Five years ago, reporters from the New York Times dropped a bombshell by exposing sexual harassment in Hollywood, with Harvey Weinstein’s misconduct being just a tip of the deeply misogynistic iceberg. The difficult and dogged investigation by Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey and Rebecca Corbett gave impetus to the #MeToo movement, that gave innumerable women all over the world a voice to share their stories of workplace sexual exploitation.
Kantor and Twohey wrote about it in a book titled She Said, in 2019, which has become the basis of a film of the same name, serving as a reminder of that brief period when women were empowered just by the fact that somebody, somewhere was reading their stories online. The #MeToo movement may not have had the desired impact; after Weinstein became the voodoo doll into whom everybody stuck pins, many sexual predators got away scotfree, but still, what the expose had achieved was nothing short of revolutionary.
Back in the 1970s, another small revolution took place in the media. It was the time of the women’s movement, sexual liberation and the rise of feminism, but nobody was talking openly about female desire. A series titled Minx, created by Ellen Rapoport, is about the publishing of an erotic magazine targeted at women, a good two decades after Playboy and other such magazines had brought pornography into the mainstream with their nude female centrefolds
Vassar graduate Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond), a second wave feminist, wants to bring out a magazine called The Matriarchy Awakens, but all the response she gets from male publishers to whom she pitches, is a puzzled, “But why is she so angry?”
The only one who shows interest is the cheerfully iconoclastic Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson) who runs a magazine publishing company called Bottom Dollar, that brings out cheap fetish magazines. He is no Hugh Hefner, but he gets by. (His wardrobe of bell bottoms and chest-baring shirts, seems to have been inspired by Bob Guccioni, founder of Playboy rival, Penthouse). He finds his nude models impressed by the feminist stories in a dummy copy of Joyce’s magazines and offers to publish it, with a few changes of course. With his marketing savvy he points out that nobody would read a “shouty” magazine with that off-putting name. The articles about marital rape and payment for housework were all very well, but they would need sugar-coating and that would entail a nude male centerfold.
The straitlaced Joyce is offended at the very idea. But, chicks are changing as a character observes and Doug cannot see why fun and equality cannot go together. Why does thinking of the fun part make her feel weak?
She comes around to accept that she is, after all, creating the female gaze. Male desire, she says, has always been celebrated, a male centrefold would give that power to women too. Doug convinces her that feminism and erotica can go hand in hand. What also helps change her mind is the Burt Reynolds semi-nude centrespread in Cosmopolitan magazine (a true event), that created a sensation at the time, and captured a large female readership.
Minx was not a real magazine, but was based on the handful like Playgirl and Viva, that had come out as a response to the Playboy stable of publications. The short-lived Viva was, ironically, published by Guccioni and managed to get respected writers like Simone de Beauvoir, Joyce Carol Oates, Anais Nin, to contribute pieces, even with its salacious photos, just as Playboy had sophisticated content amidst the nudes. Rapoport was quoted a having said to The Hollywod Reporter, “I read something about one of these magazines, and it struck me immediately: these magazines in the 1970s were feminist magazines, which I had no idea about. It was a workplace that was populated by feminists and pornographers.”
Ira Ritter, the publisher of Playgirl, launched in 1973, that carried celebrity and entertainment news along with male nudes, told Esquire magazine, “”Our goal was to treat women as people. Back then, they were sex objects presumed to be only interested in housekeeping or serving their man. We were a very threatening magazine for men.”
What is it but social hypocrisy that no eyebrows are raised when porn magazines for men are displayed on racks along with regular publications, but a magazine like Minx is shamefully hidden under the shop counter? Truckers transporting the cartons to distributors across the country refuse to carry it. If it publishes a piece about contraception, it offends the Catholic mobsters than control the transport business.
There is a scene, illuminating for Joyce, when she goes to a meeting with the Mafia with Doug, believing she is a partner, but is sent off to the kitchen to help the wives prepare and serve lunch. She notices that the Mafia wives have a kind of control over their households, the only way they assert power in the family. Joyces learns that self-esteem can come in different forms.
She and the Bottom Dollar team expect the occasional police raid, fines and confiscation of the material, but the virulence with which a female politician opposes Minx takes them by surprise, and she is completely immune to Doug’s charm. More to Joyce’s shock, young feminist students think Minx is selling out the cause so they boo her and organize campus protests to burn the magazine. There is the other difficulty in getting suitable advertising, because regular female products would not be a good fit.
Interestingly, both men and women who take their clothes off for a dubious kind of fame are not in the least ashamed. They walk around the office in the buff, or wearing the absurdly fetishistic costumes they don for the shoots. Still, there remains an uncomfortable ideological chasm between feminism and pornography. When Joyce defends her magazine to a feminist on a talk show, she is accused of being shallow. (She has nightmares of Gloria Steinem pelting her with tomatoes!)
Minx becomes a hit, however, both with women and gay men, and Joyce is giddy with joy at her vision reaching readers, never mind the comprises she has had to make. But there is a thin line between erotica and sleaze, and in his rush to chase success, Doung crosses it; there is the inevitable lawsuit too, threatening to shut down the magazine and making Minx a victim of its own success.
Half a century later, when most magazines have disappeared, not just the erotic ones, and pornography is available at the touch of the smartphone screen, all this fuss seems futile in retrospect. Still, the issues Minx and its real-life counterparts raised remain. When content for women, even today, is supposed to be fashion, make-up and cookery, and for men it’s cars, gadgets booze and sex, the question that remains unanswered is: what turns women on?
(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal dated November 18, 2022)