by Ariel Levy
Roe and the legalization of the birth control pill—both of which were crucial to feminists—were both helped by funding from Hefner. In 1970, the Playboy Foundation hired a consultant named Cyril Means, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, to file amicus curiae, or friend of the court, briefs in two abortion cases: Doe v. Bolton in Georgia and Roe v. Wade in Texas. Both cases ultimately went before the U.S. Supreme Court and were, for all practical purposes, consolidated when the ruling was handed down in Roe.
The Playboy Foundation also gave grant money to NOW’s Legal Defense and Education Fund and supported the ERA; Hefner personally hosted a fund-raiser for it at the Playboy Mansion. “I was a feminist before there was such a thing as feminism!” Hefner has said. A mutual friend even tried to set him up on a date with Gloria Steinem before she became famous. (It didn’t work out.)
Because of his efforts to promote progressive legislative change and because of the freewheeling approach to sex, nudity, and non-monogamy he advanced through his magazine, his clubs, and his life, Hefner is considered by many to be the hero of the sexual revolution. Hefner attracted the radical cultural elite to his magazine. Contributors included Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac, and Alex Haley, whose Playboy interview with Malcolm X paved the way for his book Autobiography of Malcolm X. There were, of course, men of the Left who found the Playboy empire less than groovy. Hefner pursued the cartoonist Robert Crumb for the magazine in the late sixties, to no avail. Crumb, who drew the album cover for Janis Joplin’s Cheap Thrills and created classic cartoons of the era like Mr. Natural and Keep On Truckin’, has said he found the Playboy Mansion “rather alienating and dull…I thought it was corny. And the girls seemed barely human to me; I couldn’t talk to them.” But the average American man was dazzled by Hefner’s offer of libertine hedonism: Forget your hang-ups and your Puritan guilt and come get everything you’ve ever wanted.
Beyond creating a successful brand, Hefner had a vision for a new kind of masculinity, a new kind of man, one who no longer needed to be the duck-hunting outdoorsman, the virtuous patriarch of the forties and fifties. Instead, he was reimagined as a suave gent in a V-neck cashmere sweater, mixing drinks, listening to records, and appreciating the “finer things in life,” like jazz and beautiful women. He was freed from domesticity. The feminists’ conception of the liberated woman shared a common attribute. She no longer had to toil in the kitchen, benevolent for her brood; she was reconceived as her own, independent person. She was freed from domesticity.
But a shared distaste for conventional family arrangements and repressive laws was the extent of Hefner’s ideological compatibility with the women’s liberation movement. In 1967, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked Hefner why he’d chosen the rabbit as the symbol for his empire. He replied:
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 that 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.
You can understand why statements like these made feminists want to throw up. They were specifically fighting to be seen as real people, not sudsy bunnies. They wanted to show the world that women were “difficult” and “sophisticated,” not to mention formidable.
Hefner’s sexual revolution seemed to apply only to men. Women who had the same wealth of sexual experience as Hefner, who enjoyed elegant underwear as he enjoyed silk pajamas, were “somehow mentally filthy.” And Hefner backed his taste up with rules. “The Playboy girls have a very high morality,” he said. “After all, if the Bunnies accept a date, they lose their job. Private detectives find out if they accept a date.” Women were meant to be ornamental entertainment, not partners in wildness, and their complicity—their obedience—was policed accordingly in the Playboy empire. Hefner said that he wouldn’t mind if his daughter, Christie, then fourteen, appeared in Playboy one day; “I would consider it a compliment to me and my work.” But again, he would want that to be a show of sexiness, not an indication of an unbridled sexuality like his own. “I wouldn’t like my daughter to have a promiscuous life. I would not like my daughter to be immoral.”
A double standard was unapologetically built into his philosophy. In the first issue of Playboy, Hefner’s introduction read, “If you’re somebody’s sister, wife or mother-in-law and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to your Ladies Home Companion.” Free love was edifying for a man, immoral for a woman. Though Hefner was a devoted sexual opportunist himself, he expected total fidelity from his “special girls.” “I do not look for equality between man and woman,” he said. “I like innocent, affectionate, faithful girls.” Really, he liked them the way you like a bunny—as something soft to fondle. “Socially, mentally, I enjoy more being with men. When I want to speak, to think, I stay with men.”
To this day, Hefner does not understand why feminists had a problem with him. He maintains that he is a great liberator, a brave iconoclast who battled inhibition for the good of humankind. His opponents are the unenlightened and the uptight. In 2002 he told Esquire, “Women were the major beneficiary of the sexual revolution…that’s where feminism should have been all along. Unfortunately, within feminism, there has been a puritan, prohibitionist element that is antisexual.”
He’s talking about Susan Brownmiller. Even if she was not personally on his mind when he said that, she was one of the foremost representatives of the “element” he was referring to. Hefner and Brownmiller appeared together on the Dick Cavett Show in 1970 to debate pornography (among other things), and as the program progressed, Hefner became increasingly baffled as Brownmiller became increasingly irate. The encounter culminated with Brownmiller suggesting that he try coming on stage with a bunny tail on his behind and seeing how well he liked it. In 2005, Hefner told documentarians Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato that he had been “at a loss for words” during this appearance, because the women’s libbers had been “our partners in a revolution to really change sexual values.” They may have been bedfellows on Roe, but their worldviews were miles apart and their definitions of sexual liberation were mutually exclusive.
In the late seventies, a prominent splinter group of activists, including Brownmiller, Gloria Steinem, Shere Hite, Robin Morgan, the poet Adrienne Rich, and the writers Grace Paley and Audre Lorde, turned their attention to fighting pornography. Brownmiller was one of the founders of the New York chapter of a new group called Women Against Pornography, and they rented out a storefront on Forty-second Street to use as their office. The area was a swamp of peep shows, porn shops, and prostitution—ground zero for the objectification of women—and the feminists set up camp right in the middle of it, in hopes of spreading the gospel of women’s liberation and cleaning the place up. There were protests and demonstrations, of course, but Women Against Pornography’s trademark was offering guided tours of the neighborhood intended to elucidate the degradation of sex workers. They would bring visiting Benedictine nuns to a strip club to observe the patrons and dancers, or they’d take a curious band of housewives inside a porn shop so they could investigate what it was their husbands were looking at in the garage. Women Against Pornography even led high school class trips.
“Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,” was one of their slogans, coined by Robin Morgan. The idea behind the mantra was also a theme in Brownmiller’s first book. In 1975, after four years of squeezing research and writing into her schedule of activism and journalism, Brownmiller pu
blished Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. It became a best-seller, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and a movement classic. Against Our Will was the first truly comprehensive history of rape ever published. In it, Brownmiller argued that rape was not just an isolated crime like robbery or murder, but a systematic process of demoralization. Of course, we now accept as fact that rape is a grim tactic used in war, or by repressive regimes bent on breaking and subjugating their own people. But Brownmiller went much further. As always, she was working from an emphatic, unwavering conviction: Rape was “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” Rapists were merely the “front-line masculine shock troops” in the war against women, the “terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.” And pornography was the “undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda” that fed them.
Brownmiller wrote, “I wonder if the ACLU’s position [on pornography] might change if, come tomorrow morning, the bookstores and movie theaters lining Forty-second Street in New York City were devoted not to the humiliation of women by rape and torture, as they currently are, but to a systematized, commercially successful propaganda machine depicting the sadistic pleasures of gassing Jews or lynching blacks? Is this analogy extreme? Not if you are a woman who is conscious of the ever-present threat of rape.”
It wasn’t just Hugh Hefner who found this position “antisexual.” Within the women’s liberation movement, the question of how to represent sex—even the question of how to have sex—became divisive. Two distinct and passionately oppositional factions developed. On the one hand there were the antiporn feminists, and on the other, there were the women who felt that if feminism was about freedom for women, then women should be free to look at or appear in pornography. Screaming fights became a regular element of feminist conferences once the “pornography wars” got underway in the late seventies.
The term “sex-positive feminist” first came into use at this time. It was employed by the members of the women’s movement who wanted to distinguish themselves from the antiporn faction. But, of course, all of the feminists thought they were being sex-positive. Brownmiller and her compatriots felt they were liberating women from degrading sexual stereotypes and a culture of male domination and—consequently—making room for greater female sexual pleasure. Her opponents thought they were fighting a new brand of in-house repression. “Sometimes [there] were emotional defenses of free speech, but to our bewilderment, we also saw that some women identified their sexuality with the S/M pictures we found degrading,” Brownmiller wrote. “They claimed we were condemning their minds and behavior, and I guess we were.” Everyone was fighting for freedom, but when it came to sex, freedom meant different things to different people.
Rifts deepened in 1983, when Catharine MacKinnon, a radical feminist legal scholar at the University of Minnesota, and Andrea Dworkin, a visiting professor with a fondness for overalls who had authored the controversial books Woman Hating (1974) and Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), drafted a city ordinance positioning porn as a civil rights violation against women. Their ordinance was twice vetoed by the mayor of Minneapolis, but Dworkin and MacKinnon were subsequently summoned by the conservative city council of Indianapolis, Indiana, which was eager to rid their city of smut and wanted the antiporn feminists’ help. The city council and the Republican mayor of Indianapolis, William Hudnut, were opposed to core feminist goals like abortion rights and the ERA, but Dworkin and MacKinnon felt so outraged by what they viewed as pornography’s assault on female dignity that they joined forces with the conservatives anyway.
Dworkin was a former prostitute who had been beaten by her husband and sexually assaulted by doctors when she was taken to the Women’s House of Detention in New York City in 1965 after participating in a march against the Vietnam War. In 1995, she told the British writer Michael Moorcock, “I looked at pornography to try to understand what had happened to me. And I found a lot of information, about power and the mechanisms by which the subordination of women is sexualised.” The ordinance she’d crafted with MacKinnon was signed into Indianapolis law in 1984. Soon thereafter, the law was deemed unconstitutional and overturned by federal courts. But many feminists never forgave Dworkin and MacKinnon—and, by association, all antiporn feminists—for getting into bed with the right wing. To them, it symbolized exactly the kind of termagant moralism and prudery they felt were corrupting their movement.
“Suddenly, pornography became the enemy…sex in general became the enemy!” says Candida Royalle, a sex-positive feminist then, a director of adult films geared to female viewers now. “The women’s movement, in a way, was starting to be co-opted. I think the MacKinnonites and the Dworkinites definitely moved in at that point. And remember, Dworkin is the one who said intercourse is an act of rape, inherently an act of rape.”
Royalle is not alone in interpreting Dworkin’s work this way; both Playboy and Time magazine have cited this idea as hers. Dworkin for her part has said this is not a message she intended to convey. In the preface to the tenth anniversary addition of her book Intercourse, she wrote about why an imaginary (male) reader might mistakenly think she was saying all intercourse is rape:
[I]f one’s sexual experience has always and without exception been based on dominance—not only overt acts but also metaphysical and ontological assumptions—how can one read this book? The end of male dominance would mean—in the understanding of such a man—the end of sex. If one has eroticized a differential in power that allows for force as a natural and inevitable part of intercourse, how could one understand that this book does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape? Equality in the realm of sex is an antisexual idea if sex requires domination in order to register as sensation. As sad as I am to say it, the limits of the old Adam—and the material power he still has, especially in publishing and media—have set limits on the public discourse (by both men and women) about this book.
I don’t think Dworkin is being quite fair here. The bias against her work also has something to do with people being put off by her extremist proclamations. Consider this snippet from an article she wrote called “Dear Bill and Hillary” for The Guardian (London) in 1998:
Bill Clinton’s fixation on oral sex—non-reciprocal oral sex—consistently puts women in states of submission to him. It’s the most fetishistic, heartless, cold sexual exchange that one could imagine…I have a modest proposal. It will probably bring the FBI to my door, but I think that Hillary should shoot Bill and then President Gore should pardon her.
This was more than Candida Royalle had bargained for. She had first gotten involved with the women’s movement in her late teens, when she attended consciousness-raising workshops in the Bronx and organized free clinics where local women could come for PAP smears and pelvic exams. For Royalle, it was an ironic disappointment to see the movement go in what felt like an anti-sex direction, because one of the most powerful things she’d gleaned from feminism was a heightened sense of connection with her own body, one area in particular: “A lot of girls don’t grow up knowing they have a clitoris,” she says. “I remember reading the very first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and it was that book that made me understand how I could have an orgasm. I had a boyfriend for years who I’d been sleeping with and I couldn’t understand why it was never enough! But then I saw that book and there was this diagram, and it said, you know, you rub this thing long enough and then you have an orgasm. And I thought, Oh, I think I’ll try that. That was a big part of the movement back then. Sexual liberation was really a lot of what it was about. Sadly, that changed.”
Now middle-aged, Royalle is a bright-eyed blonde who wears wacky glasses and lives in a roomy apartment in Greenwich Village decorated with dozens of photos of herself in various phases and ages and hair colors. “I think it was the summer of 1970 that I went with a friend over to Corsica and we rented mopeds and spent a night in the mountains and took
a hit of mescaline, and there’s all these really fun pictures of us,” she says. “There I am posing—probably flying—with my copy of Sisterhood Is Powerful. Like it’s the Bible.” (Keep in mind: Sisterhood Is Powerful, the anthology of feminist writings, was edited by Robin Morgan, the same woman who postulated “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.”) “It was this fun moment, very much about sisterhood,” says Royalle, “but things changed. It became sort of the opposite. It started about two-thirds of the way in…you could feel the subtle shift. I remember feeling that I was becoming a minority; that I was not sticking to the party line because I did have a boyfriend, and it was kind of like I was sleeping with the enemy. There was a real move to rejecting heterosexual relationships and embracing lesbianism, or embracing separatism. There are women who won’t want to hear this, but I think a lot of women were calling themselves lesbians who, in the end, really weren’t. Because it was the thing to do, it was more politically acceptable.”
In this environment, Royalle felt almost as restricted as she had back in the fifties, only now she was rebelling against feminist sisters instead of an overprotective patriarchy. She left New York for San Francisco to pursue a career as an artist. Royalle paid the bills by modeling for other artists, which led to an offer to appear in an art film, which led to a career in pornography. “During that time I was living amongst a group of people who were fiercely independent, these outrageous drag queens. We had sex with whoever we wanted. We did drugs whenever we wanted. No one could tell us what to do. So when I needed extra money and the opportunity to be in a movie came up, it wasn’t like Ooh, is this acceptable? It wasn’t a big deal…there was no AIDS yet and it was still a time of sexual adventurousness.”