At the Junction of Two Manly Enterprises, a Hero Fantasy Unfolds

Claims of reading Playboy for the articles have long been met with raised eyebrows and knowing giggles. Even as the magazine is considering ending its US print edition,¹ references to its journalistic product still elicit laughter, as in a recent Saturday Night Live cold open in which a mock President Trump (played by Alec Baldwin) cheerfully takes a question from a Playboy reporter and is shocked to realize he will be asked about immigration policy rather than sex.² The joke is on Trump, because Playboy has always prided itself on its worldliness and superb storytelling. The magazine’s core business, after all, is not the objectification of women but the selling of an ideal Western masculinity—a fantasy whose recent erosion has arguably hurt Playboy more than the abundance of freely available images of nude women on the Internet.

Demonstrating just that centrality of the masculine ideal to Playboy’s once-roaring success is a new book that details the long-lasting relationship between the magazine and the various serial narratives about the fictional British spy James Bond. Bond would have been a Playboy subscriber if he were real, according to his creator, Ian Fleming. Playboy’s readers would have been Bond if they could transcend reality, according to the magazine’s editors. Lurking at the intersection of these two franchises (both, coincidentally, born in 1953) was the presumed answer to a pressing postwar question: What does true manhood look like?

Claire Hines’s intertextual analysis outlines the many aspects of the public version of the Playboy-Bond relationship—the magazine’s early serialization of Fleming’s thrillers, its 1964 Bond-themed cover and interview with actor Sean Connery (who was the first to portray Bond on screen), its pictorials of “James Bond’s Girls,” and the various references to Playboy products (or product placement, in modern terms) in some of the Bond films. So intertwined were the two franchises that Playboy reader letters even influenced the development of Bond’s character and appearance. For example, Fleming replaced Bond’s Berretta pistol from the first five novels with a Walther PPK after a Playboy reader criticized “Bond’s deplorable taste in firearms”—specifically, his use of a “lady’s gun” (42).

The more fascinating part of Hines’s analysis, however, goes beyond the two enterprises’ mutual boosting to spotlight the astonishingly parallel guidance they provided in encouraging male consumerism. One of the shared foci, on “fetishized mechanical objects” (88), was represented by Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 car and the Playboy automated round bed. Both Playboy and Bond encouraged the commodification of women and guilt-free (hetero)sexuality, as evidenced by the Bond girls and Playboy Bunnies. Both championed elaborate male grooming routines, gourmet food and alcohol, and travel to exotic locations.

The book makes a contribution to magazine studies in its discussion of class (a rare element in US media scholarship) as central to the Playboy-Bond relationship. Hines, a UK professor, notes that Bond’s appeal to North American men (Playboy’s target audience before its mushrooming into a global magazine franchise) stemmed in part from the character’s “apparent classlessness” (63)—which, not to be understood as a lack of sophistication, represented modernity. The casting of Connery as Bond, with his “aggressive masculinity” and “working-class Scottishness” (61), further boosted the character’s appeal. Bond was no longer “an aristocratic amateur,” like earlier spy heroes, but “every bit a professional secret agent” (10) who enjoyed the perks of his job and his adventurous sex life.

The wannabe American playboy who read Playboy for guidance was told by the magazine’s editors to strive to be similar: “He must take joy in his work, without regarding it as the end and all of living; he must be an alert man, an aware man, a man of taste, a man sensitive to pleasure, a man who—without acquiring the stigma of the voluptuary or dilettante—can live life to...