The Outline World Dispatch · The Outline

'Playboy' shaped the America of today

August 6, 2018·20 min·1 clip

A 1970 Playboy article titled 'Just Slip This Into Her Drink' coincided with Bill Cosby's second alleged assault that same year.

Host James C. Green interviews freelance journalist Jess Klein about a piece she wrote after inheriting a box of 1970s Playboy magazines from her brother, who found them on a New York street. Klein describes being struck by the elegance of the ads and the horror of the prose, noting the magazine was written almost entirely by male writers. She shows the August 1970 issue, pointing out details including the bunny-shaped footprints around a cover model and an interview with Paul Ehrlich on climate change that reads almost identically to today's warnings. The conversation zeroes in on an article titled Just Slip This Into Her Drink, ostensibly about aphrodisiacs, which she reads as a primer on getting women drunk to lower inhibitions. Klein connects this to Bill Cosby, whose second public assault allegation dates to 1970 and involves Autumn Burns and a Vegas hotel room. She describes Cosby's closeness to Hugh Hefner, the purported Cosby room at the Playboy Mansion, and a 2008 lawsuit from a 17-year-old accuser who named Hefner as complicit. She frames all of this against the early feminist movement: the introduction of rape shield laws and the long fight for spousal rape criminalization, which was not achieved in all 50 US states until 1993. Klein describes Hefner's Janus-faced politics: publishing accounts of illegal traumatizing abortions while objectifying women in the same issues. She cites Holly Madison's memoir from The Girls Next Door and allegations of domestic abuse in Hefner's household. Green asks how Playboy operates today, and Klein notes its brief nude-free experiment, pieces by Dr. Chantal Tibbles on empowering sex workers, and Me Too coverage that sometimes slipped into telling women to change their behavior. She cites Donald Trump's 1990 Playboy cover, which he still brags about, and Cooper Hefner's public repudiation of that cover. Klein closes by arguing that Playboy cannot fully escape its historical legacy and that even its more progressive pieces exist inside a culture it helped build.

As heard by us

A glossy magazine becomes a sharper study of sex, power, and selective progress.

The conversation treats Playboy less as nostalgia than as a clean example of glossy packaging, selective politics, and the gender logic underneath.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If Playboy looks like nostalgia, this episode shows the bill underneath.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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