What kind of woman writes for Playboy?

Over at Jezebel, Susan Braudy takes us waaayyy back to 1969 for a tale of consciousness raising Playboy-style, when Playboy’s editors decided they would take a poke at this feminism thing by hiring a woman (yes, you heard that right) to write about it. As Susan tells it, she was encouraged by her agent to more or less follow her nose for a publication that, shockingly enough, she considered “cheesy” to write on a topic about which she knew nothing.

Braudy says she found her encounters with what she calls “second-wave feminist theory” to be consciousness-raising—“the question growing in me was why have we women put up with isolation from each other. It became clearer and clearer that problems I’d cringed over in private shame were suffered by most women”—but her portraits of those early freedom fighters are merciless:

“Radical feminists were so angry it was almost impossible for them to organize. Ti-Grace [Atkinson] was censured by her splinter group for sounding off to the press. She’d become too famous, and her colleagues voted she could no longer speak to reporters alone.¹

“Others disagreed about whether men could join marches and if feminism could include married women or any women who were “male-identified,” then meaning conforming to standards set by men. Groups were forming and shattering because of social class, distrust, ambition, personal dislike, and consensus about whom to purge. When Yoko Ono brought John Lennon to one meeting, women shouted back and forth until he fled.

“Roxanne Dunbar came from Boston to perform in New York: six women sat on stage and solemnly chopped off their long hair because their tresses pleased men. Other women cried, cheered and cursed Roxanne from their folding chairs. One woman exited yelling, “You’re all dykes!” Anselma Dell’Olio shouted, “Am I supposed to cut off my breasts because men like them?”

Unsurprisingly, the one favorable portrait is of the one feminist Braudy wanted to be like, and if you guessed “Gloria Steinem,” give yourself a cigar:

“I was hypnotized by Gloria. She was as gorgeous as anybody I’d seen on the movie screen and was what I longed to be—a sophisticated New York woman. She exhaled dazzle. Her exquisite Upper East Side brownstone apartment² had been decorated by the Warhol superstar “Baby Jane” Holzer. Gloria slept on a hip platform bed and used her bedroom as a home office. She stocked her refrigerator with only two green bottles of Perrier water and a lime.”

Braudy gets a second, and less welcome, blast of consciousness raising when she takes her article to Playboy. It seems the idea was for her to turn a totally negative piece, portraying the feminist crowd as a total freak show, a bunch of short-haired dykes (except for their armpits) reeking of self-pity and sweat, utterly incapable of getting the one thing they needed—a man.

Braudy’s stubbornness ultimately earns her a session with the Man himself, Hugh Hefner, who emerges unsurprisingly as an amazing colossal dick—“Why is all this happening behind my back?”—when it’s more than likely that Hef signed off on the idea—“We’ll get a woman to trash them, do our dirty work for us! Brilliant!”—and then “forgot” when it didn’t come out quite the way he’d planned.

Since Playboy was rolling in cash back in the day, it would have cost them almost nothing to pay off an unknown free-lancer, but the fact that they kept after Braudy to see things their way suggests how much they wanted a woman to “fix” feminism for them, perhaps because their manbrains weren’t really up to the task of explaining why women weren’t the equal of men. Eventually, though, they gave up. The chick just wouldn’t listen to reason.

Afterwords
Braudy mentions only briefly the first “Women’s Pride Day” march, on August 28, 1970, organized by Betty Friedan and featuring many of the founding babes. Purely by chance, I was in New York that day. I had been visiting army friends from Vietnam in Connecticut and stopped off in the Big Apple to visit some lefty friends I’d known in Chicago. I had no knowledge of what was usually called “fem lib” back then and only heard about the march on the train. When I called my lefty friends they weren’t home, and I figured (correctly) that they were at the march. I didn’t make the march itself, but I did catch up with the speechifying, which took place in William Cullen Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library. All the women gave exactly the same speech, of course, so that intensity rather than content determined the “winner”—clearly Bella Abzug.³

Like all sixties radicals, feminists made room for everyone, and the last speaker for the evening was a representative from the “Radical Lesbians Alliance,” a shy young woman whose name I don’t remember, who had only one line “I don’t want to rape your sister, mister.” Fortunately, we’ve gotten past that.

Naturally, the meeting ran long, leading to a funny, New York conclusion. Being good radicals, the women used union help in staging the meeting (since it was New York, they surely had no choice). The electricians’ union was handling the sound system, and the contract was only good until (I think) nine pm. So the last bit, the singing of the new women’s anthem, which I rather doubt is still a thing, had to be done without amplification.

Was Hillary there? I don’t know. But she certainly should have been.