Almost exactly 56 years ago, Gloria Steinem published an investigative tell-all in Show magazine titled “A Bunny’s Tale.” She had applied for a job as a Playboy Bunny under the name Marie Catherine Ochs, chosen because it was “too square to be phony.” Whether it was the name that did it, or the fact that Gloria Steinem was hot as hell, she breezed through her job interview. Bunny Marie discovered the working conditions to be tedious, uncomfortable, insulting, and at times dangerous. Steinem’s article later went into her essay collection, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), which sold half a million copies and canonized “A Bunny’s Tale” as a historic event—the day a Bunny spoke back.

I’m no Bunny. But there’s a lot of good advice in “A Bunny’s Tale” about how to conduct an investigation. When I learned late last year that the Playboy Club was reopening (the original New York outpost closed in 1986), it seemed a delicious opportunity to assess, by way of juxtaposition, the world we live in now. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner died in 2017—may he rest in a heaven of baby oil and Viagra—and the version of femininity he espoused to such success (body meeting certain specifications, character docile) has taken a tumble down the stock market of cultural capital. The Playmate was this strange man’s invention, a girl, he said, with “no lace, no underwear, she is naked, well-washed with soap and water, and she is happy.”

Playboy still merchandises its iconic rabbit logo to clothing companies and other branding outlets, but the larger Playboy culture machine has ground to a halt. The mansion in Los Angeles has been sold off; the bunnies’ leporine reign is over. The company has switched direction, and the revamped print magazine—a thick, glossy dossier with tasteful nudity, an inclusive ethos, and no advertising—is no longer Playboy Enterprise’s best-known product.

Meanwhile, Hefner’s throne is empty, and nobody wants to fill it the way he did. We are living in a slightly different world from the one that #MeToo intervened in the year before last. Now that scandal has culled so many patriarchs from their corporate dictatorships, only a fool would pitch his career on being a brand’s louche daddy. But what happens in the world of PR never quite aligns with the world of lived experience, and the disintegration of the Playboy brand isn’t the same thing as real change in the way that people act on their desires. Gazing at a press release for a Playboy Club event in New York, I wondered how it might be possible to lift a magnifying glass at that place in culture—the gap between what seems to be happening to gender norms according to the media, and what is actually occurring in private, sexualized, straight spaces.

And that’s how I found myself clop-clopping down 42nd Street in ill-fitting shoes and clip-in hair extensions, gathering the mettle to approach the velvet rope.