April 20, 2023 • 30 mins
As Viva continues to stumble along and figure itself out, so does seemingly everyone else in the 1970s. In the midst of the sexual revolution and the rise of “Porno Chic,” there’s a chorus of anti-porn feminists attacking Bob Guccione’s publishing empire, and Viva’s caught in the middle.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
It's late nineteen seventy five, just a few months after
Betty Jane's fired from Viva, and Viva publisher Bob Guccioni
is under fire. Bob's a central figure in the sexual revolution,
but he's also a central enemy of anti porn feminists,
a group that's expanding with a chorus that's growing louder
(00:22):
by the day. The marcher's aim was clear, let's kill
the four billion dollar industry that exploits females and female bodies,
young and old.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I'm ripping this up for incest survivors and right victims.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
This is what I have to say to Bob Guccioni.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
The early seventies famously ushered in a new kind of
get hip, get sexy, sexual liberation, which was mostly liberating
for men, but we'll get to that in a minute.
But by the mid seventies, porn makers like Bob are
sorting out just how far this liberation can go. So
while Kathy's been ramping up the cox at Viva, Bob's
(01:01):
been pushing the limits of what porn can be at Penhouse,
which means more vulva shown more explicitly than ever before.
Bob's getting attacked in both courtrooms and the court of
public opinion by groups on both sides of the political aisle.
By some, he's considered a free speech martyr and a hero,
but mainly he's seen as a larger than life symbol
(01:24):
of everything that's wrong and misogynistic about porn. Here's Bob
defending himself on sixty Minutes around this time.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
What do you say to those people, particularly women, who
say the sole purpose of Penthouse and the other magazines
is to demean women. We lord women, We uplift women.
We make life seem impossible without them. We were the
first people in New York to help finance the Equal
Rights Amendment.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
He's talking about the Era, a proposed constitutional amendment which
would have guaranteed equal rights for all sexes, an amendment
that came close, but for a variety of reason and
conservatives being one never passed.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
We were the first corporate group to come out and
donate money to Equal Rights Moment with Viva and I
have more women working for me that I have men,
more female executives working that I have male executives.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Bob loves to talk about how pro woman he is,
how many women he employs, how much he pays, and
all of this is true. His approach to business and
sexuality is incredibly progressive for the time, but he's not
letting his arguments stop there.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Well, if it wasn't for the fact that we are
all of us so damn dishonest about sex, we wouldn't
have the guilt that we have about it. And if
we didn't have the guilt we have about it, we
wouldn't have the problems that we do now.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
The guilt and shame that Bob is referring to is
a very real thing for everyone, But guilt and shame
regarding sex for women arguably comes from a very different
place than it does men. It's a lot more complex,
and it's made even more complicated by men like Bob.
And despite what he seems to think, the get hip,
(03:04):
gets sexy attitude of Viva and Penthouse isn't necessarily helping
alleviate that guilt. In a lot of ways. It might
even be making it a little bit worse for some women.
So Bob's now at war with anti porn feminists while
publishing a feminist porn magazine, which means Viva, well, it's
(03:25):
kind of at war with itself and in order to
understand what happens next at Viva. In this episode, we're
going to zoom out from the day to day Viva
story and dive into the seventies feminist porn wars, because
like any war, this one's complicated, full of skewed history,
conflicting motivations and beliefs, and the good guys they're not
(03:48):
quite as easy to identify as you'd think from crooked media,
and iHeartMedia. I'm Jennifer Ramalini and this is Stiffed Episode five,
not So Porno Chic Act one Zipless fuck over. Now,
(04:17):
none of us will really know why Bob GUCCIONI hated
Viva's rape issue enough to have editor Betty Jane fired
over it. But it's fair to say by putting out
their rape issue, the Viva editors were tripping a wire.
This topic is a hot button, not just for their boss,
but for the public in general. And according to Bob's
sixty minutes interview, that's not the kind of content the
(04:41):
Penthouse universe is about.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Bebby God. Penhouse is an entertainment medium. First, I don't
think I'm not a missionary. The fact that it may
also be informative is by the way, it is first
and entertainment medium, and.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
In his defense of his porn empire, Bob's also beating
another drum directly related to Viva's rape issue, and quite
possibly why he was so defensive with Betty Jane. Here's
Bob in a Nightwatch interview from the eighties with Christopher Glenn.
We heard part of their conversation earlier in the series.
Speaker 5 (05:14):
So some people say, when they speak disparagingly of your activities,
that reading magazines such as yours increases violent to sexual crimes,
et cetera, etc. And sure enough, here comes a study
published last week by researchers at the University of New
Hampshire that say it says essentially, at the higher of
the readership for men's magazine in a given state, the
higher the incidents of reported rate.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
Well, let me tell you that that's a lot of crap,
it's a lot of bold dash. Anybody came out with
a study like that is faking it. It just simply
isn't true. And every single study that's been done, including
the presidential study under I believe it was Johnson, where
you have real sexually explicit material available to the public,
there is an enormous decrease decrease in any incidence of
(05:58):
sexual crimes.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Well, Bob's saying here is not entirely untrue, but he's
pushing the argument a little far. In recent studies, like
one from the University of Texas in twenty twenty that
explored the connection between porn and sexual aggression over the
past forty years, researchers found there was no correlation between
sexually explicit material and sexual violence. But that doesn't mean
(06:20):
access to porn decreased crimes. Here's Bob digging in further
on that argument, and this time it's definitely a giant stretch.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
There are a lot of people that require what you
call hardcore smut for its therapeutic value. You know, that
sort of guy is kept from invading the privacy of
other citizens, kept from committing crimes of rape and other
sex crimes.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yes, he's saying penthouse and porn itself prevents rape. Not
the chillest nor most accurate argument, But remember, Bob is
not chill about porn right now, and neither is anyone else.
In fact, by the mid seventies and ramping up into
the eighties, the whole country is freaking the fuck out.
Speaker 6 (07:03):
The feminists hated porn because they felt it was the
man's view of sex and that women were not included.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
That's feminist writer and icon Erica Jong talking about a
certain fraction of feminists starting to crop up at the time.
Speaker 6 (07:20):
Okay, so I would ask the question, what if we
wrote our own explicit stuff, How would it be different,
How would women's explicitness be different from men? And if
women have a different view, is it, let's write about it.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Erica Jong's one of the first women, starting in the
seventies to write explicitly about women's sexuality in a big, proud,
mainstream way. But let's back up a bit. Jong's work
in the early seventies probably would not have received the
attention it did without the pro sex, pro female pleasure
feminism of the late sixties, a movement that imagined what
(08:02):
a true sexual liberation could look like for women.
Speaker 7 (08:06):
In the early consciousness raising sessions of the late sixties
were talking. Nineteen sixty seven nineteen sixty eight, there were
women talking about their desires and talking about pleasure.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
That's writer Nonah Willis o'roonowitz, author of the book Bad Sex, Truth, Pleasure,
and An Unfinished revolution, which she's talking about. Here are
the same consciousness Raisin groups we talked about the beginning
of this series, the ones attended by Viva editors like
Pat Linden and Gabe Bryant, the ones where women started
asking questions about their lives they'd never really asked before.
Speaker 7 (08:42):
What do we want from these relationships? What do we
want from sex? It's not like one female experience materialized
from these sessions, but the point was prioritizing this quest
for pleasure, and I think it was exhilar for these
women to just say their desires.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
This pro sex late sixties feminist movement is mostly underground,
but it sparks something broader. In fact, it's the spark
that helps light the fire of the seventy sexual revolution,
a fire that's ignited in part by Erica John's landmark
feminist novel Fear of Flying, which comes out in nineteen
seventy three, the same year as Viva. Fear of Flying
(09:25):
is a runaway success and international bestseller. Most famously and importantly,
the book introduces the concept of the zipless fuck, which
basically said straight women sometimes wanted sex with no strings attached.
Here's journalist Christine Emba reading one of the most famous
passages from John's Fear of Flying.
Speaker 8 (09:45):
The zipless fuck is free of ulterior motives. There's no
power game. The man is not taking and the woman
is not giving. No one is attempting to prove anything
or get anything out of anyone. The zipler fuck is
the purest thing there is.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Emba talks a lot about this kind of pure casual
sex in her own book, Rethinking Sex, which covers sexual
ethics from the nineteen sixties to today.
Speaker 8 (10:11):
Basically, what she's talking about is sex like women being
able to have sex without being used, without their sexuality
being used for something else, like to prove something, or
like just having sex for sort of the pleasure of it.
And Yeah, I think that did resonate with women because
(10:31):
you know, for so long there is this discourse about how,
like men want sex, women want love.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Emba devotes an entire chapter of her book to the
zipless fuck and what it meant to the sexual revolution.
Speaker 8 (10:41):
When the term the zipless fuck was popularized, what the
public understanding of that was like, Oh, women just want
to have casual sex with no feelings really fast, Like
they just want to have empty sex with more people
and I guess that conclusion felt rising to people too.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
It's true, this idea of Erica Jong's about centering female
pleasure in the seventies, it was extremely controversial. Here's Erica again.
Speaker 6 (11:12):
I was amazed, actually that people were shocked, because I
thought what I was saying was so obvious, that there
was a whole realm of feeling that was being unreported.
I didn't think this would surprise anybody, but.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Talking about women's desires in the beginning of the sexual
revolution weirdly did surprise lots of people.
Speaker 6 (11:35):
I was absolutely commenting on what I thought was missing
from the conversation. The conversation about sex was had in
male terms.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
The sex industry was then as it is today, mainly straight,
male shaped, male funded, and male benefiting. But there are
pro sex feminists in the early seventies like Johng who
trying to change this.
Speaker 6 (12:01):
I tried to introduce the female view, the female feeling, really,
that's all. And the fact that anybody found that shocking
is amazing to me.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
The successive fear of flying makes John the face of
a kind of feminist sexual rebellion. She's everywhere in the seventies.
There's even a big profile of her in Viva, though
not every feminist is psyched about her success, and not
every Viva editor appreciated her work. I asked Viva editor Pat,
do you remember Erica Jong at all.
Speaker 9 (12:34):
At the oh time? Yeah, yeah, I do, I remember.
I didn't think too much of it.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Henry Miller said that she was changing women's lives the
way he had changed men's lives.
Speaker 9 (12:45):
Maloney, she did a sort of porny kind of stuff.
She was just one of many, and she had her
own voice, and she was and you know, she was
making it.
Speaker 7 (12:58):
Now.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Pat's more on the conservative side of things, and while
she's not totally anti porn, she's emblematic of this split
in second wave feminism at this time, a fracture in
the movement that's about to quake because the thing that's
splintering them is porn. And porn is suddenly everywhere. It's unavoidable,
in your face, and for the first time it's not
(13:21):
just in print. And with the explosion of mainstream porn,
the initial mission of the pro sex feminist starts to
get twisted, and the fires sparked by Erica John and
others in the early Sexual Revolution start to blaze out
of their control.
Speaker 8 (13:36):
Understanding and valuing female sexuality does not look the same
as like, well, here's a porn set. Now you can
just like help a man get off even more times
than you would have.
Speaker 9 (13:45):
In the past.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Act twomists at War. By the mid seventies, it's fair
to say pornography is everywhere in America. It's on local
newsstands and magazine form, but it's also in your hometown's
neighborhood movie theater. Here's Viva's film critic Molly Haskell.
Speaker 6 (14:15):
They were sut a softcore porn and they went mainstream
and people were talking about them. They went they were
opening up legitimate theaters.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Most famously, the porn movie Deep Throats, playing in dozens
of mainstream theaters across the country. It's bringing in millions
of dollars. It's a must see.
Speaker 10 (14:33):
Deep Throat was a hardcore porn film starring Linda Lovelace,
who appeared to show off in it's a talent for
taking a penis very deep into her throats.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
That's Karina Longworth, the film historian and longtime host of
the podcast. You must remember this, and it's important to
know that before this time, porn movies didn't really exist.
There were stag films, but they were short, poor quality,
didn't have plots. There was no internet, no streaming. If
you wanted to watch porn back then, you could maybe
(15:10):
maybe see these films in a private men's club which
only men saw them. Women had not been involved in
porn viewing, and suddenly now they were. There's an in
the no cool factor surrounding Deep Throat, and it helps
kick off an entire cultural trend, porno chic.
Speaker 10 (15:30):
So the New York Times came up with the term
porno chic to explain what was happening when people who
were not creepy men in raincoats started to see movies
like Deep Throat in movie theaters, and it started to
become expected that you would go see a movie like
Deep Throat so that you could keep up with cocktail
(15:50):
party conversation.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
If books like Fear of Flying helped spark the pro
sex feminist movement, movies like Deep Throat unleashed anti high
porn feminist fury in a way that becomes impossible to contain.
Because the Americans going out to see Deep Throat in
the seventies cannot be dismissed as young perverts. They're regular
people and not so regular people. They're celebrities like Johnny
(16:15):
Carson and Jack Nicholson and even Angela Lansbury who are
proudly publicly lining up at the box office and telling
their friends.
Speaker 10 (16:24):
There's a period of I think two maybe three years
where amongst the top ten highest grossing movies of the
whole year of all movies, there is an X rated
hardcore pornography movie on that top ten, their first one
being Deep Throat, which is on the same top ten
as The Godfather Too.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
And Deep Throat is important for all sorts of cultural reasons,
but it also perfectly encapsulates the question who exactly is
being liberated by sexual liberation during this time.
Speaker 10 (16:51):
The narrative suggests that this is a frigid woman who's
like has had sex but has never been able to
enjoy it until she discovers that her clitteress is deep
into her throat and so the only way to reach
it is by like sticking a big dick all the
way down in there.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
This discovery is made by Linda Lovelace's doctor, who is
of course a man. Here's a clip from the film
Have You.
Speaker 7 (17:17):
Ever Taken a penis all the way down to the
bottom of your throat.
Speaker 6 (17:21):
No, I try, but I choke.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Oh well, now I hear.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
It's a matter of discipline.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And while up until this point, pro sex feminists were
trying to center their own sexual pleasure in the Sexual Revolution,
this is not exactly what they were bargaining for.
Speaker 10 (17:38):
The Sexual Revolution sort of pretended to be about women's pleasure,
but really Wasn't you know this is a narrative of
a film which says it's about giving women orgasms. But
women do not have glittericism in the back of their throats.
It is absolutely possible that some women enjoy deep throating.
They could enjoy it for many reasons. They could even
feel orgasmic from it, but not have clitterses in their throats.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Also important is that right before deep throat and porno chic,
pro sex feminists had just started bringing awareness to female
anatomy and what it meant to pleasure it. And part
of that awareness was an education about clitteresses and how clitterises,
not vaginal penetration, are the key that unlocks the door
to where a woman's orgasm is hiding. Here's Nona willis
(18:25):
Aronowitz again.
Speaker 7 (18:26):
You know, the clitteral orgasm was on the tips of
everybody's tongues, no pun intended, So I think in some
ways it was like a positive representation and a positive
osmosis to some feminist messages. But on the other hand,
there was a backlash embedded in a lot of these
narratives where ultimately men were re centered in female pleasure.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
In other words, when it came to mainstream porn, the
central figure both viewer and subject was most often men,
and more specifically male anatomy.
Speaker 7 (19:00):
And that was a way, I think to reassure all
these men who are looking at these porn movies, even
though women are liberated, don't worry. They're still obsessed with
your dick and they need it in order to fully
realize their sexual pleasure.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
So Deep Throat is in many ways a mockery of
female sexuality, a joke about glitteristes and female orgasms. And
if there was ever any question about who the so
called sexual revolution is for, deep Throat makes clear that
in straight relationships, for straight women, sexual satisfaction is about
one thing, kneeling at the altar of the dick, an idea, incidentally,
(19:42):
that Kathy and Viva and all of its cocks is
pushing at this time too.
Speaker 10 (19:47):
And so this movie, which ends up becoming effectively part
of the sexual revolution because it opens up mainstream movie
theaters too. Hardcore porn is selling a lie that is
a lie that serves what men want to do sexually
more than it serves what women want to do sexually.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Deep throat and porno Shika itself is a big turning
point in the sexual revolution. Straight men suddenly feel even
more entitled to sex. Here's Nona Willis Aronowitz again.
Speaker 7 (20:19):
And a sexual revolution was through the male lens and
created new kinds of fines for women all of a sudden,
not that the sexual revolution. There were all kinds of
pressures to be groovy and be with it and not
have hang ups. And I think women felt like, why
(20:41):
am I even having sex when these guys don't care
about my pleasure? But if they didn't have it, they
were like lame or they were fruit or frigid. I
think it really did put women in this frustrating bind.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
And some of the women working at Viva very much
felt this dichotomy. Here's Viva Annie Gottlieb.
Speaker 11 (21:01):
Who was pretty bad time for women because we were
making ourselves sexually available, but we really didn't have any
sense that we still felt like we needed men's attention
to make us worthy.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
And all of this makes some women think they need
to show up sexually in a different way than how
they actually feel. Here's Viva editor Pat.
Speaker 9 (21:24):
I think everybody was putting on a big show about
you know, how liberated they were. You know, everybody is
trying to be something, something that is fashionable, something that's hip,
something that's with it, whatever words you want to use.
And the one thing that you were not supposed to
be was a woman who wanted a relationship with a man.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
And this is where things start to split feminism in
a big way.
Speaker 7 (21:48):
Well, man hating is interesting, right. It's like, of course,
if you are heterosexual, you don't hate men because you
desire that sexually and or desire them romantically. You want
to build lives with them, you want to have children
with them. But at the same time, if you're raising
your consciousness and becoming a feminist, you are going to
(22:11):
be angry at men and you are going to have
these aha moments of saying, what the fuck?
Speaker 1 (22:18):
But this, this man hating, man loving is just too
many truths for the feminist movement to hold it once.
Speaker 7 (22:25):
Once we hit the mid seventies. The one sect of
the feminist movement is really very focused on protection for women,
protection from men's impulses, protection from rape, domestic violence, sexual assault,
and pleasure really wasn't centered or part of that conversation.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
And then there's the other side.
Speaker 7 (22:46):
I think that pro sex feminists, as they were called,
weren't dismissing these problems, but they were saying, we have
to talk about a balance between pleasure and danger.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
And so by the mid to lie seventies, feminism breaks
in two. There are pro sex feminists and anti porn feminists,
and the latter is quickly overtaking the movement, with more
and more women joining their cause. In fact, by nineteen eighty,
Deep Throat actress Linda Lovelace will join the movement after
(23:19):
stating publicly that she was physically abused on set and
coerced into many of the scenes in the film. Lovelace
will ultimately testify before Congress the quote, every time someone
watches that movie, they're watching me being raped. But Lovelace
isn't the loudest nor earliest voice in the anti porn movement.
(23:42):
Women like Andrea Dwarkin are out years before her ferociously
ringing this anti porn bell.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
What we're doing is say that pornography is an institution
that helps to socialize men to rape, and that without
that kind of socialization, we don't take it as inevitable
that men will rape.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
You can hear how Dowarkins stands is in direct opposition
with Bob's from that Night Watch interview earlier, and while
neither is actually wrong per se, both views are extreme.
Bob took pro pornography a little too far, and Dowarkin's
position was in many ways limiting, exclusionary, and even disempowering
(24:26):
because of porn And I'll throw an exotic dancing and
sex work here too. If these things can only ever
be about perpetuating violence against women, then it goes to
follow that if you are pro any of them, if
you don't want to blow up the system so much
as rehabilitate it, then according to Dwarkin's limited lens of feminism,
(24:47):
you're considered outside the fold, even anti sisterhood and anti
feminist itself. Here's pat again.
Speaker 9 (24:54):
There's a memory and an image of being what feminism
was about, but no it was big, messy.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Miss and this is where a magazine like Viva could
have been a bridge to be both anti violence and
pro female desire, to push boundaries, to bring together anti
porn and pro sex feminists who really did have a
lot of the same goals in mind.
Speaker 7 (25:16):
They both broadly wanted the same things, which is to
be able to have sex and pursue pleasure without male
dominance and male misogyny getting in the way.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Unconsciously or not. The Viva editors were in real time
trying to deliver something that combined the two perspectives by
interviewing sex workers and writing openly about straight women's sexual fantasies,
while also covering topics like sexual violence and consent in
their rape issue. This utopian goal of liberated sexuality is
the direction they were starting to go. But given everything
(25:53):
they were up against, this is a tall order, a
magic trick that's incredibly tricky to pull off. Here's editor
Ga Bryant, who was there at the inception of Viva.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
You would think that Viva, Sexy and intelligent, would reflect
how we see ourselves, but it turned out not to.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
And why did it turn out not to?
Speaker 5 (26:17):
Well, still, to come on, the news hour the never
ending battle over pornography with Penhouse publisher Bob Guccioni and others.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
This is Bob on yet another news show, defending his
pornography against the anti porn feminists. Remember, Bob doesn't even
like leaving his house, but this issue is important enough
that he's going out on TV a lot, and this
time he's up against the anti porn powerhouse Dorchen Leedholt.
What pornography does is it makes every woman the actual
(26:47):
or potential victim of sexual violence. It functions as a
kind of terrorism. It keeps us silent. Leidhold was president
of the group Women Against Pornography or WOP, which had
a different meeting in the seventies than as today. I
know what played a major role in the feminist porn wars,
and they wanted Penthouse shut down or at least censored.
(27:08):
But Bob's not a nubie when it comes to this debate,
and he's not afraid to dig in.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
This is a totally subjective affair, and what demeans women
in her opinion may not demean women in my opinion
or yours or someone else's. Let me just answer by
quoting from a former head of the National Organization of Women.
She read the magazine.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
He's talking about Penhouse here.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
She went on to say, I couldn't do what I
was asked to do. She said, on the September issue,
I could find no put down of women, no suggestion
that women were asked to be exploited, hurt or pressed,
or even asked to cook dinner. There is no suggestion
that women be forced to have sex against their will,
she said. Penhouse sexy, yes, sexist no.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
What Bob overlooks in all this vigorous defending of Penhouse
is that he might have actually held the key to
unlocking this battle with anti porn feminists Viva magazine. Like
we've said before, Viva straddled a line between pro sex
and anti porn, especially with its rape issue. But Bob
forbids the editors from addressing any topics like this. As
(28:14):
a result, they can't possibly make a relevant feminist porn magazine.
Their hands are tied, they're kept from meeting the moment.
And as for their other boss, Kathy, she doesn't help matters.
She stands by her man and ignores the concerns of
the anti porn feminists entirely here's Kathy on Arlenehurson's show
(28:35):
now Here.
Speaker 9 (28:35):
You are a successful business woman, believer in women's rights,
and you're missus Bob Gucciuni.
Speaker 7 (28:42):
I'm sure you get a lot of flack from people.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Oh, from people.
Speaker 6 (28:45):
A lot of extreme feminists.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
I get flack from, but they really don't pay attention
to them. I mean, they're crazy, lunatic ringenyways.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
And in her inaction around Betty Jeane's firing and her
inability to define Viva in this important moment, Kathy sets
the tone for an inevitable sea change, the fatal turn
off course in Viva that's just about to come.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
I don't know anybody who wants to look at pictures
of male penises. I just don't. And you know, I
like the idea of a sexy magazine for women, but
this isn't sexy to me.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Stiff is an original podcast from iHeartMedia and Crooked Media.
It's produced by Crooked Media. It's hosted and written by
me Jennifer Ramalini and produced by Megan Donnas. Sidney Rapp
is our associate producer. Story editing by Mary Knock, music
sound design and engineering by Hannes Brown. Our fact checker
(29:49):
is Julia Paskin. Additional production support from Nafila Cato and
Inez Maza from Crooked Media. Our executive producers are Sarah Geismer,
Katy Long, and Mary Knap, with special thanks to Alison
Falsetta and Lyra Smith from iHeartMedia. Our executive producers are
Beth Anne Macaluso and Julia Weaver.
It's late nineteen seventy five, just a few months after
Betty Jane's fired from Viva, and Viva publisher Bob Guccioni
is under fire. Bob's a central figure in the sexual revolution,
but he's also a central enemy of anti porn feminists,
a group that's expanding with a chorus that's growing louder
(00:22):
by the day. The marcher's aim was clear, let's kill
the four billion dollar industry that exploits females and female bodies,
young and old.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I'm ripping this up for incest survivors and right victims.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
This is what I have to say to Bob Guccioni.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
The early seventies famously ushered in a new kind of
get hip, get sexy, sexual liberation, which was mostly liberating
for men, but we'll get to that in a minute.
But by the mid seventies, porn makers like Bob are
sorting out just how far this liberation can go. So
while Kathy's been ramping up the cox at Viva, Bob's
(01:01):
been pushing the limits of what porn can be at Penhouse,
which means more vulva shown more explicitly than ever before.
Bob's getting attacked in both courtrooms and the court of
public opinion by groups on both sides of the political aisle.
By some, he's considered a free speech martyr and a hero,
but mainly he's seen as a larger than life symbol
(01:24):
of everything that's wrong and misogynistic about porn. Here's Bob
defending himself on sixty Minutes around this time.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
What do you say to those people, particularly women, who
say the sole purpose of Penthouse and the other magazines
is to demean women. We lord women, We uplift women.
We make life seem impossible without them. We were the
first people in New York to help finance the Equal
Rights Amendment.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
He's talking about the Era, a proposed constitutional amendment which
would have guaranteed equal rights for all sexes, an amendment
that came close, but for a variety of reason and
conservatives being one never passed.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
We were the first corporate group to come out and
donate money to Equal Rights Moment with Viva and I
have more women working for me that I have men,
more female executives working that I have male executives.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Bob loves to talk about how pro woman he is,
how many women he employs, how much he pays, and
all of this is true. His approach to business and
sexuality is incredibly progressive for the time, but he's not
letting his arguments stop there.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Well, if it wasn't for the fact that we are
all of us so damn dishonest about sex, we wouldn't
have the guilt that we have about it. And if
we didn't have the guilt we have about it, we
wouldn't have the problems that we do now.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
The guilt and shame that Bob is referring to is
a very real thing for everyone, But guilt and shame
regarding sex for women arguably comes from a very different
place than it does men. It's a lot more complex,
and it's made even more complicated by men like Bob.
And despite what he seems to think, the get hip,
(03:04):
gets sexy attitude of Viva and Penthouse isn't necessarily helping
alleviate that guilt. In a lot of ways. It might
even be making it a little bit worse for some women.
So Bob's now at war with anti porn feminists while
publishing a feminist porn magazine, which means Viva, well, it's
(03:25):
kind of at war with itself and in order to
understand what happens next at Viva. In this episode, we're
going to zoom out from the day to day Viva
story and dive into the seventies feminist porn wars, because
like any war, this one's complicated, full of skewed history,
conflicting motivations and beliefs, and the good guys they're not
(03:48):
quite as easy to identify as you'd think from crooked media,
and iHeartMedia. I'm Jennifer Ramalini and this is Stiffed Episode five,
not So Porno Chic Act one Zipless fuck over. Now,
(04:17):
none of us will really know why Bob GUCCIONI hated
Viva's rape issue enough to have editor Betty Jane fired
over it. But it's fair to say by putting out
their rape issue, the Viva editors were tripping a wire.
This topic is a hot button, not just for their boss,
but for the public in general. And according to Bob's
sixty minutes interview, that's not the kind of content the
(04:41):
Penthouse universe is about.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Bebby God. Penhouse is an entertainment medium. First, I don't
think I'm not a missionary. The fact that it may
also be informative is by the way, it is first
and entertainment medium, and.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
In his defense of his porn empire, Bob's also beating
another drum directly related to Viva's rape issue, and quite
possibly why he was so defensive with Betty Jane. Here's
Bob in a Nightwatch interview from the eighties with Christopher Glenn.
We heard part of their conversation earlier in the series.
Speaker 5 (05:14):
So some people say, when they speak disparagingly of your activities,
that reading magazines such as yours increases violent to sexual crimes,
et cetera, etc. And sure enough, here comes a study
published last week by researchers at the University of New
Hampshire that say it says essentially, at the higher of
the readership for men's magazine in a given state, the
higher the incidents of reported rate.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
Well, let me tell you that that's a lot of crap,
it's a lot of bold dash. Anybody came out with
a study like that is faking it. It just simply
isn't true. And every single study that's been done, including
the presidential study under I believe it was Johnson, where
you have real sexually explicit material available to the public,
there is an enormous decrease decrease in any incidence of
(05:58):
sexual crimes.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Well, Bob's saying here is not entirely untrue, but he's
pushing the argument a little far. In recent studies, like
one from the University of Texas in twenty twenty that
explored the connection between porn and sexual aggression over the
past forty years, researchers found there was no correlation between
sexually explicit material and sexual violence. But that doesn't mean
(06:20):
access to porn decreased crimes. Here's Bob digging in further
on that argument, and this time it's definitely a giant stretch.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
There are a lot of people that require what you
call hardcore smut for its therapeutic value. You know, that
sort of guy is kept from invading the privacy of
other citizens, kept from committing crimes of rape and other
sex crimes.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yes, he's saying penthouse and porn itself prevents rape. Not
the chillest nor most accurate argument, But remember, Bob is
not chill about porn right now, and neither is anyone else.
In fact, by the mid seventies and ramping up into
the eighties, the whole country is freaking the fuck out.
Speaker 6 (07:03):
The feminists hated porn because they felt it was the
man's view of sex and that women were not included.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
That's feminist writer and icon Erica Jong talking about a
certain fraction of feminists starting to crop up at the time.
Speaker 6 (07:20):
Okay, so I would ask the question, what if we
wrote our own explicit stuff, How would it be different,
How would women's explicitness be different from men? And if
women have a different view, is it, let's write about it.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Erica Jong's one of the first women, starting in the
seventies to write explicitly about women's sexuality in a big, proud,
mainstream way. But let's back up a bit. Jong's work
in the early seventies probably would not have received the
attention it did without the pro sex, pro female pleasure
feminism of the late sixties, a movement that imagined what
(08:02):
a true sexual liberation could look like for women.
Speaker 7 (08:06):
In the early consciousness raising sessions of the late sixties
were talking. Nineteen sixty seven nineteen sixty eight, there were
women talking about their desires and talking about pleasure.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
That's writer Nonah Willis o'roonowitz, author of the book Bad Sex, Truth, Pleasure,
and An Unfinished revolution, which she's talking about. Here are
the same consciousness Raisin groups we talked about the beginning
of this series, the ones attended by Viva editors like
Pat Linden and Gabe Bryant, the ones where women started
asking questions about their lives they'd never really asked before.
Speaker 7 (08:42):
What do we want from these relationships? What do we
want from sex? It's not like one female experience materialized
from these sessions, but the point was prioritizing this quest
for pleasure, and I think it was exhilar for these
women to just say their desires.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
This pro sex late sixties feminist movement is mostly underground,
but it sparks something broader. In fact, it's the spark
that helps light the fire of the seventy sexual revolution,
a fire that's ignited in part by Erica John's landmark
feminist novel Fear of Flying, which comes out in nineteen
seventy three, the same year as Viva. Fear of Flying
(09:25):
is a runaway success and international bestseller. Most famously and importantly,
the book introduces the concept of the zipless fuck, which
basically said straight women sometimes wanted sex with no strings attached.
Here's journalist Christine Emba reading one of the most famous
passages from John's Fear of Flying.
Speaker 8 (09:45):
The zipless fuck is free of ulterior motives. There's no
power game. The man is not taking and the woman
is not giving. No one is attempting to prove anything
or get anything out of anyone. The zipler fuck is
the purest thing there is.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Emba talks a lot about this kind of pure casual
sex in her own book, Rethinking Sex, which covers sexual
ethics from the nineteen sixties to today.
Speaker 8 (10:11):
Basically, what she's talking about is sex like women being
able to have sex without being used, without their sexuality
being used for something else, like to prove something, or
like just having sex for sort of the pleasure of it.
And Yeah, I think that did resonate with women because
(10:31):
you know, for so long there is this discourse about how,
like men want sex, women want love.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Emba devotes an entire chapter of her book to the
zipless fuck and what it meant to the sexual revolution.
Speaker 8 (10:41):
When the term the zipless fuck was popularized, what the
public understanding of that was like, Oh, women just want
to have casual sex with no feelings really fast, Like
they just want to have empty sex with more people
and I guess that conclusion felt rising to people too.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
It's true, this idea of Erica Jong's about centering female
pleasure in the seventies, it was extremely controversial. Here's Erica again.
Speaker 6 (11:12):
I was amazed, actually that people were shocked, because I
thought what I was saying was so obvious, that there
was a whole realm of feeling that was being unreported.
I didn't think this would surprise anybody, but.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Talking about women's desires in the beginning of the sexual
revolution weirdly did surprise lots of people.
Speaker 6 (11:35):
I was absolutely commenting on what I thought was missing
from the conversation. The conversation about sex was had in
male terms.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
The sex industry was then as it is today, mainly straight,
male shaped, male funded, and male benefiting. But there are
pro sex feminists in the early seventies like Johng who
trying to change this.
Speaker 6 (12:01):
I tried to introduce the female view, the female feeling, really,
that's all. And the fact that anybody found that shocking
is amazing to me.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
The successive fear of flying makes John the face of
a kind of feminist sexual rebellion. She's everywhere in the seventies.
There's even a big profile of her in Viva, though
not every feminist is psyched about her success, and not
every Viva editor appreciated her work. I asked Viva editor Pat,
do you remember Erica Jong at all.
Speaker 9 (12:34):
At the oh time? Yeah, yeah, I do, I remember.
I didn't think too much of it.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Henry Miller said that she was changing women's lives the
way he had changed men's lives.
Speaker 9 (12:45):
Maloney, she did a sort of porny kind of stuff.
She was just one of many, and she had her
own voice, and she was and you know, she was
making it.
Speaker 7 (12:58):
Now.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Pat's more on the conservative side of things, and while
she's not totally anti porn, she's emblematic of this split
in second wave feminism at this time, a fracture in
the movement that's about to quake because the thing that's
splintering them is porn. And porn is suddenly everywhere. It's unavoidable,
in your face, and for the first time it's not
(13:21):
just in print. And with the explosion of mainstream porn,
the initial mission of the pro sex feminist starts to
get twisted, and the fires sparked by Erica John and
others in the early Sexual Revolution start to blaze out
of their control.
Speaker 8 (13:36):
Understanding and valuing female sexuality does not look the same
as like, well, here's a porn set. Now you can
just like help a man get off even more times
than you would have.
Speaker 9 (13:45):
In the past.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Act twomists at War. By the mid seventies, it's fair
to say pornography is everywhere in America. It's on local
newsstands and magazine form, but it's also in your hometown's
neighborhood movie theater. Here's Viva's film critic Molly Haskell.
Speaker 6 (14:15):
They were sut a softcore porn and they went mainstream
and people were talking about them. They went they were
opening up legitimate theaters.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Most famously, the porn movie Deep Throats, playing in dozens
of mainstream theaters across the country. It's bringing in millions
of dollars. It's a must see.
Speaker 10 (14:33):
Deep Throat was a hardcore porn film starring Linda Lovelace,
who appeared to show off in it's a talent for
taking a penis very deep into her throats.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
That's Karina Longworth, the film historian and longtime host of
the podcast. You must remember this, and it's important to
know that before this time, porn movies didn't really exist.
There were stag films, but they were short, poor quality,
didn't have plots. There was no internet, no streaming. If
you wanted to watch porn back then, you could maybe
(15:10):
maybe see these films in a private men's club which
only men saw them. Women had not been involved in
porn viewing, and suddenly now they were. There's an in
the no cool factor surrounding Deep Throat, and it helps
kick off an entire cultural trend, porno chic.
Speaker 10 (15:30):
So the New York Times came up with the term
porno chic to explain what was happening when people who
were not creepy men in raincoats started to see movies
like Deep Throat in movie theaters, and it started to
become expected that you would go see a movie like
Deep Throat so that you could keep up with cocktail
(15:50):
party conversation.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
If books like Fear of Flying helped spark the pro
sex feminist movement, movies like Deep Throat unleashed anti high
porn feminist fury in a way that becomes impossible to contain.
Because the Americans going out to see Deep Throat in
the seventies cannot be dismissed as young perverts. They're regular
people and not so regular people. They're celebrities like Johnny
(16:15):
Carson and Jack Nicholson and even Angela Lansbury who are
proudly publicly lining up at the box office and telling
their friends.
Speaker 10 (16:24):
There's a period of I think two maybe three years
where amongst the top ten highest grossing movies of the
whole year of all movies, there is an X rated
hardcore pornography movie on that top ten, their first one
being Deep Throat, which is on the same top ten
as The Godfather Too.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
And Deep Throat is important for all sorts of cultural reasons,
but it also perfectly encapsulates the question who exactly is
being liberated by sexual liberation during this time.
Speaker 10 (16:51):
The narrative suggests that this is a frigid woman who's
like has had sex but has never been able to
enjoy it until she discovers that her clitteress is deep
into her throat and so the only way to reach
it is by like sticking a big dick all the
way down in there.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
This discovery is made by Linda Lovelace's doctor, who is
of course a man. Here's a clip from the film
Have You.
Speaker 7 (17:17):
Ever Taken a penis all the way down to the
bottom of your throat.
Speaker 6 (17:21):
No, I try, but I choke.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Oh well, now I hear.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
It's a matter of discipline.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And while up until this point, pro sex feminists were
trying to center their own sexual pleasure in the Sexual Revolution,
this is not exactly what they were bargaining for.
Speaker 10 (17:38):
The Sexual Revolution sort of pretended to be about women's pleasure,
but really Wasn't you know this is a narrative of
a film which says it's about giving women orgasms. But
women do not have glittericism in the back of their throats.
It is absolutely possible that some women enjoy deep throating.
They could enjoy it for many reasons. They could even
feel orgasmic from it, but not have clitterses in their throats.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Also important is that right before deep throat and porno chic,
pro sex feminists had just started bringing awareness to female
anatomy and what it meant to pleasure it. And part
of that awareness was an education about clitteresses and how clitterises,
not vaginal penetration, are the key that unlocks the door
to where a woman's orgasm is hiding. Here's Nona willis
(18:25):
Aronowitz again.
Speaker 7 (18:26):
You know, the clitteral orgasm was on the tips of
everybody's tongues, no pun intended, So I think in some
ways it was like a positive representation and a positive
osmosis to some feminist messages. But on the other hand,
there was a backlash embedded in a lot of these
narratives where ultimately men were re centered in female pleasure.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
In other words, when it came to mainstream porn, the
central figure both viewer and subject was most often men,
and more specifically male anatomy.
Speaker 7 (19:00):
And that was a way, I think to reassure all
these men who are looking at these porn movies, even
though women are liberated, don't worry. They're still obsessed with
your dick and they need it in order to fully
realize their sexual pleasure.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
So Deep Throat is in many ways a mockery of
female sexuality, a joke about glitteristes and female orgasms. And
if there was ever any question about who the so
called sexual revolution is for, deep Throat makes clear that
in straight relationships, for straight women, sexual satisfaction is about
one thing, kneeling at the altar of the dick, an idea, incidentally,
(19:42):
that Kathy and Viva and all of its cocks is
pushing at this time too.
Speaker 10 (19:47):
And so this movie, which ends up becoming effectively part
of the sexual revolution because it opens up mainstream movie
theaters too. Hardcore porn is selling a lie that is
a lie that serves what men want to do sexually
more than it serves what women want to do sexually.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Deep throat and porno Shika itself is a big turning
point in the sexual revolution. Straight men suddenly feel even
more entitled to sex. Here's Nona Willis Aronowitz again.
Speaker 7 (20:19):
And a sexual revolution was through the male lens and
created new kinds of fines for women all of a sudden,
not that the sexual revolution. There were all kinds of
pressures to be groovy and be with it and not
have hang ups. And I think women felt like, why
(20:41):
am I even having sex when these guys don't care
about my pleasure? But if they didn't have it, they
were like lame or they were fruit or frigid. I
think it really did put women in this frustrating bind.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
And some of the women working at Viva very much
felt this dichotomy. Here's Viva Annie Gottlieb.
Speaker 11 (21:01):
Who was pretty bad time for women because we were
making ourselves sexually available, but we really didn't have any
sense that we still felt like we needed men's attention
to make us worthy.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
And all of this makes some women think they need
to show up sexually in a different way than how
they actually feel. Here's Viva editor Pat.
Speaker 9 (21:24):
I think everybody was putting on a big show about
you know, how liberated they were. You know, everybody is
trying to be something, something that is fashionable, something that's hip,
something that's with it, whatever words you want to use.
And the one thing that you were not supposed to
be was a woman who wanted a relationship with a man.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
And this is where things start to split feminism in
a big way.
Speaker 7 (21:48):
Well, man hating is interesting, right. It's like, of course,
if you are heterosexual, you don't hate men because you
desire that sexually and or desire them romantically. You want
to build lives with them, you want to have children
with them. But at the same time, if you're raising
your consciousness and becoming a feminist, you are going to
(22:11):
be angry at men and you are going to have
these aha moments of saying, what the fuck?
Speaker 1 (22:18):
But this, this man hating, man loving is just too
many truths for the feminist movement to hold it once.
Speaker 7 (22:25):
Once we hit the mid seventies. The one sect of
the feminist movement is really very focused on protection for women,
protection from men's impulses, protection from rape, domestic violence, sexual assault,
and pleasure really wasn't centered or part of that conversation.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
And then there's the other side.
Speaker 7 (22:46):
I think that pro sex feminists, as they were called,
weren't dismissing these problems, but they were saying, we have
to talk about a balance between pleasure and danger.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
And so by the mid to lie seventies, feminism breaks
in two. There are pro sex feminists and anti porn feminists,
and the latter is quickly overtaking the movement, with more
and more women joining their cause. In fact, by nineteen eighty,
Deep Throat actress Linda Lovelace will join the movement after
(23:19):
stating publicly that she was physically abused on set and
coerced into many of the scenes in the film. Lovelace
will ultimately testify before Congress the quote, every time someone
watches that movie, they're watching me being raped. But Lovelace
isn't the loudest nor earliest voice in the anti porn movement.
(23:42):
Women like Andrea Dwarkin are out years before her ferociously
ringing this anti porn bell.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
What we're doing is say that pornography is an institution
that helps to socialize men to rape, and that without
that kind of socialization, we don't take it as inevitable
that men will rape.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
You can hear how Dowarkins stands is in direct opposition
with Bob's from that Night Watch interview earlier, and while
neither is actually wrong per se, both views are extreme.
Bob took pro pornography a little too far, and Dowarkin's
position was in many ways limiting, exclusionary, and even disempowering
(24:26):
because of porn And I'll throw an exotic dancing and
sex work here too. If these things can only ever
be about perpetuating violence against women, then it goes to
follow that if you are pro any of them, if
you don't want to blow up the system so much
as rehabilitate it, then according to Dwarkin's limited lens of feminism,
(24:47):
you're considered outside the fold, even anti sisterhood and anti
feminist itself. Here's pat again.
Speaker 9 (24:54):
There's a memory and an image of being what feminism
was about, but no it was big, messy.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Miss and this is where a magazine like Viva could
have been a bridge to be both anti violence and
pro female desire, to push boundaries, to bring together anti
porn and pro sex feminists who really did have a
lot of the same goals in mind.
Speaker 7 (25:16):
They both broadly wanted the same things, which is to
be able to have sex and pursue pleasure without male
dominance and male misogyny getting in the way.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Unconsciously or not. The Viva editors were in real time
trying to deliver something that combined the two perspectives by
interviewing sex workers and writing openly about straight women's sexual fantasies,
while also covering topics like sexual violence and consent in
their rape issue. This utopian goal of liberated sexuality is
the direction they were starting to go. But given everything
(25:53):
they were up against, this is a tall order, a
magic trick that's incredibly tricky to pull off. Here's editor
Ga Bryant, who was there at the inception of Viva.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
You would think that Viva, Sexy and intelligent, would reflect
how we see ourselves, but it turned out not to.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
And why did it turn out not to?
Speaker 5 (26:17):
Well, still, to come on, the news hour the never
ending battle over pornography with Penhouse publisher Bob Guccioni and others.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
This is Bob on yet another news show, defending his
pornography against the anti porn feminists. Remember, Bob doesn't even
like leaving his house, but this issue is important enough
that he's going out on TV a lot, and this
time he's up against the anti porn powerhouse Dorchen Leedholt.
What pornography does is it makes every woman the actual
(26:47):
or potential victim of sexual violence. It functions as a
kind of terrorism. It keeps us silent. Leidhold was president
of the group Women Against Pornography or WOP, which had
a different meeting in the seventies than as today. I
know what played a major role in the feminist porn wars,
and they wanted Penthouse shut down or at least censored.
(27:08):
But Bob's not a nubie when it comes to this debate,
and he's not afraid to dig in.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
This is a totally subjective affair, and what demeans women
in her opinion may not demean women in my opinion
or yours or someone else's. Let me just answer by
quoting from a former head of the National Organization of Women.
She read the magazine.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
He's talking about Penhouse here.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
She went on to say, I couldn't do what I
was asked to do. She said, on the September issue,
I could find no put down of women, no suggestion
that women were asked to be exploited, hurt or pressed,
or even asked to cook dinner. There is no suggestion
that women be forced to have sex against their will,
she said. Penhouse sexy, yes, sexist no.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
What Bob overlooks in all this vigorous defending of Penhouse
is that he might have actually held the key to
unlocking this battle with anti porn feminists Viva magazine. Like
we've said before, Viva straddled a line between pro sex
and anti porn, especially with its rape issue. But Bob
forbids the editors from addressing any topics like this. As
(28:14):
a result, they can't possibly make a relevant feminist porn magazine.
Their hands are tied, they're kept from meeting the moment.
And as for their other boss, Kathy, she doesn't help matters.
She stands by her man and ignores the concerns of
the anti porn feminists entirely here's Kathy on Arlenehurson's show
(28:35):
now Here.
Speaker 9 (28:35):
You are a successful business woman, believer in women's rights,
and you're missus Bob Gucciuni.
Speaker 7 (28:42):
I'm sure you get a lot of flack from people.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Oh, from people.
Speaker 6 (28:45):
A lot of extreme feminists.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
I get flack from, but they really don't pay attention
to them. I mean, they're crazy, lunatic ringenyways.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
And in her inaction around Betty Jeane's firing and her
inability to define Viva in this important moment, Kathy sets
the tone for an inevitable sea change, the fatal turn
off course in Viva that's just about to come.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
I don't know anybody who wants to look at pictures
of male penises. I just don't. And you know, I
like the idea of a sexy magazine for women, but
this isn't sexy to me.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Stiff is an original podcast from iHeartMedia and Crooked Media.
It's produced by Crooked Media. It's hosted and written by
me Jennifer Ramalini and produced by Megan Donnas. Sidney Rapp
is our associate producer. Story editing by Mary Knock, music
sound design and engineering by Hannes Brown. Our fact checker
(29:49):
is Julia Paskin. Additional production support from Nafila Cato and
Inez Maza from Crooked Media. Our executive producers are Sarah Geismer,
Katy Long, and Mary Knap, with special thanks to Alison
Falsetta and Lyra Smith from iHeartMedia. Our executive producers are
Beth Anne Macaluso and Julia Weaver.
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