Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America by Elizabeth Fraterrigo, and: Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy by Carrie Pitzulo (review)

Playboy occupies an unusual position in modern periodical studies. The magazine has weathered its share of controversy over the past sixty years, but during its mid-twentieth-century heyday it was acknowledged as a leading tastemaker in the periodical market. Playboy famously cultivated a fantasy of urbane masculinity premised on readers’ ability to navigate a burgeoning consumer society. This editorial slant made it an especially visible arbiter of taste in the cultural mainstream—so much so, in fact, that by 1959, at the end of the supposedly buttoned-up decade in which the magazine had made its debut, Playboy’s Penthouse became a nationally syndicated television variety show. The short-lived but noteworthy series featured actors, musicians, comedians, and other entertainers performing songs, trying out bits, and engaging in cocktail chatter against the backdrop of a Chicago bachelor’s meticulously decorated penthouse apartment. Hugh M. Hefner, Playboy’s irreverent creator, hosted the program himself, for he had already publicized his credentials as the living embodiment of the new masculine ideal in the pages of his magazine.¹

The mainstream visibility Playboy enjoyed in its early years places it among the handful of periodicals central to any narrative history of twentieth-century American magazines. And it is among even more select company if the aim of such a history were to account for consumers’ taste formation in the postwar era. Until recently, however, Playboy has garnered scant attention from scholars of periodical media. Indeed, while the magazine has been the subject of field-defining scholarship in feminist and gender studies, the same cannot be said of print culture studies, where the pinup magazine, much less pornography, is still viewed with trepidation. The impasse might have stemmed not from any inherent aversion to studying commercial interests (a popular topic of research for years) but rather from a particular aversion to having to account for the pinup’s bare flesh. Indeed, the problem of women’s objectification in Playboy and related periodicals is so obvious that any study of the medium would seem to have to spend most of the time apologizing for it. Modern periodical studies’ open secret, then, is that although we recognize Playboy as one of the postwar era’s most important magazines, we do not actually do much work on it.

Two recently published books have reversed that trend and made Playboy the subject of monograph-length studies. Each is by a historian of gender and American culture and thus is conversant with the body of critique out there. But what distinguishes these studies from previous work is that their claims are supported by archival research in collections containing everything from company papers, memos, and correspondence (based in Chicago) to, rather intriguingly, Hefner’s personal scrapbooks (housed with him at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles). Having secured unprecedented access to these collections, both Elizabeth Fraterrigo and Carrie Pitzulo have made an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Playboy’s centrality to American consumer culture. For what each book reveals in its own way is that Playboy’s midcentury visibility was a function not only of its so-called “Playmates,” or centerfolds, but also, more radically, of its text, or the voluminous amount of prose devoted to high-end marketing, political discourse, and cultural refinement. Fraterrigo and Pitzulo consistently demonstrate that the time and labor Hefner and his associates committed to textual production demand our full attention. Their analysis of Playboy accounts for but moves well beyond the visual fact of bare flesh. In so doing, Fraterrigo and Pitzulo put forth a convincing and entirely sincere argument for reading the magazine’s articles.

Pitzulo’s and Fraterrigo’s examinations of Playboy from 1953 to the 1970s differ dramatically in the way they periodize the magazine’s development into...