When I say “empowered women,” you think Playboy Bunnies, right?
Sounds laughable, but that’s what the producers and cast of NBC’s new series “The Playboy Club” are arguing. The series, based on the flagship Playboy Club that opened in Chicago in 1960, debuted earlier last month and began receiving criticism even before airing its pilot episode.
Why the ambitious claim? Because in the first episode, the show’s heroine Maureen, played by Amber Heard, kills her attempted rapist by stabbing him in the jugular with a stiletto heel.
Marilyn Miller, a former Bunny from the Chicago club, gave an interview with Vanity Fair after watching the pilot episode and said not even a fraction of that type of action ever went down at the Club.
Miller also said she thought the show was “cheap” and “degrading,” its only saving grace being the historically accurate set.
Intellectuals like M.C. Bodden, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Marquette, identified the show as an example of “the aestheticization of women’s subordination to men and sexual titillation.”
“It is pure television mediation strategy,” Bodden said. “Find a number of beautiful women actors, find historically accurate set designs, use visually arresting colors so that we don’t notice the lack of any serious examination of the unethical treatment of women.”
In other words, the show draws on nostalgia to make issues of “the past” seem digestible and to show the progress we’ve made since then — a method mirrored by AMC’s “Mad Men” and ABC’s “Pan Am.”
But we may be forgetting something: Sexism isn’t just part of the past.
Back then women were exploited in Playboy Clubs; now it happens at the Playboy Mansion, among other places. For more than half of the 20th century, women’s labor rights were highly restricted; now we can work wherever we want, but still receive less pay than men.
The trouble with “The Playboy Club” is the skewed definition of empowerment that it gives us. A woman who has to kill her rapist to save herself is not empowered; she’s a victim of sexual violence.
The show also embellishes the conflict between Bunnies and club keyholders, attempting to convince us that modern-day women have bypassed customary sexual harassment in the workplace and now have the same neutral experience as everyone else. Sure, it’s just a show, but it’s set in a real place and in a decade that few of us were around for, so we believe what we see, even though what we see is fiction.
“Now my son thinks some of these things happened,” Miller said of the rape and murder case from the first episode.
And that’s a disservice to those who once had connections to the actual Playboy Club, Bunnies and keyholders alike.
NBC is looking to cancel “The Playboy Club,” to the surprise and chagrin of few. I doubt producers will give up on the sentimental ‘60s; “Mad Men” cleaned up at the Emmys and has an enormous fan base. But “Mad Men” has something “The Playboy Club” never did: authenticity.
So I hope when the next “Mad Men” knock-off airs, we’ll be able to note the difference between past and present, fact and fiction and empowerment and subordination. It’s still not an easy line to draw, which says only one thing: we haven’t come as far as we think we have.