Book of the week: Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America by Elizabeth Fraterrigo

(Oxford, 320 pages, $29.95)

“Even in its heyday,” Playboy magazine promoted an idea of the good life that was “a yokel’s idea of sophistication,” said Edward Kosner in The Wall Street Journal. That doesn’t mean the idea wasn’t powerful. Seven million copies of Hugh Hefner’s 1950s brainchild were selling each month by 1972, a year when Hefner’s empire of disrobed women included 40 Playboy clubs and “the world’s most profitable gambling joint.” Whether topless “bunnies” and Hefner’s all-pajama wardrobe accelerated or merely reflected a shift in social and sexual mores is a “chicken-and-egg question” that might not seem worth worrying about. Leave it to an “earnest academic” to sift the evidence and reach a surprising conclusion: Playboy acted less as a battering ram to Eisenhower-era conformity than as a flagship for a new “orthodoxy of individuality.”

“Be forewarned,” said Noreen Malone in Slate.com’s Double X. Elizabeth Fraterrigo’s Playboy tome is written for academic audiences and is not “remotely titillating.” Fraterrigo is far less interested in how Playboy changed Americans’ sex lives than in how it changed our mind-set as consumers. Hefner’s genius was in recognizing “deep unrest in the men he saw around him,” said Julia Keller in the Chicago Tribune. A year before the 1953 launch of Playboy, Hefner was an unhappy office worker in an unhappy marriage. He understood other men’s “frustration with the bland regularity of the roles they were expected to fill.” Embracing independence and bachelorhood, he created a magazine that told men they might be happier if they had extra cash in their pockets and jazz on the hi-fi, and were chasing bedmates who didn’t want babies. Playboy showed men an escape plan and “presented it to advertisers, tied up in a ribbon.”

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Playboy ultimately opened up women’s options, too, simply by insisting that they had an equal right to enjoy their sexuality, said Tom Bissell in The New Republic Online. Sure, the magazine’s big-think pieces were often misogynistic, and its centerfolds so “calcified” mainstream ideas of feminine beauty “that Hefner could reasonably demand a commission on every breast augmentation performed since 1965.” But Fraterrigo’s story isn’t a fairy tale. It’s about how a nation learned to seek fulfillment through spending—how a man in silk pajamas almost unintentionally “sexualized the acquisitional ethos of the American middle class.”