![]() ![]() Although Playboy featured white women exclusively as centerfolds in its first decade, its late-night television program, Playboy’s Penthouse, frequently included black entertainers like Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sara Vaughn, and Ray Charles. It began for the express purpose of offering “a little diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age.” Yet it didn’t take long for the magazine and its “brand” to assume other roles. Hefner’s sense of the magazine’s social and cultural role developed gradually. ![]() magazine, responded to Hugh Hefner’s claim that Playboy celebrated the beauty of the female body by countering: “There are times when a woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.” Its popularity, however, was in many ways connected to its reliance on sexual conventions and “girl next door” fantasies as well as its subversion of traditional racial, sexual, and gender constrictions. Gloria Steinem, feminist activist and founding editor of Ms. As Elizabeth Fraterrigo notes in Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America, in the postwar era the magazine was considered the “premier arbiter of American beauty” and possessed “tremendous cultural power.”įor its critics, however, the magazine’s elevation of men as swinging bachelors and women as objects of lust made it an egregious example of sexism in the media. Its radical thesis-that misguided notions of masculinity were at the root of America’s moral quandary-was new for Baldwin (at least in emphasis) and a direct challenge to the magazine’s primary demographic.įounded in 1953 by Hugh Hefner, Playboy originally targeted and appealed to white, heterosexual, middle- and upper-class male consumers, depicting a life of glamor, status, sophistication, and sexual freedom. James Baldwin submitted an essay, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” to Walter Lowe Jr., the first African American editor of Playboy magazine. ![]()
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