Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality

The format of Playboy was developed to protect the magazine from prosecution under obscenity law. Writing from recognized writers was published to meet a standard of worth that would get the magazine First Amendment protection.

The First Amendment was then used by Playboy to protect its

sexual exploitation of women. Playboy sel s women.

The use of women as objects in Playboy is part of how Playboy

helps to create second-class status for women. Women in

Playboy are dehumanized by being used as sexual objects and

commodities, their bodies fetishized and sold. The term

“bunny” is used to characterize the woman as less than

human—little animals that want sex al the time, animals that

are kept in hutches.

The women in Playboy are presented in postures of submission and sexual servility. Constant access to the throat, the anus, and the vagina is the purpose. of the ways in which the

women are posed.

Playboy has made a specialty of targeting women for sexual

harassment: working women, including nurses, police, and

military personnel; and presumptively educated women, including university students and lawyers.

Underlying al of Playboy's pictorials is the basic theme of

al pornography: that al women are whores by nature, born

wanting to be sexually accessible to all men at all times. Playboy

particularly centers on sexual display as what women naturally do to demonstrate this nature.

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Pornography and Civil Rights

Playboy, in both text and pictures, promotes rape.

Playboy, especially in its cartoons, promotes both rape and

child sexual abuse.

There is also some amount of overtly violent material in

Playboy. The text often enthusiastically promotes various acts

of violence against women, including gang-rape. The pictures

usually include some pictures that show sadomasochism:

women are hurt in them or are in some physical danger. (For

example, a woman is naked with acupuncture needles all over

her body, including in her breasts; or a woman is chained to

a pole and surrounded by laser beams. )

Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1953. An early issue used

an employee as a centerfold; as her employer, Hefner had sex

with her too. This has remained the pat ern, the women who

work for Playboy, especially the centerfolds, being Hefner’s own

primary preserve of women. As the Playboy empire has increased in power and wealth, Hefner’s personal use of the women in the magazine has continued and expanded. He uses

them and he sel s them. Now the women are brought to him by

lesser pimps; he need not do the recruiting himself. For instance, Linda Marchiano, known as Linda Lovelace in the pornographic film “Deep Throat, ” was pimped to Hefner by her then-husband, Chuck Traynor. Hefner sodomized her and

tried to have her have intercourse with a dog. Dorothy Strat-

ten, a Playboy centerfold who was sodomized, tortured,

murdered, then raped after she was dead by her pimp-husband,

Paul Snider, was tricked and intimidated into photo sessions by

Snider, who then sold the photos and access to Dorothy herself