Female Chauvinist Pigs (6 page)

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:

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 published
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: