The historian Elizabeth Fraterrigo asks us to accept a somewhat unlikely premise, which is this: A titty magazine that has been culturally irrelevant since the late 1970s was at the forefront of many of this nation’s most important social upheavals and reconfigurations. It is to her book’s credit—and, it must be said, to Playboy’s—that one closes her book largely convinced that she is right.



The collapse of the U.S. Postal System’s de facto censorship apparatus? Playboy had a hand in that. Changing attitudes about sex outside of marriage? Playboy was part of this, too. The specious notion that a high-earning, free-spending bachelor is some kind of epicurean rebel? Playboy yet again. The feminist movement? Playboy “was partly responsible” for it, as Gloria Steinem once admitted. The now common glossy-magazine practice of advertising luxuries that readers cannot possibly afford? Thank you, Playboy. The idea that a man could have fine clothes, a sweet smell, an uncorked Bordeaux, and remain masculine? Yes, believe it or not, Playboy paved the way for metrosexuality, too.

Never a great magazine, though often a very good one, Playboy was and remains iconic, and there is probably a wonderful narrative history to be written about it. This is not that book, and Fraterrigo’s tone is frequently dry enough to make you worry that her effort will spontaneously combust from the heat of a reading lamp. What she has written is a careful, wide-ranging account as much about American postwar urban culture as about Playboy itself. There is a long and interesting chapter on Helen Gurley Brown and the rise of the Single Girl, for instance, perceptive citations from Organization Man lit like Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, and some truly fascinating stuff about Hugh Hefner himself.

The early Playboy sought the eyes and minds of what Fraterrigo calls “the young, affluent, urban bachelor,” and the first issue was pitched by Hefner as “a little diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age.” These anxieties were not only about being barbequed by Soviet nukes; for the American male, they included having to marry the first woman you had sex with, living with your parents (thanks to a dire postwar housing shortage), and feeling emasculated by the new nature of American work, no longer artisanal or rugged or self-determining but managerial and inchoate and soul-stranglingly indoor. This was, in fact, the young Hefner’s life, and he loathed it. In 1953, he was a struggling cartoonist with a wife and child; the Chicago Daily News profiled him in a lifestyles piece as a model of suburban bonhomie. A year later, Playboy was launched. Soon enough Hefner was a millionaire bachelor with an estranged daughter, Christie. (They would not reconnect until after she graduated from college, and she would eventually run the Playboy empire.)

In terminating a certain kind of life for himself, Hefner also terminated it for a generation of American men--if not in fact then at least as the ideal. While his current existence--with its carousel of Viagra, twentysomething blonds, and fresh pajama bottoms--seems a rather nightmarish gauntlet for an eighty-year-old to run, Hefner has avoided the fate suffered by so many American public figures: he is utterly free of phoniness. Unfortunately, this has come at the cost of seeming utterly ridiculous, though he does not seem to mind.