May 11, 2023 • 29 mins
As the 1970s come to a close, so does Viva’s run as one of America’s first feminist porn magazines. We explore what the legacy of Viva magazine tells us about issues of female sexuality and sexual autonomy, and how many of these battles are still being fought today.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So I'm reading from this Viva issue, the international magazine
for women.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
It's been a minute since Viva's sex advice columnist, Doctor
Judy has seen a physical copy of Viva magazine, since
she could actually look at and reflect on her work.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
First thing I open is, I'm captured by this photograph
opposite my column with a naked woman just on her top, naked,
there's a pincer on her nipple.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Truth is, unless you held on to them since the
nineteen seventies issues of Viva, they're extremely hard to find.
It's like the work of Viva's women, like most all work,
if you think about it, has just poof disappeared. But
I have all the issues. I've been collecting them for years.
I brought them to every editor and writer I met
(00:50):
in person, including doctor Judy.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
So I'm fascinated with this photograph. And then opposite it
is my column Sexual Fantasies, a study of erotic fantasies
their meaning, significance in contribution to the human sexual condition,
which is really kind of cool because it's not just
the fantasy, but my analysis of it, which comes from
(01:15):
intelligence and a lot of experience and some scientific understanding
and analytic understanding.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
When Bob first launched FEVA, the sex Fantasy's column was
written by a man, But when Doctor Judy took over,
she blew this other guy's work out of the water.
Just listen to one of her pieces.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Fantasy nourishes our sexual psychees and charges our sexual energies.
It adds the luster of the unexplored to our sexual
experiences and experiments. Nearly every individual falls through some secret
erotic fantasy. The range of these is as wide as
the range of humanity. So true, and that is why,
(01:59):
like humanity, they are infinitely interesting. Yes, this month, Viva
continues exploring the complex, fascinating world of sexual fantasy.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
For just a second. In our interview, doctor Judy gets
lost in the work, in her work, she'd forgotten. She's proud.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Oh I love this. Okay, it was always my thought.
Your fantasy is you are the I love this. I
would always tell people this. You are the producer, the director,
and all the actors in your fantasy. You are not
just you.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
You created them.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
So you are the guy or the girl or whatever
whoever else is in your fantasy. You made them up
and you're the one who's directing the show, so all
of it belongs to you. You create the whole thing.
So that was my favorite lesson and I loved it.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
The women I talked to for this podcast were almost
all in their seventies and eighties. There were decades away
from their time at Viva, but they remembered it often vividly.
When Viva shuddered in January of nineteen seventy nine, it
wasn't just the end of a magazine, it was the
end of an era.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
So all of a sudden, all the openness about sex
publicly stopped, and so people didn't have an outlet anymore.
Whereas things were going upwards to being more educated on
different levels, all of that was cut off.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
So what happened? Why did Bob pull the rug out
from under everyone? And what can Viva's legacy reveal to
us about sex and feminism today? From Crooked Media and iHeartMedia,
I'm Jennifer Romalini and this is the final episode of Stiff,
Episode eight, The last Word, Act one. The light bulb
(03:59):
does not want to change.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
The formula should have worked, and to this day, I
really don't know why it didn't.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
That's Gaye Bryant, who you may remember had the original
idea for Viva. Gaze still a bit flu mixed over
why her idea didn't succeed, and so are some of
Viva's editors, like Robin Willaner.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
The editorial vision I think absolutely could have worked. I
think the vision for it could have succeeded.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Now, some of the editors I talked to thought Viva's
failure had nothing to do with content or vision or execution,
but something much bigger, something systemic. Here's Viva and Penthouse
editor Peter Block.
Speaker 5 (04:42):
I think the main reason Viva failed is that I
can't think of a good, intelligent women's magazine that succeeded ever.
I mean, one after the other. There's been some great magazines,
and they all go by the way saw it. None
of them succeed.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
But most people I interviewed for this series hung Viva's
downfall on one fatal misstep. Here's Viva writer Annie Gottlieb.
Speaker 6 (05:09):
The very same pictures failed to attract women. I mean,
I think they missed the target of female sexuality, you know,
by a mile, at least in the visuals.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
And here's Bob Guccioni Junior explaining.
Speaker 7 (05:21):
You know, women with disdainfull of at the average women
in the street, if they knew about it, just thought
it was a magazine with men's genitate issuing.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
And even if some of Viva's readers claimed they wanted
quote more cock.
Speaker 7 (05:35):
It lacked the sort of subtlety and imagination and you know,
fantasy element that women wanted in the magazine. That it
was too in your face, too blunt, and they didn't
want to necessarily see this much and they get male flesh,
and it was just a different perception. The way a
man gets excited was the way a woman.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Gets excited, even gay seconds this sentiment, if.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
I had to put it in a sentence, I think
that the physical turns men on and the emotional turns
women on.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Okay, Since the beginning of reporting this series, I've wondered
a lot about this. Every Viva editor I talked to
repeated this line. Women just aren't turned on visually. Women
who are into men don't actually like looking at men's
bodies and especially not their dicks. Women need subtlety and softness.
(06:30):
The male nudes could never work. Viva was doomed from
the start. Blah blah blah. And this line about women
not liking porn is not limited to this story. It's
a line used by cis white heterosexual men for decades
as the reason not to fund female pornographers. It's a
big part of why the porn industry still doesn't cater
(06:52):
to women in a meaningful way anywhere near the same
way it caters to men. And here's the thing, it's
just that it's not true.
Speaker 8 (07:01):
You know, it's absolute bollocks that women are not visually stimulated.
You fucking bet we are.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
That's Cindy Gallup. She's the founder of Make Love Not Porn,
a feminist sex site. There's a little bit social network,
a little bit porn hub, except ethically curated and without
the copious misogyny.
Speaker 8 (07:18):
You know, and research on its being done. That show
show us porn, show us men's snakered bodies. You bet
we get wet. You know, that's a load of crap
that we need emotion. I mean, women absolutely enjoy looking
at men's naked bodies. You bloody bet we do.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Cindy says, the challenge of being a feminist in the
porn business comes down to one very very obvious thing,
the patriarchy.
Speaker 8 (07:41):
We as women have never been allowed to bring our
lens to bear on human sexuality, and the world is
a poorer place for it. The world makes it fucking
difficult to innovate and disrupt social narratives around sex.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
And this tracks with the Viva story too, with Bob
and the male photographer's art directing photo shoots, deciding what
women desire without ever asking the women themselves. And as
much as things have changed for women in the decades
since Beava launched, this hasn't. It's an American societal norm
that seems, for a variety of reasons, immovable. We're stuck.
Speaker 8 (08:20):
And so here's what has not changed since the seventies
and is still enormously problematic today. Any industry that is
male dominated at the top inevitably produces output that is
objectifying and offensive and objection to women.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
But what about feminism's gains more women in boardrooms? Hell,
all those female penhouse executives Bob loved talking about Kathy
Keaton at the top of Viva's masthead. Cindy's not hearing it.
Speaker 8 (08:51):
It's slightly old joke about the light bulb. How many
therapists does it take to change of light bulb? Only one?
But the light bulb has to already want to change
in every single industry in popular culture that informs our
views on everything, including the roane of men, the roan
of women, the role of sexuality, what makes you sexual desirable?
What doesn't? The light bulb does not want to change.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
And so maybe it wasn't that women didn't like looking
at dis in Viva. It's more that the men in charge,
the gatekeeping dicks themselves held on tight two well, the dicks.
They didn't actually ask the question what do women want? Instead,
they just asked what would I do if I were
a woman. But we kind of knew all this right.
(09:37):
Over the last eight episodes, we've covered all the iterations
that Viva went through during its brief existence, and there
were a lot naked women, naked men, no dicks, flaccid dicks,
back to no dicks again, cool, smart feminist writing, weird
anti feminist writing, low brow humor, high brow fashion, etc.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Etc.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
And the thing is that even though the editors tried
a bunch of different things, none of them were commercially successful.
Though it's hard to quantify how much of this was
tied to Bob and the controversy that surrounded him. His
reputation was for sure at least a small factor, especially
when it came to making money through ads. Here's editor
(10:23):
Robin will Lanner.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
Again, Viva had the problem of coming out of the
Penthouse organization that didn't give any comfort to advertisers, and
nobody was ever going to give Viva the benefit of
the doubt on advertising.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Magazines need advertising money, period, and mainstream advertisers of all stripes,
especially those who advertise in women's magazines like cosmetics brands,
are today and have always been wary to be publicly
aligned with porn and pornographers like Bob, and if Viva
was unable to get ads, this would be reason enough
(11:00):
to shudder it. But Viva also struggled on newsstands. It
was never in, say, the supermarket checkout line, but instead
it was relegated to the dirty magazine section where only
men shopped. But even beyond the dearth of ad or
newsstand money, Bob and Kathy often made big, expensive, not
(11:21):
entirely thought out bets with Viva's budget. I mean, just
think about Anna Wintour's extravagant photo shoots or even basic
things like paper. Here's Peter again.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
He was printing it on sick beautiful paper. It was
just for a commercial magazine. It just costs too much.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
But Viva had always lost money. Bob had been bleeding
buckets of money into it from the beginning since nineteen
seventy three, and it hadn't mattered to him much before
he could afford it.
Speaker 7 (11:56):
That wasn't the issue, and that was so successful. It
was probably a very efficient tax right off?
Speaker 2 (12:01):
You wait, a tax right off? Was Viva just an
elaborate scheme for one man to pay less than his
fair share in taxes? When trying to pinpoint why Viva
shut down, it's easy to get lost in the content
of the magazine, what worked, what didn't. But a lot
of times these things are more just straight up ruthless
(12:25):
gaming of capitalism than you'd think, because what we know
is that from the beginning of Viva, Bob was able
to use his women's magazine failure to offset his men's
magazine Penthouse's success.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
I mean, it's always been my understanding that they kept
Viva going until Bob could no longer use the losses
to offset income from Penthouse, you know, But my understanding
was that if you kept funding a losing business venture
like Viva, was past seven years, the IRS no longer
considered that an investment.
Speaker 9 (12:57):
They considered it a hobby.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
I always heard that that timing, whatever that was, whether
it was seven years or nine years, was correlated to
Bob's inability to write off the losses.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
With the tax right off. It's fair to question what
level of urgency, if any, Bob had to improve Viva's numbers.
And like what Cindy Gallups said, the light bulb really
has to want to change, and in many ways change
wasn't exactly in Bob's nature either.
Speaker 5 (13:28):
Here's Peter again, and he said, Peter, let me tell
you something. When somebody tells me I'm wrong, I know
I'm right. If you have that belief and you follow
through on it, it's a prescription for disaster, because you
can be Because he remembered, at at least in his mind,
(13:50):
that people had told him he was wrong, he wasn't
going to succeed with penh House, And of course he succeeded,
but he you know, it's he hired a lot of
terrific people, but ultimately he didn't take any of their
advice on things.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
It's late nineteen seventy eight when Bob decides to shut
it all down. Heva was a full five years old.
Here's Peter again, only this time he's not on the phone.
Speaker 10 (14:23):
Well, look, this is what I heard working there as
the years were going on. Was definitely people said a
lot of things, so, you know, but people would say, well,
Bob can take this as a tax writer for five years,
but then he's you know, he's just not going to
keep doing it because he's just losing money. And I
(14:44):
think it did end after five years.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
And for me, this timing is just a little too coincidental.
So was Viva just a tax write off a quote
hobby for Bob GUCCIONI Was he ever invested in its
six or was it actually better for him the whole
time if it failed?
Speaker 10 (15:06):
Just knowing Bob, he certainly didn't start this thing as
a tax writer off. He would never do anything for
the money, which is why he ended up dying without assent.
But at some point if the magazine was failing after
years and just not working, and his accountant said, look,
after five years, you're going to have to start paying
(15:27):
real money's no longer a tax write off, I could
see him listening, because I mean, he stopped other magazines too,
But there's no way he started this magazine as a
tax write off or as an experiment, or I think
he really believed that this was something that could work.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Bob Guccioni was a stubborn cisgender white man of the
twentieth century. He was a product of his time, the
early seventies sexual revolution, which, by the time Viva ultimately fails,
is coming to an end. Here's Viva, writer Annie.
Speaker 6 (16:03):
The late sixties were like this rocket that propelled us
into the seventies with all that hope and energy and exploration.
But then there was there was also inflation, as we
have now, as the seventies progressed, and so it became
harder to live on a little bit. You know, you
couldn't just live this kind of gypsy life and this
(16:24):
exploratory life.
Speaker 9 (16:26):
You had to work.
Speaker 6 (16:27):
You had to you know, you had to make more money,
and that brought people down, of course, So that's part
part of what happened, was economic.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
When Viva finally folds, the seventies are all but over.
No matter if Bob fumbled Viva or not. The brief
window where a mainstream audience would have embraced a feminist
porn Magazine is closing, Porno Chic is dead. In just
a few months, Ronald Reagan will announce his presidential bid.
Speaker 6 (16:57):
Everything's changing, this whole feeling that it's a new morning
in America. It's morning in America.
Speaker 11 (17:03):
Right.
Speaker 6 (17:04):
That party, the stale party, you know, all of the
crack files and the condoms and the cocaine dust that's
been lying around has all been swept out and everything
is clean.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Because once the eighties are ushered in, well, we went backwards.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Society went backwards, and I watched it happen. What happened
was that society stopped being open of that sex.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
So where did that leave the Viva editors and other
talented women who worked at the magazine. We'll get to
that after the break at two. Afterglow, Viva Magazine was
(17:51):
Robin and Gaze and Anna wind Tours and dozens of
women's first big job, a place where they learned how
to do their work. It was all because of Bob
GUCCIONI a flawed, difficult pain in the ass of a
man who also happened to do a lot of good.
Here's Bob's head of pr Leslie J.
Speaker 11 (18:12):
He definitely empowered me there's no doubt about it. I mean,
I really think I came live in that office doing
what I did. I was able to reach my potential
and go beyond even you know, I loved my job.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Because Bob did give all these women opportunities when a
lot of the world was not.
Speaker 10 (18:34):
I mean, he'd call you honey, but he'd make you
editor in chief.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Many of them still admire both Bob and Kathy.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
I just saw that they were a team and that
they always were into something new and what was coming.
And I personally resonated with that because that was how
I lived my life, like what's coming next, where's the
world going? How can we be on the edge of discovery?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
After Viva, Bob and Kathy continue on their path of
professional discovery. They try to start a casino in Atlantic City.
I was the second person to buy land in Atlantic City.
I'd beat everybody except results. They dapple in animation.
Speaker 7 (19:20):
We've done a dozen Shakespearean plays that have been animated
and sold.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
The Love of the World. They're years ahead of predicting
virtual reality and cyber sex, though they never implement it.
Here's Kathy on Phil Donahue's show in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 4 (19:33):
The other interesting thing about this is you do not
have to appear in virtual reality as you You can
appear as a fantasy creation of yourself.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
But their biggest success comes from the new magazines they
launched together.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
I totally loved when they got into the Omni magazine.
I mean, they made this commitment to live one hundred
years and longevity, and sadly both of them died it cancer,
you know, way young.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
In nineteen ninety seven, Kathy Keaton, by then one of
the wealthiest and highest ranking publishing executives in the world,
dies of complications from breast cancer. She was fifty eight.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
She reached out to me while she was dying of
breast cancer and was in a real state of denial
about her chances. And I went to New York to
see her before she died, and it was really, you know,
quite moving because she was hooked up to morphine but
wearing one of those outfits that she was always known for,
(20:34):
you know, the skin tight tank top with her bra
showing and you know, leopard skin or a snake skin leggings.
The idea of getting into an outfit like that when
you're sick enough to be hooked up to morphine is
mind boggling to me. But Kathy had tremendous self discipline.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Bob's never the same without Kathy. Here's his longtime friend,
the photographer Earl Miller, who shot me of Viva's nudes.
Speaker 9 (21:01):
When Cathy died, he lost his own tucks. He became
a recluse afterwards. His story is like a Greek tragedy,
the story of from rags to riches back to rags.
One of the richest men in the world, and he
went broke.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Bob had started Penhouse with Kathy, and truth is he
doesn't know how to run it without her. Penhouse is
the lynchpin of Bob's company, and he fails to evolve
it at pace with the digital times, is too slow
to bring Penhouse online. By the early two thousands, the company,
(21:40):
which was such a product of the seventies, collapses, and
with it, so does Bob. He leverages everything to save
his empire. He's forced to sell his Manhattan mansion and
even his beloved art collection. He fights to the end, and.
Speaker 12 (21:57):
Then, of course he got his own cancer. And one
of the profound impacts that he had with his own
physical presence was that incredibly easy relaxed baritone voice. The
surgery in his throat changed his voice became a high pitched,
(22:20):
almost inaudible. Yet I had to put my ear up
to his mouth to understand what he was saying.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Bob Guccioni, the proud lion of porn publishing, goes out
not with a roar but a whisper. He died in
twenty ten. He was seventy nine. Bob may have died
with nothing, but he left a lot behind. Here's his son,
Bob Junior.
Speaker 13 (22:46):
I say his legacy is a great visionary, great artists,
great painter, a great editor. You know, believed and fought
for the First Amendment unlike any other publisher has ever done. Frankly,
I think his legacy is strong. It was a very powerful,
wonderfully flowed, brilliant genius.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Bob and Kathy aside, some of Viva's biggest legacies are
the women who worked there. Here's editor Betty Jane.
Speaker 14 (23:12):
I'm proud of what we did. And I look at
the stuff sometimes and I look at what's surprisingly not updated.
I look if something is still funny, or if something
is still prescient or hits the nail on the head
or whatever, and some of it I'm not happy about,
but most of it I am. I think it stands up. Okay,
(23:33):
I mean, I look back and I have such fond
feelings about that period of my life, you know, freedom choices.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
After losing her job at Viva, Betty Jane went on
to be a columnist a dozens of magazines and newspapers.
She'd build a tight professional community at Viva and collaborated
with her former Viva colleagues for the rest of her career.
Speaker 14 (23:58):
We may not have had the well, look, I lost
my job because I you know, because we didn't have
any power, but we.
Speaker 11 (24:05):
Had each other.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
The people they worked with were meaningful, and so was
the time they were working in.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
And the resilience that we had in the seventies were
the expectations were so low for us that whenever we
did something that was better, it was like whoa. Everything
that we achieved was sort of like WHOA, I you know,
I did that.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
I could do that.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
After Viva, Robin went on to be the publisher of
Mother Jones, the founder and CEO of Parenting Magazine, and
a vice president at c NEET. Today, she's an advisor
to tech startups and author of a book of business
advice for women and for the women of Viva. This
sense of achievement that Robin just talked about it meant everything.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
I sometimes wonder if that was a period of plenty
when we were allowed to loss and move ahead. We
were in a business that was a bit frontier, you know,
wild west, and we picked it up and ran with it.
(25:11):
If you were determined and you were good at it,
you could go anywhere.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Post Viva, Gay went lots of places. She was the
editor in chief of Working Woman, of Mirabella. She was
a vice president at the New York Times.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
I didn't seem to want to get involved in the
sexual freedoms of the time, but I did get very,
very much turned on by the freedoms that women were achieving.
To have your own money, to decide your own life,
and so on. Those freedoms to me were and are
(25:51):
so huge.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
And even for all its misfires, the ridiculous flaccid dix,
the gender caricature bosses, the feminist contradictions, Viva still meant something.
It was a step forward. Like all the best kinds
of failures, Viva was an ambitious one or out of hope.
(26:15):
It's a hopefulness many of us have in the beginning
of our careers if we're lucky, this feeling that what
we do has or will soon have meaning, no matter
how small. But it's a feeling that's hard to hold
on to as we're burned out and screwed over professionally,
as cynicism creeps in. And maybe that's why I was
(26:36):
attracted to Viva in the first place. That first time
I saw it, when I was sitting at a desk
at a women's magazine feeling disillusioned myself. I could feel
the hope and urgency in its pages, how the editors
felt everything could change, it could all be different, and
they could be part of how they were planning of flag.
(27:00):
They were planning a flag. It might not have worked,
but I think they were really trying to do.
Speaker 6 (27:05):
Something yeah, or at least to put a marker down
so that you could come back and do what you're doing, like,
let's carry it on.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Viva came out of a culture of risk taking, a
progression of flawed people using their power to give others
at least a bit more freedom to try something innovative
and new, even if it too was flawed.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
What I really admired about Bob and Kathy is that
they were brave. They went where other people did not
dare to go, but fantasized about going, and they took risks,
and that was tremendous because it allowed all the rest
(27:50):
of us to go further and further towards that without fear.
Thank you, Bob, Thank you Kathy.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
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 Knoff, music
sound design and engineering by Hannes Brown. Our fact checker
(28:39):
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 Knaff, with special thanks to Alison
Falsetta and Lyra Smith from iHeartMedia. Our executive producers are
Beth Anne Macaluso and Julia Weaver to
So I'm reading from this Viva issue, the international magazine
for women.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
It's been a minute since Viva's sex advice columnist, Doctor
Judy has seen a physical copy of Viva magazine, since
she could actually look at and reflect on her work.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
First thing I open is, I'm captured by this photograph
opposite my column with a naked woman just on her top, naked,
there's a pincer on her nipple.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Truth is, unless you held on to them since the
nineteen seventies issues of Viva, they're extremely hard to find.
It's like the work of Viva's women, like most all work,
if you think about it, has just poof disappeared. But
I have all the issues. I've been collecting them for years.
I brought them to every editor and writer I met
(00:50):
in person, including doctor Judy.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
So I'm fascinated with this photograph. And then opposite it
is my column Sexual Fantasies, a study of erotic fantasies
their meaning, significance in contribution to the human sexual condition,
which is really kind of cool because it's not just
the fantasy, but my analysis of it, which comes from
(01:15):
intelligence and a lot of experience and some scientific understanding
and analytic understanding.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
When Bob first launched FEVA, the sex Fantasy's column was
written by a man, But when Doctor Judy took over,
she blew this other guy's work out of the water.
Just listen to one of her pieces.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Fantasy nourishes our sexual psychees and charges our sexual energies.
It adds the luster of the unexplored to our sexual
experiences and experiments. Nearly every individual falls through some secret
erotic fantasy. The range of these is as wide as
the range of humanity. So true, and that is why,
(01:59):
like humanity, they are infinitely interesting. Yes, this month, Viva
continues exploring the complex, fascinating world of sexual fantasy.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
For just a second. In our interview, doctor Judy gets
lost in the work, in her work, she'd forgotten. She's proud.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Oh I love this. Okay, it was always my thought.
Your fantasy is you are the I love this. I
would always tell people this. You are the producer, the director,
and all the actors in your fantasy. You are not
just you.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
You created them.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
So you are the guy or the girl or whatever
whoever else is in your fantasy. You made them up
and you're the one who's directing the show, so all
of it belongs to you. You create the whole thing.
So that was my favorite lesson and I loved it.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
The women I talked to for this podcast were almost
all in their seventies and eighties. There were decades away
from their time at Viva, but they remembered it often vividly.
When Viva shuddered in January of nineteen seventy nine, it
wasn't just the end of a magazine, it was the
end of an era.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
So all of a sudden, all the openness about sex
publicly stopped, and so people didn't have an outlet anymore.
Whereas things were going upwards to being more educated on
different levels, all of that was cut off.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
So what happened? Why did Bob pull the rug out
from under everyone? And what can Viva's legacy reveal to
us about sex and feminism today? From Crooked Media and iHeartMedia,
I'm Jennifer Romalini and this is the final episode of Stiff,
Episode eight, The last Word, Act one. The light bulb
(03:59):
does not want to change.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
The formula should have worked, and to this day, I
really don't know why it didn't.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
That's Gaye Bryant, who you may remember had the original
idea for Viva. Gaze still a bit flu mixed over
why her idea didn't succeed, and so are some of
Viva's editors, like Robin Willaner.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
The editorial vision I think absolutely could have worked. I
think the vision for it could have succeeded.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Now, some of the editors I talked to thought Viva's
failure had nothing to do with content or vision or execution,
but something much bigger, something systemic. Here's Viva and Penthouse
editor Peter Block.
Speaker 5 (04:42):
I think the main reason Viva failed is that I
can't think of a good, intelligent women's magazine that succeeded ever.
I mean, one after the other. There's been some great magazines,
and they all go by the way saw it. None
of them succeed.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
But most people I interviewed for this series hung Viva's
downfall on one fatal misstep. Here's Viva writer Annie Gottlieb.
Speaker 6 (05:09):
The very same pictures failed to attract women. I mean,
I think they missed the target of female sexuality, you know,
by a mile, at least in the visuals.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
And here's Bob Guccioni Junior explaining.
Speaker 7 (05:21):
You know, women with disdainfull of at the average women
in the street, if they knew about it, just thought
it was a magazine with men's genitate issuing.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
And even if some of Viva's readers claimed they wanted
quote more cock.
Speaker 7 (05:35):
It lacked the sort of subtlety and imagination and you know,
fantasy element that women wanted in the magazine. That it
was too in your face, too blunt, and they didn't
want to necessarily see this much and they get male flesh,
and it was just a different perception. The way a
man gets excited was the way a woman.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Gets excited, even gay seconds this sentiment, if.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
I had to put it in a sentence, I think
that the physical turns men on and the emotional turns
women on.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Okay, Since the beginning of reporting this series, I've wondered
a lot about this. Every Viva editor I talked to
repeated this line. Women just aren't turned on visually. Women
who are into men don't actually like looking at men's
bodies and especially not their dicks. Women need subtlety and softness.
(06:30):
The male nudes could never work. Viva was doomed from
the start. Blah blah blah. And this line about women
not liking porn is not limited to this story. It's
a line used by cis white heterosexual men for decades
as the reason not to fund female pornographers. It's a
big part of why the porn industry still doesn't cater
(06:52):
to women in a meaningful way anywhere near the same
way it caters to men. And here's the thing, it's
just that it's not true.
Speaker 8 (07:01):
You know, it's absolute bollocks that women are not visually stimulated.
You fucking bet we are.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
That's Cindy Gallup. She's the founder of Make Love Not Porn,
a feminist sex site. There's a little bit social network,
a little bit porn hub, except ethically curated and without
the copious misogyny.
Speaker 8 (07:18):
You know, and research on its being done. That show
show us porn, show us men's snakered bodies. You bet
we get wet. You know, that's a load of crap
that we need emotion. I mean, women absolutely enjoy looking
at men's naked bodies. You bloody bet we do.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Cindy says, the challenge of being a feminist in the
porn business comes down to one very very obvious thing,
the patriarchy.
Speaker 8 (07:41):
We as women have never been allowed to bring our
lens to bear on human sexuality, and the world is
a poorer place for it. The world makes it fucking
difficult to innovate and disrupt social narratives around sex.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
And this tracks with the Viva story too, with Bob
and the male photographer's art directing photo shoots, deciding what
women desire without ever asking the women themselves. And as
much as things have changed for women in the decades
since Beava launched, this hasn't. It's an American societal norm
that seems, for a variety of reasons, immovable. We're stuck.
Speaker 8 (08:20):
And so here's what has not changed since the seventies
and is still enormously problematic today. Any industry that is
male dominated at the top inevitably produces output that is
objectifying and offensive and objection to women.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
But what about feminism's gains more women in boardrooms? Hell,
all those female penhouse executives Bob loved talking about Kathy
Keaton at the top of Viva's masthead. Cindy's not hearing it.
Speaker 8 (08:51):
It's slightly old joke about the light bulb. How many
therapists does it take to change of light bulb? Only one?
But the light bulb has to already want to change
in every single industry in popular culture that informs our
views on everything, including the roane of men, the roan
of women, the role of sexuality, what makes you sexual desirable?
What doesn't? The light bulb does not want to change.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
And so maybe it wasn't that women didn't like looking
at dis in Viva. It's more that the men in charge,
the gatekeeping dicks themselves held on tight two well, the dicks.
They didn't actually ask the question what do women want? Instead,
they just asked what would I do if I were
a woman. But we kind of knew all this right.
(09:37):
Over the last eight episodes, we've covered all the iterations
that Viva went through during its brief existence, and there
were a lot naked women, naked men, no dicks, flaccid dicks,
back to no dicks again, cool, smart feminist writing, weird
anti feminist writing, low brow humor, high brow fashion, etc.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Etc.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
And the thing is that even though the editors tried
a bunch of different things, none of them were commercially successful.
Though it's hard to quantify how much of this was
tied to Bob and the controversy that surrounded him. His
reputation was for sure at least a small factor, especially
when it came to making money through ads. Here's editor
(10:23):
Robin will Lanner.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
Again, Viva had the problem of coming out of the
Penthouse organization that didn't give any comfort to advertisers, and
nobody was ever going to give Viva the benefit of
the doubt on advertising.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Magazines need advertising money, period, and mainstream advertisers of all stripes,
especially those who advertise in women's magazines like cosmetics brands,
are today and have always been wary to be publicly
aligned with porn and pornographers like Bob, and if Viva
was unable to get ads, this would be reason enough
(11:00):
to shudder it. But Viva also struggled on newsstands. It
was never in, say, the supermarket checkout line, but instead
it was relegated to the dirty magazine section where only
men shopped. But even beyond the dearth of ad or
newsstand money, Bob and Kathy often made big, expensive, not
(11:21):
entirely thought out bets with Viva's budget. I mean, just
think about Anna Wintour's extravagant photo shoots or even basic
things like paper. Here's Peter again.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
He was printing it on sick beautiful paper. It was
just for a commercial magazine. It just costs too much.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
But Viva had always lost money. Bob had been bleeding
buckets of money into it from the beginning since nineteen
seventy three, and it hadn't mattered to him much before
he could afford it.
Speaker 7 (11:56):
That wasn't the issue, and that was so successful. It
was probably a very efficient tax right off?
Speaker 2 (12:01):
You wait, a tax right off? Was Viva just an
elaborate scheme for one man to pay less than his
fair share in taxes? When trying to pinpoint why Viva
shut down, it's easy to get lost in the content
of the magazine, what worked, what didn't. But a lot
of times these things are more just straight up ruthless
(12:25):
gaming of capitalism than you'd think, because what we know
is that from the beginning of Viva, Bob was able
to use his women's magazine failure to offset his men's
magazine Penthouse's success.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
I mean, it's always been my understanding that they kept
Viva going until Bob could no longer use the losses
to offset income from Penthouse, you know, But my understanding
was that if you kept funding a losing business venture
like Viva, was past seven years, the IRS no longer
considered that an investment.
Speaker 9 (12:57):
They considered it a hobby.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
I always heard that that timing, whatever that was, whether
it was seven years or nine years, was correlated to
Bob's inability to write off the losses.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
With the tax right off. It's fair to question what
level of urgency, if any, Bob had to improve Viva's numbers.
And like what Cindy Gallups said, the light bulb really
has to want to change, and in many ways change
wasn't exactly in Bob's nature either.
Speaker 5 (13:28):
Here's Peter again, and he said, Peter, let me tell
you something. When somebody tells me I'm wrong, I know
I'm right. If you have that belief and you follow
through on it, it's a prescription for disaster, because you
can be Because he remembered, at at least in his mind,
(13:50):
that people had told him he was wrong, he wasn't
going to succeed with penh House, And of course he succeeded,
but he you know, it's he hired a lot of
terrific people, but ultimately he didn't take any of their
advice on things.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
It's late nineteen seventy eight when Bob decides to shut
it all down. Heva was a full five years old.
Here's Peter again, only this time he's not on the phone.
Speaker 10 (14:23):
Well, look, this is what I heard working there as
the years were going on. Was definitely people said a
lot of things, so, you know, but people would say, well,
Bob can take this as a tax writer for five years,
but then he's you know, he's just not going to
keep doing it because he's just losing money. And I
(14:44):
think it did end after five years.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
And for me, this timing is just a little too coincidental.
So was Viva just a tax write off a quote
hobby for Bob GUCCIONI Was he ever invested in its
six or was it actually better for him the whole
time if it failed?
Speaker 10 (15:06):
Just knowing Bob, he certainly didn't start this thing as
a tax writer off. He would never do anything for
the money, which is why he ended up dying without assent.
But at some point if the magazine was failing after
years and just not working, and his accountant said, look,
after five years, you're going to have to start paying
(15:27):
real money's no longer a tax write off, I could
see him listening, because I mean, he stopped other magazines too,
But there's no way he started this magazine as a
tax write off or as an experiment, or I think
he really believed that this was something that could work.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Bob Guccioni was a stubborn cisgender white man of the
twentieth century. He was a product of his time, the
early seventies sexual revolution, which, by the time Viva ultimately fails,
is coming to an end. Here's Viva, writer Annie.
Speaker 6 (16:03):
The late sixties were like this rocket that propelled us
into the seventies with all that hope and energy and exploration.
But then there was there was also inflation, as we
have now, as the seventies progressed, and so it became
harder to live on a little bit. You know, you
couldn't just live this kind of gypsy life and this
(16:24):
exploratory life.
Speaker 9 (16:26):
You had to work.
Speaker 6 (16:27):
You had to you know, you had to make more money,
and that brought people down, of course, So that's part
part of what happened, was economic.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
When Viva finally folds, the seventies are all but over.
No matter if Bob fumbled Viva or not. The brief
window where a mainstream audience would have embraced a feminist
porn Magazine is closing, Porno Chic is dead. In just
a few months, Ronald Reagan will announce his presidential bid.
Speaker 6 (16:57):
Everything's changing, this whole feeling that it's a new morning
in America. It's morning in America.
Speaker 11 (17:03):
Right.
Speaker 6 (17:04):
That party, the stale party, you know, all of the
crack files and the condoms and the cocaine dust that's
been lying around has all been swept out and everything
is clean.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Because once the eighties are ushered in, well, we went backwards.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Society went backwards, and I watched it happen. What happened
was that society stopped being open of that sex.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
So where did that leave the Viva editors and other
talented women who worked at the magazine. We'll get to
that after the break at two. Afterglow, Viva Magazine was
(17:51):
Robin and Gaze and Anna wind Tours and dozens of
women's first big job, a place where they learned how
to do their work. It was all because of Bob
GUCCIONI a flawed, difficult pain in the ass of a
man who also happened to do a lot of good.
Here's Bob's head of pr Leslie J.
Speaker 11 (18:12):
He definitely empowered me there's no doubt about it. I mean,
I really think I came live in that office doing
what I did. I was able to reach my potential
and go beyond even you know, I loved my job.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Because Bob did give all these women opportunities when a
lot of the world was not.
Speaker 10 (18:34):
I mean, he'd call you honey, but he'd make you
editor in chief.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Many of them still admire both Bob and Kathy.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
I just saw that they were a team and that
they always were into something new and what was coming.
And I personally resonated with that because that was how
I lived my life, like what's coming next, where's the
world going? How can we be on the edge of discovery?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
After Viva, Bob and Kathy continue on their path of
professional discovery. They try to start a casino in Atlantic City.
I was the second person to buy land in Atlantic City.
I'd beat everybody except results. They dapple in animation.
Speaker 7 (19:20):
We've done a dozen Shakespearean plays that have been animated
and sold.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
The Love of the World. They're years ahead of predicting
virtual reality and cyber sex, though they never implement it.
Here's Kathy on Phil Donahue's show in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 4 (19:33):
The other interesting thing about this is you do not
have to appear in virtual reality as you You can
appear as a fantasy creation of yourself.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
But their biggest success comes from the new magazines they
launched together.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
I totally loved when they got into the Omni magazine.
I mean, they made this commitment to live one hundred
years and longevity, and sadly both of them died it cancer,
you know, way young.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
In nineteen ninety seven, Kathy Keaton, by then one of
the wealthiest and highest ranking publishing executives in the world,
dies of complications from breast cancer. She was fifty eight.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
She reached out to me while she was dying of
breast cancer and was in a real state of denial
about her chances. And I went to New York to
see her before she died, and it was really, you know,
quite moving because she was hooked up to morphine but
wearing one of those outfits that she was always known for,
(20:34):
you know, the skin tight tank top with her bra
showing and you know, leopard skin or a snake skin leggings.
The idea of getting into an outfit like that when
you're sick enough to be hooked up to morphine is
mind boggling to me. But Kathy had tremendous self discipline.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Bob's never the same without Kathy. Here's his longtime friend,
the photographer Earl Miller, who shot me of Viva's nudes.
Speaker 9 (21:01):
When Cathy died, he lost his own tucks. He became
a recluse afterwards. His story is like a Greek tragedy,
the story of from rags to riches back to rags.
One of the richest men in the world, and he
went broke.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Bob had started Penhouse with Kathy, and truth is he
doesn't know how to run it without her. Penhouse is
the lynchpin of Bob's company, and he fails to evolve
it at pace with the digital times, is too slow
to bring Penhouse online. By the early two thousands, the company,
(21:40):
which was such a product of the seventies, collapses, and
with it, so does Bob. He leverages everything to save
his empire. He's forced to sell his Manhattan mansion and
even his beloved art collection. He fights to the end, and.
Speaker 12 (21:57):
Then, of course he got his own cancer. And one
of the profound impacts that he had with his own
physical presence was that incredibly easy relaxed baritone voice. The
surgery in his throat changed his voice became a high pitched,
(22:20):
almost inaudible. Yet I had to put my ear up
to his mouth to understand what he was saying.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Bob Guccioni, the proud lion of porn publishing, goes out
not with a roar but a whisper. He died in
twenty ten. He was seventy nine. Bob may have died
with nothing, but he left a lot behind. Here's his son,
Bob Junior.
Speaker 13 (22:46):
I say his legacy is a great visionary, great artists,
great painter, a great editor. You know, believed and fought
for the First Amendment unlike any other publisher has ever done. Frankly,
I think his legacy is strong. It was a very powerful,
wonderfully flowed, brilliant genius.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Bob and Kathy aside, some of Viva's biggest legacies are
the women who worked there. Here's editor Betty Jane.
Speaker 14 (23:12):
I'm proud of what we did. And I look at
the stuff sometimes and I look at what's surprisingly not updated.
I look if something is still funny, or if something
is still prescient or hits the nail on the head
or whatever, and some of it I'm not happy about,
but most of it I am. I think it stands up. Okay,
(23:33):
I mean, I look back and I have such fond
feelings about that period of my life, you know, freedom choices.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
After losing her job at Viva, Betty Jane went on
to be a columnist a dozens of magazines and newspapers.
She'd build a tight professional community at Viva and collaborated
with her former Viva colleagues for the rest of her career.
Speaker 14 (23:58):
We may not have had the well, look, I lost
my job because I you know, because we didn't have
any power, but we.
Speaker 11 (24:05):
Had each other.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
The people they worked with were meaningful, and so was
the time they were working in.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
And the resilience that we had in the seventies were
the expectations were so low for us that whenever we
did something that was better, it was like whoa. Everything
that we achieved was sort of like WHOA, I you know,
I did that.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
I could do that.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
After Viva, Robin went on to be the publisher of
Mother Jones, the founder and CEO of Parenting Magazine, and
a vice president at c NEET. Today, she's an advisor
to tech startups and author of a book of business
advice for women and for the women of Viva. This
sense of achievement that Robin just talked about it meant everything.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
I sometimes wonder if that was a period of plenty
when we were allowed to loss and move ahead. We
were in a business that was a bit frontier, you know,
wild west, and we picked it up and ran with it.
(25:11):
If you were determined and you were good at it,
you could go anywhere.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Post Viva, Gay went lots of places. She was the
editor in chief of Working Woman, of Mirabella. She was
a vice president at the New York Times.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
I didn't seem to want to get involved in the
sexual freedoms of the time, but I did get very,
very much turned on by the freedoms that women were achieving.
To have your own money, to decide your own life,
and so on. Those freedoms to me were and are
(25:51):
so huge.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
And even for all its misfires, the ridiculous flaccid dix,
the gender caricature bosses, the feminist contradictions, Viva still meant something.
It was a step forward. Like all the best kinds
of failures, Viva was an ambitious one or out of hope.
(26:15):
It's a hopefulness many of us have in the beginning
of our careers if we're lucky, this feeling that what
we do has or will soon have meaning, no matter
how small. But it's a feeling that's hard to hold
on to as we're burned out and screwed over professionally,
as cynicism creeps in. And maybe that's why I was
(26:36):
attracted to Viva in the first place. That first time
I saw it, when I was sitting at a desk
at a women's magazine feeling disillusioned myself. I could feel
the hope and urgency in its pages, how the editors
felt everything could change, it could all be different, and
they could be part of how they were planning of flag.
(27:00):
They were planning a flag. It might not have worked,
but I think they were really trying to do.
Speaker 6 (27:05):
Something yeah, or at least to put a marker down
so that you could come back and do what you're doing, like,
let's carry it on.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Viva came out of a culture of risk taking, a
progression of flawed people using their power to give others
at least a bit more freedom to try something innovative
and new, even if it too was flawed.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
What I really admired about Bob and Kathy is that
they were brave. They went where other people did not
dare to go, but fantasized about going, and they took risks,
and that was tremendous because it allowed all the rest
(27:50):
of us to go further and further towards that without fear.
Thank you, Bob, Thank you Kathy.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
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 Knoff, music
sound design and engineering by Hannes Brown. Our fact checker
(28:39):
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 Knaff, with special thanks to Alison
Falsetta and Lyra Smith from iHeartMedia. Our executive producers are
Beth Anne Macaluso and Julia Weaver to
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