An ex-bunny describes the loss of her ‘family’ as the magazine stops
publishing nude photos – but Gloria Steinem is among its detractors, saying the
publication has never expressed ‘the full humanity of men or women’
Jaki Nett, a 72-year-old yoga
instructor and former Playboy bunny, is worried.
“Do you
know if the magazine will survive?” she asks, on the phone from Germany.
Nett is
reacting to this week’s announcement that Playboy, a magazine first
published over 60 years ago featuring a nude Marilyn Monroe, has decided to no
longer feature photos of naked models in its pages.
Time has
marched on, but the move to take nude photos out of its pages seems so
antithetical to what the magazine has stood for and symbolized for six decades,
it does not seem like an overreaction to question the magazine’s destiny.
Nett, who worked as a bunny for
more than 11 years in the 1960s and 1970s out of a Los Angeles Playboy club,
and was one of the first black bunnies to be employed there, says that “family”
is on the line.
“Once you
are a bunny, you are always a bunny,” she explains, recalling very happy years
working out of the bunny-themed gentleman’s nightclub. Nett remembers
nostalgically the mystique that came with being a bunny and being associated
with the brand. “Men would look at us with these eyes of wonder,” she recalls.
“We became part of an experience, a part of Americana.”
She says
that Playboy took care of its own, financing at least half of her undergraduate
degree, and making sure that things like sexual harassment and assault were
never tolerated within the walls of its clubs.
“Even if
people touched our tails, their [Playboy club] memberships were taken,” she
says, referring to the fluffy white pompoms women working for Playboy wore on
their rear. “As long as we were on the Playboy premises, we were protected.”
But
shielding her from the worst in male-on-female violence was not something the
Playboy franchise could help with on the outside.
Nett recalls being raped by one of
the club’s patrons during her bunny years. The rape took place outside of the
club premises, she says.
She says
reporting the incident to the police was out of the question at the time (“At
that point, the woman was usually seen to be in the wrong, I didn’t want to go
through that”). She was very clear who had done it, however, and knew his face
well: he was a regular at the club.
Nett may
not have felt she could turn to the authorities for help, but at the club,
there was no question whose side management was on once she shared what had
happened: hers.
The next
time he came in, all she had to do was point him out.
“He said
he didn’t do it, and I said he did.”
The
regular was banned for life, she says, even as he denied her accounts. “They
did what they had to do. Inside the club they did what they could. Some people
thought we were being used as a sexual object. This was not the case. I was
very well protected. We all were,” she says.
Many women, however, see the brand
that Playboy created as dangerously destructive to women’s well-being.
Jennifer
Lena, a sociologist and professor at Columbia University, describes the Playboy
phenomenon as anchoring down a reference point in terms of women’s sexuality
which led to a way of thinking about women that was “an impediment to
progress”.
At the
time when women were set up to take advantage of sexual liberation, and define
their bodies on their own terms, Playboy’s depictions of sexually willing and
available “girls next door” made female nudity synonymous with the fulfillment
of male desires in a male-dominated, patriarchal society, rather than one that
finally paid attention to women as agents of their own bodies.
The creation
of such a framework may be seen as having helped to lay the foundations for
what has led to the rise of a mainstream, hyper-pornified culture that is more
often than not degrading to women and divorced from notions of female consent.
Gloria
Steinem, the American feminist icon and pioneer, told the Guardian: “For
Playboy to stop publishing nude photos of women (of course, it never published
nude photos of men) is like the NRA saying that it’s no longer pushing handguns
because machine guns and assault rifles are so easily available.”
“Playboy would have to change
its title, heart and brain cells in order to express the full humanity of men
or women,” Steinem continued.
Steinem is a longstanding critic
of the Playboy franchise. In 1963, she published an exposé of the life and realities of a Playboy
bunny after going undercover as one in in a New York Playboy club.
But for
Carrie Pitzulo, an adjunct professor of history at University System of
Georgia, depicting Playboy and its franchise as a wholly anti-woman operation
is vastly mistaken.
Pitzulo,
who has written a book on the subject, says that while the magazine was by no
means radical, it introduced America to the notion that it was all right for
good girls – specifically of the middle-class, white variety – to have sex.
“The
playmate was the sweet girl next door,” she explains.
In such a
way, Playboy, and its larger-than-life creator, Hugh Hefner, was actually promoting
very mainstream, politically correct ideas of sex, Pitzulo says, centered on
notions of family and monogamy. Such values were reflected in the advice
columns Pitzulo recovered from the 1950s and 1960s that favored faithfulness,
for instance, over promiscuity.
Liberal –
even if not radical - causes were also taken up by the magazine, which was an
open supporter of abortion rights, the creation of rape crisis centers and
child day care centers. “Yes, it was a sexist magazine, but it wasn’t only
about that,” she says.
For
Pitzulo, the fact that Playboy has decided to stop publishing naked pictures in
print says more about the state of our culture than about the publication per
se.
“It shows
us how far America has gone in terms of hyper-sexualisation in the mainstream:
that the magazine that used to be the leader has given up.”
But no
more naked pictures by Playboy needn’t be all bad, For some cultural
commentators, the moment comes with a much-awaited degree of symbolism.
“I am so
bored that conversations about women’s sexuality have focused on Playboy for 6o
years, and I am glad it’s over,” says Lena.
“It’s time
what we have a conversation about women’s sexuality on our own terms.”
