This article examines images of urban and domestic space that appeared in Playboy magazine in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that in crafting the bachelor's ideal habitat, Playboy engaged in a popular discourse on changing roles for men and women, transformations in the urban landscape, and a consolidating ethos of consumption. Readers encountered a vision of urban life and domesticity that served as a gendered response to the perceived “feminization” of society and widespread suburbanization while also countering images of urban decline. Playboy's representations of the bachelor pad and the city provide insight into the meanings attached to the evolution of the metropolitan landscape in the postwar period and reveal the cultural foundations for the construction of a masculine identity based on leisure and consumption.
"The Playboy Town House," Playboy9 (May 1962): 84, 105.
2.
My investigation of the playboy's domestic realm builds on Barbara Ehrenreich's insights about Playboy's attempt to reclaim indoor space for men in The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1983), 43-4. For an excellent discussion of commodity consumption and postwar masculinity, see Bill Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern America (New York: Berg, 2001).
3.
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 3-8; Jessica Weiss, To Have and To Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2000 ); Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 23-29; Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 183-184; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985 ), 233, 240-41; and Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1992), 177-180.
4.
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique ( New York: Norton, 1963) is perhaps the most well-known expression of discontent with the postwar emphasis on woman-as-homemaker, but it was not the first. Eva Moskowitz, "`It's Good to Blow Your Top': Women's Magazines and a Discourse of Discontent, 1945-1965 ," Women's History8 (Fall 1996): 66-98, points to an open critique of domestic ideology. Joanne Meyerowitz's"Beyond the Feminine Mystique" and the essays in her edited volume Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1994) complicate the picture of postwar gender ideology by investigating a wider range of discourses and practices concerning women's roles. On marital tensions and frustrations, see May, Homeward Bound, 183-207 and Weiss, To Have and To Hold, 15-47.
5.
For examples of this discussion, see Look magazine's series on the beleaguered male: J. Robert Moskin, "The American Male: Why Do Women Dominate Him?" Look22 (February 4, 1958): 77-80; George B. Leonard, "The American Male: Why Is He Afraid to Be Different?" Look22 (February 18, 1958): 95-104; William Attwood, "The American Male: Why Does He Work So Hard?" Look22 (March 4, 1958): 71-75; and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "The Crisis of American Masculinity," Esquire51 (November 1958): 64-66, which summarized the prevailing critique of women's power but attributed the crisis to pressures for conformity. For women's workforce participation see Mitra Toossi, "A Century of Change: the U.S. Labor Force, 1950-2050," Monthly Labor Review125 (May 2002): 18-24.
6.
On late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century gender upheaval, see E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books , 1993); Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Michael Kimmel, "Men's Responses to Feminism at the Turn of the Century," Gender & Society1 (September 1987): 261-83. Gail Bederman's Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5-7, challenges the notion of "crisis," arguing that white middle-class men never doubted their right to wield power but merely looked for new ways to reconstitute power in a changing society.
7.
Shepherd Mead , "How to Handle Women in Business," Playboy4 (January 1957): 53-4. The article appeared again in the September 1963 issue.
8.
Wini Breines, Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties ( Boston: Beacon, 1992), 25-46; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 252-53; K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York : Routledge, 2005). James Gilbert's Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) offers a reassessment of the view that postwar American men were unduly concerned about masculine decline.
9.
On the need for scholars to consider how representations of urban spaces inform perception and experience, see Mary Corbin Sies, "North American Suburbs, 1880-1950: Cultural and Social Reconsiderations," Journal of Urban History27 (March 2001): 318-19.
10.
Susan Saegert , "Masculine Cities and Feminine Suburbs: Polarized Ideas, Contradictory Realities," Signs5 (Spring 1980): S96-111; Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 297-99. For debate on the conceptual utility of an urban/suburban dichotomy, see William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, "Bold New City or Built-Up 'Burb? Redefining Contemporary Suburbia" American Quarterly46 (March 1994 ): 1-30; and Robert Fishman, "Urbanity and Suburbanity: Rethinking the 'Burbs" American Quarterly46 (March 1994): 35-9.
11.
"Volume 1, Number 1" Playboy1, no. 1 (n.d.): 3.
12.
The articles proved so popular that Playboy published several more plans and initiated "A Playboy's Pad," a regular series of photographic essays on the actual "pads" inhabited by bachelors across America, beginning with "Manhattan Tower" in August 1965. The plans include "The Playboy Bed" (November 1959), "Playboy's Weekend Hideaway" (April 1959), "The Playboy Town House" (May 1962), "Playboy's Patio Terrace" (August 1963), "Playboy's Electronic Entertainment Wall" (October 1964), and "Playboy Plans a Duplex Apartment (January 1970).
13.
"Playboy's Penthouse Apartment," Playboy3 (September 1956): 54-60; "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment Part II," Playboy3 (October 1956): 66-70. Unless otherwise noted, quotations about the penthouse are from these sources.
14.
Barbara M. Kelly , Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 89-90.
15.
Philip Wylie , "The Womanization of America," Playboy 5 (September 1958): 52, 77.
16.
On housing designs and family ideals, see David Handlin, The American Home: Architecture and Society, 1815-1915 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978); Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); idem , Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Richard Bushman, Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth, eds., American Home Life, 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services (Knoxville : University of Tennessee Press, 1992); Kelly, Expanding the American Dream; Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press , 1990). On the ranch house, see Clifford Edward Clark, Jr., The American Family Home, 1800-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 193-97; and Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 203-18.
17.
Wylie, " Womanization," 77; and William Iversen, "Apartness," Playboy5 (May 1958): 35-6.
18.
Steven Gelbert , "Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing, and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity," American Quarterly49 (March 1997): 67-8; Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 58; Kelly, Expanding the American Dream, 71-3, discusses the imperative for home improvement projects in Levittown due to the small size of houses there. For earlier manifestations of masculinity within the family home, see Margaret Marsh, "Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity, 1870-1915," in Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffin, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1990 ), 111-27.
19.
"The New American Domesticated Male," Life36 (January 4, 1954): 42-4. See also "New Do-It-Yourself Market," Business Week (June 14, 1952): 70; "Do-It-Yourself Man," Look17 (September 22, 1953): 113-4; and "The Shoulder Trade," Time64 (August 2, 1954): 62.
20.
Shepherd Mead , "The Dream House and How to Avoid It," Playboy3 (July 1956), 53-4.
21.
"Penthouse Playmate," Playboy6 (August 1959): 55.
22.
On men and women persecuted for homosexuality and gender nonconformity, see David K. Johnson , The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecutions of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2004 ); John D'Emilio , "The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America," in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57-73; Alan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 264-70; Lillian Faderman, "The Love that Dares Not Speak Its Name: McCarthyism and Its Legacy," in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 43-5.
23.
The bachelor pads in the films All in a Night's Work (1961), Boeing Boeing (1965), and The Silencers (1966) served as points of seduction or featured mood-enhancing automated lighting and furnishings. For examples of bachelor-pad-themed cartoons see the following issues of Playboy: January 1959, 27; March 1960, 29; and January 1964, 177.
24.
Cohan argues that Rock Hudson's appearance in the film marked a concerted effort to reconstitute the closeted actor's heterosexual persona after the dissolution of a sham marriage. Steven Cohan, "So Functional for Its Purposes: The Bachelor Apartment in Pillow Talk," in Joel Sanders , ed., Stud: Architectures of Masculinity ( New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 28-41. George Wagner, "The Lair of the Bachelor," in Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Henderson, eds., Architecture and Feminism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 185. For further discussion of Playboy's domestic interiors, see Bill Osgerby, "The Bachelor Pad as Cultural Icon: Masculinity, Consumption and Interior Design in American Men's Magazines, 1930-65," Journal of Design History18, no. 1 (2005): 99-113.
25.
The notion of masculine performance comes from Judith Butler, who posits that gender identity "is performatively constituted by the very `expressions' that are said to be its results." Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 33.
26.
"McCulloch's Push-Button Paradise," Life40 (May 7, 1956): 71-8; A. Lawrence Kocher, "The New House for Family Living," Architectural Record119 (May 1956): 90; Glenn Fowler, "Builders Depict Home of Future," The New York Times (January 27, 1957): R1; "House of Future Runs by Buttons ," The New York Times (October 11, 1950): 39; Phyllis Ehrlich, "Push-Button Appliances Will Lighten Housework," The New York Times (January 1, 1958): 29.
27.
"Playboy's Patio Terrace," 96-102.
28.
"House of Future Previewed," Los Angeles Times (June 12, 1957): 3; and "`House of Future' Built of Plastic" The New York Times (June 16, 1957): R1. The master bedroom in the "Hotpoint House" model home on display in Long Island in 1950 reportedly featured similar controls, including a button to start the kitchen stove. "House of Future Runs by Buttons ," 39.
29.
John Anderson , "Designs for Living," Playboy8 (July 1961): 48.
30.
Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf , 1986).
31.
On the "open plan," see Lesley Jackson, Contemporary: Architecture and Interiors of the 1950s (London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1994), 81-91.
32.
Royal Barry Wills, "Space," Architectural Record97 (May 1945): 77; "A Hobby Space for Multiple Use," Architectural Record97 (May 1945 ); 91; Kocher, "The New House for Family Living," 90; and Jackson , Contemporary, 83-88.
33.
Blake Rutherford , "Let's Go to My Place," Playboy6 (February 1959): 58.
34.
Kenon Breazeale , "In Spite of Women: Esquire Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer," Signs20 (August 1994): 19-20.
35.
Harvey Levenstein , People of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 104, 132; Marling, As Seen On TV, 213, 218, 243-88. On Playboy's efforts to distinguish the leisurely cooking activities of the bachelor from women's family-oriented labor, see Joanne Hollows, "The Bachelor Dinner: Masculinity, Class and Cooking in Playboy, 1953-1961," Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies16, no. 2 (2002): 143-55.
36.
For the kitchen as "hub" of the house, see Kocher, "New House for Family Living," 90; Clark, American Family Home, 213-15; Marling , As Seen on TV, 250, 262-63; and Jackson, Contemporary, 88.
37.
"Playboy Plans a Duplex Penthouse," 159 and Thomas Mario, "The Gourmet Bit," Playboy4 (September 1957): 28-29.
38.
See the following articles by Thomas Mario: "Long Live the Lobster ," Playboy5 (August 1958), 19; "Santa Claus in a Bottle," Playboy2 (December 1954): 37; "Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum," Playboy2 (July 1955): 13; "How to Play with Fire," Playboy1 (July 1954): 23; "The Elegant Omelet," Playboy5 (February 1958): 32.
39.
Mario, " The Gourmet Bit," 27; Thomas Mario, "Playboy at the Salad Bowl," Playboy3 (July 1956): 32.
40.
Marling, As Seen On TV , 224, 226.
41.
Richard Gehman , "Man's Private World," Cosmopolitan150 (May 1961): 39-43.
42.
Andrew Hurley , Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the America Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 68, 57-72; on bowling alleys, see esp. 150-84. For baseball, see Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 146-54, 175. On malls, retail, and downtown, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 257-289; and Alison Isenberg , Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 176, 182. Ernest Havemann, "Amid Profound Change, Personal Crisis," Life51 (September 8, 1961): 100.
43.
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; 190-230; Lizabeth Cohen, Consumers' Republic, 194-256; Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight , 32-49; Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). On investors favoring large-scale suburban development, see Thomas W. Hanchett, "Financing Suburbia: Prudential Insurance and the Post-World War II Transformation of the American City," Journal of Urban History26 (March 2000): 312-28. Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 383-88; Michael Johns, Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Isenberg, Downtown, 183-209, discuss the waning primacy of downtown in the 1950s.
44.
Kristina Zarlengo , "Civilian Threat, the Suburban Citadel, and Atomic Age American Women," Signs24, no. 4 (1999): 936; and Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 328.
45.
"Survival Under Atomic Attack," produced by Castle Films in cooperation with the Federal Civil Defense Administration , 1951, available at www.archive.org . On post-WWII depictions of the effects of catastrophic warfare on urban centers and postcatastrophe urban danger, see Carl Abbott, "The Light on the Horizon: Imagining the Death of American Cities," Journal of Urban History32 (January 2006 ): 175-96. Eric Avila, "Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Film Noir, Disneyland, and The Cold War (Sub)Urban Imaginary," Journal of Urban History31 (November 2004): 7.
46.
Romantic comedies, including Pillow Talk (1959 ), Lover Come Back (1961), All in a Night's Work (1961), and If a Man Answers (1962), also provided a positive vision, setting their boy-meets-girl exploits against the backdrop of the city, especially New York.
47.
"Most Urban of Them All," Playboy4 (May 1957): n.p. (emphasis in original); "Playbill" Playboy5 (December 1958): 3; Hugh Hefner, "Golden Dreams," Playboy41 (January 1994): 114; "Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner," Playboy21 (January 1974): 65; Russell Miller, Bunny: The Real Story of Playboy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 16; and Hugh M. Hefner, "Playboy Philosophy," Playboy10 (January 1963): 42.
48.
Howard Chudacoff , The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
49.
Frederic C. Birmingham, "Summer in the City," Playboy5 (August 1958): 29-30, 67.
50.
See the "What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?" advertisements in the following issues of Playboy: January 1959, February 1958, January 1960, April 1964, February 1963, July 1958, August 1958, March 1958, April 1963, June 1963, November 1965, and December 1964.
51.
Hefner, "Golden Dreams ," 267.
52.
See the "Man at His Leisure" features in the following issues of Playboy: June 1959, 62; June 1960, 74; September 1963, 150-1; March 1961 , 94; "Painter of the Urban Scene," Playboy5 (April 1958): 49; and "The World of Leroy Neiman," Playboy25 (July 1978): 134.
53.
John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies ( London: Sage, 1990).
54.
Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1962), 108-15, 140; and Sex and the Office ( New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1964).
55.
"The Playboy Bed," Playboy6 (November 1959): 104; "The Playboy Bed," Playboy12 (April 1965): 88-9, 184. Beginning with The Silencers (1966), Dean Martin portrayed bachelor Matt Helm, who owned a similarly equipped, round rotating bed. A retired spy, Helm worked as a men's magazine centerfold photographer until he was called back into service. Tom Wolfe, The Pump-House Gang (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), 75.
56.
For competing views on the merits of life as a Playboy Bunny, see Gloria Steinem's two-part expose, "A Bunny's Tale," Show3 (May 1963), 90, and "A Bunny's Tale Part II," Show3 (June 1963), 66; and Kathryn Lee Scott, The Bunny Years (Los Angeles: Pomegranate Press , 1998).
57.
"The Playboy Mansion," Playboy13 (January 1966): 207. Readers were introduced to Hefner's domestic world with "Playmate Holiday House Party" in December 1961 , followed by "A Playmate Pillow Fight" in February 1963. On spatial control in Disneyland, see Avila, "Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight ," 10-6 and Marling, As Seen on TV, 109-18.
On western and "sunbelt" cities, see John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (Berkeley: University of Califsornia Press, 1992); Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: the Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York : Basic Books, 1987); Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight; Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993); Eugene P. Moehring, Resort City in the Sunbelt: Las Vegas, 1930-2000, 2nd ed. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000); Raymond A. Mohl, ed., Searching for the Sunbelt: Historical Perspectives on a Region ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990).
Playboy noted in 1958 that half of its readers were married. According to a 1962 study, among adult males age 18 or older in households receiving Playboy, 70% were married, while the percentage of homeownership in Playboy households was 49%. These figures, however, do not take into account the magazine's considerable popularity among men living on college campuses, where an estimated one-quarter of all copies of the magazine was sold, nor do they consider the demographics of those who did not purchase an issue but read someone else's copy. "Meet the Playboy Reader," Playboy5 (April 1958): 76-7; Daniel Starch and Staff, 1962Consumer Magazine Report (Mamaroneck, New York), 18, 40; "Sassy Newcomer," Time68 (September 24, 1956): 71.
64.
Margaret Marsh , "Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity," 111-27; and Steven Gelbert, "Do-It-Yourself," 67-8.
65.
Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 250-51; Neil Smith, "New City, New Frontier: The Lower East Side as Wild, Wild West," in Michael Sorkin , ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 61-83.
