Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy by Carrie Pitzulo (review)

Bachelors and Bunnies offers an intriguing interpretation of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy in its first two decades, portraying the magazine as a champion of sexual liberation for women as well as men, and, even more surprisingly, as a proponent of heterosexual monogamy. Carrie Pitzulo has arrived at these counterintuitive, revisionist views after scrupulous investigation of Playboy’s company archive in Chicago; thorough reading of the magazine’s understudied Forum and Advisor columns; and interviews with Hefner and other magazine editors. The quality of this evidence, along with Pitzulo’s deft shaping of it, ensures that this book will set the terms for the next generation of Playboy scholarship.

Pitzulo concedes that in its early years Playboy (founded in 1953) reveled in the anti-female male chauvinism endemic to postwar American culture, fanning men’s fears of suffocating mothers, nagging wives, and venal gold-digging co-eds. And she faults Hefner for taking an overly self-righteous, defensive posture when he became the target of feminist outrage in the early 1970s. (“A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual,” Gloria Steinem allegedly said.) But the upshot of Pitzulo’s argument is that Playboy was in the vanguard of 1960s-style liberal feminism—by celebrating female sexual agency in its pictorials, as well as through its editorial and financial support (via Hefner’s Playboy Foundation) of political campaigns for women’s abortion rights, educational and professional opportunity, and equal pay for equal work.

That Playboy nevertheless “fell short of a truly feminist agenda,” as Pitzulo soberly concludes, should surprise no one familiar with the image of a silk-robed Hugh Hefner surrounded by a harem of nubile blondes (166). Whatever else it might be, Playboy is first and foremost a vehicle of male pleasure and fantasy. In its early years, Hefner’s magazine battled a much-publicized masculinity crisis brought on by the decline of rugged individualism, the soullessness of corporate office work, and the valorization of domestic family life. Hefner proposed that men, in effect, embrace their feminization. The playboy is a man who loves cooking, shopping for clothes, and decorating his bachelor pad. He scrutinizes himself, and other men, with “a self-consciousness usually reserved for women” (6).

And Pitzulo isn’t convinced the visual objectification of Playmates was nearly as nefarious as Playboy’s feminist critics alleged. Much as she finds the wholesome girl-next-door Playmate formula limiting as a representation of American femininity, Pitzulo credits the centerfold feature with normalizing not just female availability but also women’s right to enjoy sex, thus subverting the Victorian sexual double-standard. In any case, the Playboy that emerges in Bachelors and Bunnies is less a soft-core porn slick than a national forum for thoughtful discourse about modern heterosexual relationships (though one intriguing discovery from Pitzulo’s scrutiny of readers’ letters is of gay men using Playboy to speak to each other). Perhaps Pitzulo’s most seductive finding is that Playboy was committed above all to monogamous heterosexual love and marriage—but only after an early adult period of stylish hedonism in the well-appointed urban penthouse.