Why are women thrifting Playboy?
Disarming misogyny through reclamation
By ANJALI IYER — amiyer@ucdavis.edu
Over the last few years, I’ve noticed a change in how women view Playboy magazines. It started with the emergence of the Playboy bunny as a popular Halloween costume — the corset, fishnets and iconic bunny ears have become a hallmark of Halloweekend. The subsequent Playboy reformation has since manifested in logos on fast-fashion baby tees, merch and a surge in thrifting for vintage magazine editions.
Though attitudes toward Playboy memorabilia have softened over the years, critics have remained fiercely vocal since the time of the publication’s founding. Promotion copywriter Hugh Hefner started the magazine in 1953 when he purchased sex icon Marilyn Monroe’s nudes for the first ever “Sweetheart of the Month” feature. Hefner fancied himself an icon of the sexual revolution and a verdant feminist, but his actions in pursuit of profit often contradicted his public persona.
Countless former Playbunnies — hostesses for the Playboy mansion — would come forward after his death in 2017 with allegations of horrific abuse. Hefner would force models to change their appearance at his behest and mandated humiliating public weigh-ins, according to these women. Holly Madison, one of Hefner’s ex-girlfriends, shared how Bunnies were often restricted from leaving the Playboy mansion. In her memoir, Crystal Hefner, the third wife of Hefner, describes a harrowing story in which she discovered she was being filmed through hidden cameras in her husband’s bed.
Testimonies from the women closest to Hefner paint him as a man who desired a reputation as a savvy businessman imbued with an aspirational level of sexual prowess. Hefner’s attachment to his public perception was reflected in Playboy’s content, as the publication tried to maintain a semblance of balance between pornography and news entertainment with articles tactfully nestled between images of nude women.
This granted male readers plausible deniability — after all, they weren’t just reading for sexual pleasure; Playboy had scholarly articles too! This manifested in the creation of the first Playboy Club, where men could engage in scholarly conversation while corset-clad Bunnies served them drinks. To a modern audience, early Playboy was clearly a self-aggrandising male fantasy attempting to masquerade as an intellectual brand. It was an exploitative corporation that, in Madison’s words, “was about the breaking down of a woman.”
So, why are women choosing to reclaim Playboy?
It seems the stigma surrounding the magazine has evolved into a reclamation of the publication’s history of exploitation. While this phenomenon could be dismissed as a mere feature of fourth-wave feminism or the repopularization of physical media, it’s accompanied by an expressed desire to reclaim other things previously used by men to sequester women. For instance, the use of the word “cunt” — once considered one of the most profane words in the English language — is now an aspirational descriptor for one’s outward appearance.
Like Playboy magazines, women have since usurped and transformed the word’s implications. A term designed to degrade female genitalia and its female sex is now colloquially used to describe a woman as attractive and cool. These two phenomena symbolize a subversion of expectations — an outlandish way to shift a longstanding power imbalance.
Reclaiming these emblems of misogyny is a way to control and neutralize cycles of sexual exploitation that continue to subject women to subservience through the fetishization of our bodies.
A woman acquiring a copy of Playboy is not simply about owning a subversive coffee table book — it's a reclamation of sexuality manifested in the ownership of physical media. When a woman collects vintage Playboys, it’s not to ogle Linda Lovelace or memorialize Vladimir Nabokov’s feature interview. There is implicit value in ownership itself, irrespective of the magazine’s content, which distinguishes it from male possession.
Playboy and “cunt” are certainly not the only antiquated concepts subject to a modern redefinition but are emblematic of what it means to undermine the pillars of sexual objectification that uphold misogyny.
Written by: Anjali Iyer — amiyer@ucdavis.edu
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