to explain his real-life relationships with the Playmates he became romantically involved with. How did they work? Was he faithful to them? Did he expect fidelity from them? “The problem of being faithful does not even exist in such a situation,” he replied. “I do not ignore other girls.” He tried to explain that he usually had a special relationship that lasted for a few years and was supplemented by other less important relationships. He rattled off a string of names, girls he’d had primary relationships with for thirteen years. “I would like to make it clear that those never were pseudo-marriages, they were cohabitations, which, unfortunately, provoke jealousy in some women.”

  “And are you jealous, Mr. Hefner?” Fallaci asked.

  “Sure I am,” he said. “I wouldn’t like Mary to be sexually involved with someone else. When this happened with some of my special girls, I was rather hurt. In my relationships, I do not look for equality between man and woman. I like innocent, affectionate, faithful girls who—”

  “Do you mean you would never love a woman who has had as many men as you have had women, Mr. Hefner?” Fallaci broke in. “A woman who accepted and applied your philosophy?”

  “Not in the least,” he said. “I have never looked for a woman like me. I wouldn’t know what to do with a Hugh Hefner in skirts.”4

  Judith Butler had only recently published Gender Trouble and introduced the idea of “gender performativity” into the culture when I started graduate school, in the early nineties; the idea was that masculinity and femininity were not something we are but something we repeatedly do.5 Around the same time, in a piece in the New York Times Magazine, the critic Katha Pollitt coined the term “the Smurfette principle” to describe the weirdly gender-disproportionate world of cartoons. She had been surprised to notice as an adult that in cartoons it was common to see “a group of male buddies” that was “accented” by a single, stereotypical girl. This conveyed the message that “boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys.” In other words, “the girl” was an intrusion, often unwelcome, in an all-male universe. She did not represent human consciousness but a psychosexual disturbance with a bow on top.6 I found these ideas to be liberating. I also found them to be familiar. I’d encountered them before, not in college but in elementary school, and not through Playboy Bunnies but through Bugs Bunny.

  When he is naked, which is most of the time, Bugs is an anthropomorphized caricature of a rabbit of indeterminate age and gender. He has a slim, androgynous body; big, lash-rimmed eyes; a perky tail; the sassiness of a teenager; and a knack for getting himself out of compromising situations. A bunny’s existence is inherently precarious—there is no creature more defenseless—and Bugs Bunny lives all alone, unprotected. He cannot get through an episode without being preyed upon or bossed around by any number of bullies and blowhards, ranging from the merely irritating to the truly terrifying. Nobody respects his boundaries, and everyone underestimates him—which is how, on the bright side, he manages to outsmart them all. Bugs gives the slip to dumb hunters, sadistic sergeants, and pompous maestros alike, not just eluding capture but turning it into a game. He can transform himself utterly without anyone noticing. I deeply identified with the carrot-chomping Bugs Bunny, but he was also my first sexual crush. I liked his big eyes, his crooked grin, his mocking tone, the little cleft in his chest. He was my very first genderfucker.

  I adored Bugs. He was my platonic ideal of a man. Yet I never liked him more than when he dressed up as a sexy girl-rabbit. Bugs “played the girl” in the most exaggerated, artificial, ridiculous ways imaginable. In a dress, he was a geisha, a mermaid, a ballerina, Lana Turner, a bobby-soxer, Carmen Miranda, the person giving the performance and the person the performance was for. Bugs in a dress was no helpless bunny all alone in the woods with her tits out. S/he as a girl was vast. S/he contained multitudes. S/he was playful, sexy, sublime. Of all cartoon animals, s/he was the one whose allegiance I never thought to doubt. I trusted Bugs implicitly. I loved him/her. Bugs was on my side. Which is why I never liked him/her less than when he ogled a sexy girl-rabbit and turned to the camera with a dirty wink. Later, in high school, I’d develop an obsessive crush but also a deep sense of identification with David Bowie. When Bowie died, decades later, and stories came out about his relationships in the 1970s with very young girls—girls younger than I was when I first discovered him—I shut up that part of myself. It made me want to cry. I loved him. I thought he was on my side.

  When Kira was three, we were driving home one afternoon and stopped behind a bus at a light. The bus was wrapped in an ad for a sexy vampire TV show. This was not a vampire show I’d heard of before, but it was hard to keep up—there were so many. The cast of this show was young, pretty, and stylish, like the cast of bloodsucking Friends. When Kira saw them, she piped up, excited, “Oh, Mommy! Look at those peoples! They’re so beautiful. They’re so ’dorable. They’re so gorgeous!”

  Her fervor surprised me. I’d never even heard her say some of those words before. Had I told her she was cute one too many times and accidentally triggered an unhealthy fixation on beauty, or was she just picking up on what the world was teaching her? There are billboards and buses and posters for movies, TV shows, cosmetics, and fashion all over the city. There are pictures of pretty people, but especially girls, everywhere. They communicate wordlessly. I thought about how, from the m
oment she’d opened her eyes, she’d been driven around town, absorbing things, picking up magazines at the doctor’s office, saying, “I want to look at the princesses.” (What else might Nicole Kidman be, after all, in a pink gown in a perfume ad?) The world reveals itself through images and gestures long before language intervenes. The bear is brown. The cow says moo. The lady in the bikini loves the hamburger very, very much. I was born in the same year as the Miss America protest; the first feminist political action in almost a century. Sometimes, I wonder what happened between 1968 and the year Kira was born, in 2008, the year Girls Gone Wild launched a magazine, a clothing line, and a compilation record, and founder Joe Francis’s net worth reached $150 million. Was there progress? Did we move forward? in circles? Where did we go?

  Sitting behind the vampire bus, waiting for the light to change, I thought about what to say to Kira that might help her remain more or less intact and discover who she really is in a world that literally never stops yelling at her that her primary value is sexual; that her identity is fungible (there is always a fresh crop of newer, younger, prettier girls); that her perspective is marginal, suspect, niche, and therefore not of real importance (unlike boys’ experiences, which are human and therefore evergreen, universal, and innately valuable); that she’s “entertainment for men,” or else she’s nothing. I wanted to give her something to help her resist this, but I also knew that to resist is to open yourself up to attack, to declare rabbit-hunting season on yourself.

  The stories we tell ourselves are tricky and shape shifting. Much like Bugs, they will do what it takes to preserve themselves, to survive. They’ll continuously, gleefully alter their appearance. They’ll pretend to be whatever you say you want them to be. But deep down, they have a lot riding on these fixed ideas about opposites, about this great symbolic divide between male and female, black and white, old and young, gay and straight, that splits the world in half and sorts everything in it. I wanted to say to Kira, “Don’t be fooled,” but I couldn’t, because to say that is to say, “The whole world is lying to you.” I wanted to say, “The world wants to tell you that you don’t exist, and that you don’t belong, but don’t believe it,” but of course I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to break her heart. So, instead, I finally just said that anodyne thing, that worthless thing parents say. “Yes,” I said, “they are very beautiful . . . but you know, beauty is not the most important thing.”