Jaki Nett, a 72-year-old yoga instructor and former Playboy bunny, is worried.

“Do you know if the magazine will survive?” she asks, on the phone from Germany.

You are viewing: Why Is The Playboy Symbol Bad

Nett is reacting to this week’s announcement that Playboy, a magazine first published over 60 years ago featuring a nude Marilyn Monroe, has decided to no longer feature photos of naked models in its pages.

Time has marched on, but the move to take nude photos out of its pages seems so antithetical to what the magazine has stood for and symbolized for six decades, it does not seem like an overreaction to question the magazine’s destiny.

Nett, who worked as a bunny for more than 11 years in the 1960s and 1970s out of a Los Angeles Playboy club, and was one of the first black bunnies to be employed there, says that “family” is on the line.

“Once you are a bunny, you are always a bunny,” she explains, recalling very happy years working out of the bunny-themed gentleman’s nightclub. Nett remembers nostalgically the mystique that came with being a bunny and being associated with the brand. “Men would look at us with these eyes of wonder,” she recalls. “We became part of an experience, a part of Americana.”

She says that Playboy took care of its own, financing at least half of her undergraduate degree, and making sure that things like sexual harassment and assault were never tolerated within the walls of its clubs.

“Even if people touched our tails, their [Playboy club] memberships were taken,” she says, referring to the fluffy white pompoms women working for Playboy wore on their rear. “As long as we were on the Playboy premises, we were protected.”

But shielding her from the worst in male-on-female violence was not something the Playboy franchise could help with on the outside.

Nett recalls being raped by one of the club’s patrons during her bunny years. The rape took place outside of the club premises, she says.

Read more : Why Are The Birds So Loud Right Now

She says reporting the incident to the police was out of the question at the time (“At that point, the woman was usually seen to be in the wrong, I didn’t want to go through that”). She was very clear who had done it, however, and knew his face well: he was a regular at the club.

Nett may not have felt she could turn to the authorities for help, but at the club there was no question whose side management was on once she shared what had happened: hers.

The next time he came in, all she had to do was point him out.

“He said he didn’t do it, and I said he did.”

The regular was banned for life, she says, even as he denied her accounts. “They did what they had to do. Inside the club they did what they could. Some people thought we were being used as a sexual object. This was not the case. I was very well protected. We all were,” she says.

Many women, however, see the brand that Playboy created as dangerously destructive to women’s well-being.

Jennifer Lena, a sociologist and professor at Columbia University, describes the Playboy phenomenon as anchoring down a reference point in terms of women’s sexuality which led to a way of thinking about women that was “an impediment to progress”.

At the time when women were set up to take advantage of sexual liberation, and define their bodies on their own terms, Playboy’s depictions of sexually willing and available “girls next door” made female nudity synonymous with the fulfillment of male desires in a male-dominated, patriarchal society, rather than one that finally paid attention to women as agents of their own bodies.

The creation of such a framework may be seen as having helped to lay the foundations for what has led to the rise of a mainstream, hyper-pornified culture that is more often than not degrading to women and divorced from notions of female consent.

Gloria Steinem, the American feminist icon and pioneer, told the Guardian: “For Playboy to stop publishing nude photos of women (of course, it never published nude photos of men) is like the NRA saying that it’s no longer pushing handguns because machine guns and assault rifles are so easily available.”

“Playboy would have to change its title, heart and brain cells in order to express the full humanity of men or women,” Steinem continued.

Read more : Why Do Doctors Not Like Hmo

Steinem is a longstanding critic of the Playboy franchise. In 1963, she published an exposé of the life and realities of a Playboy bunny after going undercover as one in in a New York Playboy club.

But for Carrie Pitzulo, an adjunct professor of history at University System of Georgia, depicting Playboy and its franchise as a wholly anti-woman operation is vastly mistaken.

Pitzulo, who has written a book on the subject, says that while the magazine was by no means radical, it introduced America to the notion that it was all right for good girls – specifically of the middle-class, white variety – to have sex.

“The playmate was the sweet girl next door,” she explains.

In such a way, Playboy – and its larger-than-life creator, Hugh Hefner – was actually promoting very mainstream, politically correct ideas of sex, Pitzulo says, centered on notions of family and monogamy. Such values were reflected in the advice columns Pitzulo recovered from the 1950s and 1960s that favored faithfulness, for instance, over promiscuity.

Liberal – even if not radical – causes were also taken up by the magazine, which was an open supporter of abortion rights, the creation of rape crisis centers and child day care centers. “Yes, it was a sexist magazine, but it wasn’t only about that,” she says.

For Pitzulo, the fact that Playboy has decided to stop publishing naked pictures in print says more about the state of our culture than about the publication per se.

“It shows us how far America has gone in terms of hypersexualisation in the mainstream: that the magazine that used to be the leader has given up.”

But no more naked pictures by Playboy needn’t be all bad. For some cultural commentators, the moment comes with a much-awaited degree of symbolism.

“I am so bored that conversations about women’s sexuality have focused on Playboy for 6o years, and I am glad it’s over,” says Lena.

“It’s time what we have a conversation about women’s sexuality on our own terms.”

Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY