by Ariel Levy
This may seem confusing considering the “swing to the right” this country has taken, but raunch culture transcends elections. The values people vote for are not necessarily the same values they live by. No region of the United States has a higher divorce rate than the Bible Belt. (The divorce rate in these southern states is roughly fifty percent above the national average.) In fact, eight of the ten states that lead in national divorce are red, whereas the state with the lowest divorce rate in the country is deep blue Massachusetts. Even if people consider themselves conservative or vote Republican, their political ideals may be just that: a reflection of the way they wish things were in America, rather than a product of the way they actually experience it.
This is apparent in entertainment as well. During the month that sanctity-of-marriage–touting George W. Bush was elected to his second term in the White House, the second-highest-rated show on television was ABC’s Desperate Housewives, a cleavage-heavy drama featuring a married woman who sleeps with her teenage gardener. In the conservative greater Atlanta market, for instance, where nearly 58 percent of voters cast their ballot for Bush, Desperate Housewives was the number one show. Playboy is likewise far more popular in conservative Wyoming than in liberal New York.
If the rise of raunch seems counterintuitive because we hear so much about being in a conservative moment, it actually makes perfect sense when we think about it. Raunch culture is not essentially progressive, it is essentially commercial. By going to strip clubs and flashing on spring break and ogling our Olympians in Playboy, it’s not as though we are embracing something liberal—this isn’t Free Love. Raunch culture isn’t about opening our minds to the possibilities and mysteries of sexuality. It’s about endlessly reiterating one particular—and particularly commercial—shorthand for sexiness.
There is a disconnect between sexiness or hotness and sex itself. As Paris Hilton, the breathing embodiment of our current, prurient, collective fixations—blondeness, hotness, richness, anti-intellectualism—told Rolling Stone reporter Vanessa Grigoriadis, “my boyfriends always tell me I’m not sexual. Sexy, but not sexual.” Any fourteen-year-old who has downloaded her sex tapes can tell you that Hilton looks excited when she is posing for the camera, bored when she is engaged in actual sex. (In one tape, Hilton took a cell phone call during intercourse.) She is the perfect sexual celebrity for this moment, because our interest is in the appearance of sexiness, not the existence of sexual pleasure. (Before Paris Hilton we had Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson to drool over: two shiny, waxy blondes who used to tell us over and over again that sex was something they sang about, not something they actually engaged in.)
Sex appeal has become a synecdoche for all appeal: People refer to a new restaurant or job as “sexy” when they mean hip or powerful. A U.S. Army general was quoted in The New Yorker regarding an air raid on the Taliban as saying “it was sexy stuff,” for instance; the New York Times ran a piece on the energy industry subheadlined “After Enron, Deregulation Is Looking Less Sexy.” For something to be noteworthy it must be “sexy.” Sexiness is no longer just about being arousing or alluring, it’s about being worthwhile.
Passion isn’t the point. The glossy, overheated thumping of sexuality in our culture is less about connection than consumption. Hotness has become our cultural currency, and a lot of people spend a lot of time and a lot of regular, green currency trying to acquire it. Hotness is not the same thing as beauty, which has been valued throughout history. Hot can mean popular. Hot can mean talked about. But when it pertains to women, hot means two things in particular: fuckable and salable. The literal job criteria for our role models, the stars of the sex industry.
And so sex work is frequently and specifically referenced by the style or speech or creative output of women in general. Consider the oeuvre of pop singer Christina Aguilera, who titled her 2003 album Stripped (the tour was sold out and pulled in $32 million), mud-wrestled in a humping fashion in her video Dirrty, and likes to wear assless chaps. “She’s a wonderful role model,” Aguilera’s mother proclaimed on a VH1 special about her daughter, “trying to change society so that a woman can do whatever men do.”
It is true that women are catching up with men in the historically masculine department of sexual opportunism; trying to get the best and the most for ourselves in that arena as we are everywhere else. But it’s not true that men parade around in their skivvies as a means to attaining power, at least not men in mainstream heterosexual American culture—they don’t have to. Jay Leno sits floppy faced and chunky in a loose suit behind his desk, confident that he is the king of late night. When Katie Couric guest-hosted the Tonight Show in May 2003, she wore a low-cut dress and felt the need to emphasize her breasts by pointing at them and proclaiming “these are actually real!” Lest the leg men in the house feel understimulated, Couric also had guys with power tools cut a hole in Leno’s desk so that the program could be a more complete peep show—a Google search for “Katie Couric legs” provides links to dozens of porn sites with her calves in close-up, in case you missed it. Even America’s morning TV sweetheart, a woman who interviews heads of state and is the highest paid person in television news—outearning Ted Koppel, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Mike Wallace, and her cohost Matt Lauer with her $65 million contract—has to dabble in exhibitionism to feel as though she’s really made it today.
Couric later commented that she wanted to show America her “fun” side on the Tonight Show, but in truth she was exposing more than being fun, or even being sexual. Really what she was showing was that she was open to a certain sort of attention—which is something that we specifically require if we are going to think of a woman as hot. Hotness doesn’t just yield approval. Proof that a woman actively seeks approval is a crucial criterion for hotness in the first place.
For women, and only for women, hotness requires projecting a kind of eagerness, offering a promise that any attention you receive for your physicality is welcome. When Leno did his stint at Couric’s post on the Today Show, he remained fully clothed. While Janet Jackson introduced Americans to her right nipple at the notorious 2004 Super Bowl half-time show, Justin Timberlake’s wardrobe managed not to malfunction. Not one male Olympian has found it necessary to show us his penis in the pages of a magazine. Proving that you are hot, worthy of lust, and—necessarily—that you seek to provoke lust is still exclusively women’s work. It is not enough to be successful, rich, and accomplished: Even women like Couric and Jackson and world-champion swimmer Haley Clark, women at the pinnacle of their fields, feel compelled to display their solicitude. As that girl gone wild put it, this has become “like a reflex.”
This is not a situation foisted upon women. Because of the feminist movement, women today have staggeringly different opportunities and expectations than our mothers did. We have attained a degree of hard-won (and still threatened) freedom in our personal lives. We are gradually penetrating the highest levels of the work force. We get to go to college and play sports and be secretary of state. But to look around, you’d think all any of us want to do is rip off our clothes and shake it.
Some version of a sexy, scantily clad temptress has been around through the ages, and there has always been a demand for smut. But this was once a guilty pleasure on the margins—on the almost entirely male margins. For a trend to penetrate political life, the music industry, art, fashion, and taste the way raunch culture has, it must be thoroughly mainstream, and half that mainstream is female. Both men and women alike seem to have developed a taste for kitschy, slutty stereotypes of female sexuality resurrected from an era not quite gone by. We don’t even think about it anymore, we just expect to see women flashing and stripping and groaning everywhere we look.
If men have been appreciating the village belly dancer or the Champagne Room lap dancer for sexual gratification and titillation over the years, we have to wonder what women are getting out of this now. Why would a straight woman want to see another woman in fewer clothes spin around a pole? Why would
she want to be on that pole herself? Partly, because women in America don’t want to be excluded from anything anymore: not the board meeting or the cigar that follows it or, lately, even the trip to the strip club that follows that. What we want is to be where it’s at, and currently that’s a pretty trashy place.
It no longer makes sense to blame men. Mia Leist and plenty of other women are behind the scenes, not just in front of the cameras, making decisions, making money, and hollering “We want boobs.” Playboy is a case in point. Playboy’s image has everything to do with its pajama-clad, septuagenarian, babe-magnet founder, Hugh Hefner, and the surreal world of celebrities, multiple “girlfriends,” and nonstop bikini parties he’s set up around himself. But in actuality, Playboy is a company largely run by women. Hefner’s daughter Christie is the chairman and CEO of Playboy Enterprises. The CFO is a middle-aged mother named Linda Havard. The Playboy Foundation (which has supported the ERA and abortion rights, among other progressive causes) is run by Cleo Wilson, an African-American former civil rights activist. A woman named Marilyn Grabowski produces more than half the magazine’s photo features.
The company, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2003, is valued at $465 million; their brand and bunny are ubiquitous; they recently and successfully moved into the televised soft-core porn market; Playboy remains the world’s top-selling men’s magazine, with a paid circulation of just over three million in the United States and some fifteen million readers across the globe. And, after twenty years in remission, the first of many new Playboy Clubs is set to open at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas in 2006. Like the original swinging sixties Playboy Clubs, the new ones will be staffed by “hostesses” dressed in strapless bathing suit–like uniforms topped off with rabbit ears, shirt cuffs, and bunny tails—the same conceit that prompted Gloria Steinem to go undercover at a Playboy Club in Manhattan for two weeks in 1963 to write her famous article “A Bunny’s Tale,” in which she seared the women’s working conditions and pronounced the club’s atmosphere generally conducive to exploitation and misogyny. (Steinem’s assessment was refuted, much less famously, by former bunny Kathryn Leigh Scott in a book called The Bunny Years. Scott, who worked alongside Steinem in Manhattan, recollected the Playboy Club chiefly as a pleasant place where she made a lot of money.) Playboy closed the last of the original clubs in 1986 because they were no longer profitable, but now with the country’s reinvigorated interest in all things bimbo, Playboy has determined, probably correctly, that the time is again right to offer Americans cocktails served by women dressed as stuffed animals.
Christie Hefner is a founder of two women’s groups: Emily’s List, which raises money to support pro-choice, female Democratic political candidates, and the Committee of 200, an organization of female executives and business owners who provide mentoring programs and scholarships to young women and girls. I wanted to find out how she reconciled the work she does for women’s advancement with her job as head of a company that uses women as decorative inducements to masturbate, so I went to visit her in Chicago during the city’s green, rainy spring.
There was no hint of debauchery in the lobby at 680 North Lake Shore Drive, the building that houses Playboy Enterprises. The floor was a giant chessboard of cool marble, and an understated stainless steel sign spelled out the company’s name. (No bunny.) But when I stepped on the elevator, I knew I was in the right place. A tall, rock-hard woman in jeans and heels with a long, silky ponytail and a motherlode of cleavage got on with her friend, who looked more garden-variety blonde human female. The hot one applied another layer of lip gloss, licked her white teeth, and then bared them. “How do I look?” she asked. Her friend scrutinized her with great concentration and then pulled the zipper of her tight terry cloth top down an inch from the midpoint to the base of her cleavage. She stepped back, surveyed her work, and nodded. “I think that’s more what you want to say.”
On the fifteenth floor, a blonde receptionist was sitting in front of a glass case that housed two weird, white, rabbit-headed mannequins. “Are you all here for the fiftieth?” she asked, smiling. She meant: Were we going to audition to be Playmates in the fiftieth-anniversary issue of the magazine? The one of us who obviously was followed the receptionist back into the belly of the building. “She works for a German pharmaceutical company called BrainLAB,” her friend told me as she flipped through a copy of the magazine she’d picked up off the coffee table. A few moments passed and then she looked up from a spread on college girls, wild eyed. “I’m going too,” she said. “What the hell!” Then she went dashing in after them.
There was a sharp difference in aesthetic and attitude between the women in the lobby and the woman I was there to see. The Playboy offices are designed as glass fishbowls that you can see inside of when you approach from the stairs, so you can watch Christie Hefner long before you actually meet her. She has good skin and a short French manicure and she looks quite a bit like the actress Jo Beth Williams…you want to find Hef in her face, but he just isn’t there. “You know I used to laugh when people would ask, ‘How can you be CEO of a company whose products are sold to men?’ ” she said, smiling. “I said, gee, it never seemed to occur to people to ask that question all those years when all the women’s fashion and cosmetic and everything else companies were run by men! Nobody sat around going, well, how would he know whether this would appeal to women?”
Actually, more than a hundred women literally did sit around on the floor of Ladies’ Home Journal editor-in-chief John Mack Carter’s office for eleven hours on March 18, 1970, with a list of “nonnegotiable demands” like “We demand that the Ladies’ Home Journal hire a woman editor-in-chief who is in touch with women’s real problems and needs.” But in any case, I wasn’t there to question Hefner’s ability to produce a product that appeals to men; the numbers show she can deliver that. I was there to hear about what Playboy does for women.
“A lot of women read the magazine,” she said. “We know they read it because we get letters from them.” And this was proof, she said, that the “post–sexual revolution, post–women’s movement generation that is now out there in their late twenties and early thirties—and then it continues with the generation behind them, too—has just a more grown-up, comfortable, natural attitude about sex and sexiness that is more in line with where guys were a couple generations before. The rabbit head symbolizes sexy fun, a little bit of rebelliousness, the same way a navel ring does…or low-rider jeans! It’s an obvious I’m taking control of how I look and the statement I’m making as opposed to I’m embarrassed about it or I’m uncomfortable with it. A little bit of that in-your-face…but in a fun way…‘frisky’ is a good word.”
I asked her why she supposed all these frisky, in-your-face women were buying Playboy instead of, say, Playgirl. “To say that the gap is closing isn’t to say that the gap has closed,” she replied. “You can’t put male nudity on the screen and get an R rating; you can’t put male nudity in an ad the way you can put female nudity in an ad and have it be perfectly acceptable. I mean, we still have a disconnect because of the attitude that men have about being uncomfortable with being the objects of women’s fantasies and gaze.”
That would explain why men would be less likely than women to dream about one day appearing in the pages of Playgirl. (Why there aren’t any men charging out of the lobby and into the photo shoots saying, What the hell! It’s worth a shot!) But it doesn’t explain why women would be buying the magazine, the rabbit head merchandise…the shtick. I think that has more to do with the current accepted wisdom that Hefner articulated so precisely: The only alternative to enjoying Playboy (or flashing for Girls Gone Wild or getting implants or reading Jenna Jameson’s memoir) is being “uncomfortable” with and “embarrassed” about your sexuality. Raunch culture, then, isn’t an entertainment option, it’s a litmus test of female uptightness.
I asked Hefner how she felt about young girls aspiring to be in Playboy—girls like the ones she provides scholarships to th
rough the Committee of 200. “The reason why I think it’s perfectly okay is because the way women see being in the magazine is not as a career but as a statement,” she said firmly. “It’s a moment that lets them be creative. That can be as simple as I just want to feel attractive, or it can be very complicated, as has happened with a Vicky La Motta or a Joan Collins, saying, I am older and I want to reassert the ability to be attractive now that I’m fifty. Or: I’m an athlete and I don’t think athleticism in women is at odds with being sexy. It can be something as profound as [a woman] who had a car accident in her twenties and was a paraplegic and wrote us a letter wanting to be in the magazine and tell her story. So I think people who choose to pose for the magazine have a very definite idea of what they want to get out of it—and then they have a life and they may be an actress or a mother or a lawyer or an executive.”