Tim Hodgdon was a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of History at Arizona State University when he wrote this. He is now a Ph.D teaching at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB in Canada.

Introduction

Origins of feminist consciousness of sexual objectification

Second-wave radical feminists’ concern with the issue of sexual objectification dates from the earliest days of the movement. That concern first became publicly visible on 7 September 1968, when perhaps as many as two hundred women converged on Atlantic City, New Jersey from throughout the eastern United States to oppose “the Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol” perpetuated by the Miss America pageant.

Days prior to the event, the members of New York Radical Women (NYRW) had publicized their intention to “protest . . . an image that oppresses women in every area in which it purports to represent [them]” by staging “a day-long boardwalk-theater event” that would include “Picket Lines; Guerrilla Theater; Leafleting; . . . ; [and] a huge Freedom Trash Can” into which the demonstrators would “throw bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs, and representative issues of Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, Family Circle, etc. . . .” NYRW encouraged women to “bring any such woman-garbage you have around the house. . . .”

But a magazine of a somewhat different genre, self-described as Entertainment for Men, numbered among the publications discarded that day. Perhaps inspired by the NYRW leaflet’s assertion that “Miss America and Playboy’s centerfold are sisters over the skin,” someone thought to bring a copy of Playboy to the protest. A reporter for the New York Times noted that, in the exhilaration of the moment, the women “ripped up” the magazine “before dumping it into the trash can.”1

At the same time, women’s liberationists confronted among men of the counterculture and the New Left an ethos of “revolutionary” sexuality consistent with those movements’ broad commitment to, in the words of sociologists Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks, “self-liberation-freeing impulse and emotion from social repression and psychic inhibition-and the fostering of persons aware of their needs and desires, and capable of expressing them.”

As with other dimensions of the culture of youthful radicalism, this “revolutionary” sexuality reinforced male privilege, requiring women’s unquestioning sexual availability for its fulfillment. Women’s liberationists criticized the celebration of men’s sexual self-interest evident in what the members of Bay Area Women’s Liberation termed in 1969 “a flood of pornography coming out of the hippie culture and the white male movement, primarily revealed through their underground press. . . .”

A year later, two members of the same collective observed that radical men had “merely transferred the same old shit from [the] plastic, cosmetic wrapping” of the Establishment’s glamorized beauty culture “to a cheaper, tie-dyed package, and expected us to swallow it more willingly.” Nevertheless, as historian Mari Trine has argued, women’s liberation “continued and furthered many of the ideas about sexuality that appeared in the underground press,” asserting women’s right to a self-determined sexual subjectivity. Even as they distanced their new movement from the male-dominated left, many women’s liberationists believed fervently that sexual pleasure undermined the repressive Protestant ethic. In their revisionist notion of “revolutionary sex,” the sexual objectification of women by men stood in antithesis to sexual freedom.2

The movement protested against sexual objectification in a variety of creative ways, depending on local conditions. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union stood on the cutting edge of this wave of protest as it crested in 1970. Playboy Enterprises made its headquarters in downtown Chicago, and Hugh Hefner lived not far away, in the notorious Playboy Mansion. The CWLU decided to take their concerns to Hefner’s front door.

The CWLU’s contribution

The determination to confront Hugh Hefner as a purveyor of images of women as sexual objects sparked many demonstrations in 1970, including one at his Playboy Mansion in Chicago. On 15 April, Hefner hosted a party to raise funds for the local Moratorium Against the [Vietnam] War committee. That evening, perhaps two hundred demonstrators—“mostly women, but men, too,” bearing “a big [Viet] Cong flag”—answered the CWLU’s call to action. Penny, a member of the Union, wrote that “many other” women’s liberationists in the area “had been chafing to do a Playboy action,” anxious to expose the hypocrisy of Hefner’s stated opposition to an unjust war abroad while profiting from his own unjust exploitation of women at home. Shelley, another member, wrote that the demonstrators objected to Hefner’s “Playboy Empire—built on the concept that a woman is a mindless, big-boobed cunt, another accessory to a playboy’s total wardrobe.” The protesters exhorted guests to “sign your checks, but don’t go in!” Only one couple decided to follow this course of action, but Penny asserted that “over half [of] the paying guests didn’t show up.” She also claimed that “Hefner withdrew financial support of a civil-rights fundraising dinner for Charles Evers, black mayor of Payette, Mississippi, because a board member of the sponsoring organization had helped to spoil his party.”3

Women angered by the degrading image of the Playboy “Playmate of the Month” and other manifestations of American beauty culture staged further protests in 1970. More than fifty activists in the Boston area demonstrated outside that city’s Playboy club on 28 March. A few weeks later, a group of about twenty men burst into a conference of college fraternities at the same club, chanting “Free our sisters, free ourselves!” The following month, the women’s-liberationist newspaper Off Our Backs parodied the Playboy centerfold by publishing one of its own, dubbed “Mr. April.” Shortly after the 15 April protest at Hefner’s mansion, Playboy published Morton Hunt’s “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig,” touting it as an exposé of women’s liberation’s blind hatred of men. The article prompted renewed picketing in June by both women and pro-feminist men in Chicago. Elsewhere, a few women withdrew from beauty pageants, while an ad-hoc group, “Sisters Against Sexual Slavery,” gathered in downtown Century City, California, to mock a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored event, Girl-Watching Week, with an “ogle-in” of their own. New York City women’s liberationists staged a protest “to ‘liberate’ bunnies” outside a local Playboy club on 9 June.4

However, the appeal of beauty culture and the Playboy empire as targets for concerted action seems to have waned as 1970 drew to a close. The number of protests against Hefner’s enterprises reported in the feminist and countercultural press declined after 1971. Laura Lederer offered a plausible explanation when, in 1980, she reminisced that “more serious and crucial battles (or so it seemed at the time) were being fought in the arenas of reproductive rights . . . and crisis intervention” in response to growing awareness of sexual violence and woman-beating as widespread threats to women’s safety and human rights.5

Conclusion

1."No More Miss America! Ten Points of Protest," reprinted in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Random House, 1970), 521-523; Charlotte Curtis, "Miss America Pageant is Picketed by One Hundred Women," New York Times, 8 September 1968, 81. Both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the protest's organizers estimated that two hundred women picketed the pageant ("FBI Probed Women's Lib for LBJ White House," Arizona Republic 15 September 1991; Robin Morgan, "Women Disrupt the Miss America Pageant," in idem, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist [New York: Random House, 1977], 64).

2.Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks, Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 13; Bay Area Womens Liberation, "Stop the Pornies, Tooth and Nail" (Berkeley, Calif.) 1, no. 2 (1 October 1969): 12; Sandy [Boucher] and Ellen, "A Good Time Exposed by Al"l, It Aint Me, Babe, 6 August 1970, 17; Mari Trine, Revolutionary Sex: Continuities in the Underground Press and Womens Liberation Movement Publications, paper presented at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, New Orleans, La., 11 October 1996, 1-2; quote appears at 1.

3.Penny, "Mindless Sex Objects", Chicago Seed 5, no. 3 (1970): 5, 7, 18; Shelley, "Storm the Winter Palace", Chicago Seed 5, no. 3 (1970): 5.

4.Boler, Lake, and Wynne, We Sisters, 263. On Mr. April, see Carol Anne Douglas and Fran Moira, "Off Our Backs: The First Decade (1970-1980)", in Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam-Era Underground Press, ed. Ken Wachsberger (Tempe, Ariz.: Mica Press, 1993), 110. Morton Hunt, "Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig!" Playboy: Entertainment for Men 17, no. 5 (1970). "Men Picket Playboy", Everywoman, 31 July 1970, 4; "Contestant Quits Auction", Fifth Estate (Detroit), 2-15 April 1970, 14; Ann Forfreedom, "First L.A. Ogle-In", Everywoman, 11 September 1970, 5; Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism (New York: Quadrangle, 1971), caption to photo appearing between pp. 242-243.

Copyright 2000 by Timothy Hodgdon. Please do not reproduce without his permission. You may contact him at:

Tim Hodgdon
1529 Acadia St.
Durham, NC 27701

E-mail him at T.Hodgdon@RTMX.net to request permission to republish.