User:NrmMGA5108/sandbox: Difference between revisions

criticism, “The Prisoner of Sex,” sparked acrimonious debates, like the very public, 1971 Town Hall debate with feminists Germaine Greer and Jill Johnston. And at the 1986 birthday celebration of the Feminist Writers Guild, attendants played “Pin the Tail on Norman Mailer” in “satiric protest against what they consider his antifeminist writings” (Blades). In a similar vein, ‘’Playboy’’ has dealt with its own share of feminist critique for the past five decades. From its inception, critics have lambasted the magazine for its centerfold: “it fetishized busty, young bodies for straight male consumption” (Pitzulo 35). ‘’Playboy’’ garnered backlash from feminists, such as Betty Friedan, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Gloria Steinem, as well as anti-pornography activists Gail Dines and Catharine MacKinnon. Steinem published her damning exposé on working conditions at the ‘’Playboy’’ clubs in ‘’Show’’ magazine and faced-off with Hefner for ‘’McCall’s’’ magazine in a lengthy interview in 1970. Copies of ‘’Playboy’’ were tossed into a “freedom trashcan” as part of the 1968 Miss America Pageant protest and ‘’Playboy’’ confronted the feminist movement with its article “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig” (May 1970). Hefner intended the piece to criticize radical feminists, but his condemnation of the militants solidified his—and ‘’Playboy’’’s—reputation as anti-feminist.

‘’Playboy’’ editors balanced the negative attention from Steinem’s experience as a ‘’Playboy’’ Bunny with Mailer’s appreciation of the clubs. Mailer’s presence at the ‘’Playboy’’ clubs and mansion “lent” them “literary and symbolic cachet they have won from few other public personalities” (Weyr 78). In “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” Mailer does not censure the guests’ egregious behavior toward the female employees, nor does he disapprove of the Bunnies’ attire. Instead, Mailer matter-of-factly states that the club “looked about the way one thought it would look” with corporate executive patrons and Bunnies in all colors (qtd. in Weyr 78). Whereas Steinem claimed the boning in her bunny costume would have made “Scarlett O’Hara blanch and the entire construction tended to push all available flesh up to the bosom,” Mailer complimented the outfits: the Bunny costume “exaggerated their hips, bound their waist in a ceinture and lifted them into phallic brassiere” (Steinem 39; Weyr 78). In his ‘’Presidential Papers’’, Mailer compares a Bunny’s breasts to the “big bullet[s] on the front bumper of a Cadillac” (23). Mailer’s approval of the costume, like his comparison of Hefner to Fitzgerald, captured how editors wanted the culture to view ‘’Playboy’’—as an American icon.  

While superficial, his praise for the Bunnies and their uniforms reinforced the growing ‘’Playboy’’ brand, compelling editors to also publish Mailer’s fiction