Team Playboy: A Reflection

Over the course of this semester, I have collaborated with classmates Samantha and Jay to create an online exhibit that examines a decade of history through the lens of Playboy magazine. The three of us naturally named ourselves ‘Team Playboy’ for this project. The aim of this blog is defend our project as a whole, which should be visible from following our experiences and process behind its creation. For guidance and reference, I will place our contractual mission statement here:

Our website intends to explore ideas of the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and counterculture through an examination of Playboy magazines from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, a period in American history when The New Left challenged the social, political, and cultural status quo. We will do this through a study of the magazine's covers, articles, advertising, comics, and editorials, which will be represented in our exhibit by showcasing collections of the materials listed above.

Cover of December 1967 Playboy

All exhibits begin with research. Our primary materials, the Playboy magazines, are located in UNC Charlotte’s Atkins Library in Special Collections. I was initially surprised to learn that these magazines were in Special Collections, which is largely the library’s archive of rare and historical documents. The friendly women who work in Special Collections, and who aided Team Playboy throughout our research, told us that Playboy is kept there so that they can be watched. The years 1965-1977 are represented, but the years 1971 and 1972 are missing. The first few years actually include every issue from that year, so they were bound, but as the magazines progress into the 1970s, only most issues from those years were available. Even though we capped our research at 1975 to focus our exhibit on a clean decade, we still had a lot of Playboy to cover and then digitize. This was somewhat difficult for me, since Special Collections is only from 8am-5pm on weekdays, and I worked at Desktop Support this semester until 4pm Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. So I basically had two days a week to possibly do research, not taking into consideration all my other work for graduate school. While finding the time was difficult, once I got into the research, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I did not have much exposure to Playboy before this project, so I went into this with preconceived notions from others about how much Playboy objectifies women and how it is trashy pornography, but I kept an open mind. My research found just the opposite for this time period. I discovered sensually posed playmates (typically only one an issue during the 1960s), insightful articles, cartoons that played off of fine art, and a decently intellectual community considering the societal issues of their time. Of course, there were strains of bigotry, misogyny, and lack of political correctness visible in the forums and some cartoons, but I was still shocked by the heavily-text based content of Playboy.

After much brainstorming, we kept returning to the discourse on social issues throughout the magazine, which culminated into our mission statement. Sam decided to focus on the civil rights movement, Jay took the Vietnam War and counter culture, and I went with the sexual revolution and women’s liberation. We decided on these topics, because we repeatedly saw them being the most heavily discussed throughout the decade. It is obvious that our mission statement, written at the beginning of the semester, has been revised slightly in its execution, in the aim of precision and clarity. Once we had our individual focus, we each had to do research for secondary sources for the historical context and to gain a better understanding of Hugh Hefner. This is standard research for a history major. However, creating an online exhibit has not been typical within my education, but seems to be increasingly important for historians.

To present social revolution through Playboy, we were introduced to Omeka, a website that allows people to create online exhibits, for the purpose of this project. We used the free version of Omeka, which gives 500MB of free storage space for one exhibit. This was surprisingly more than enough. From our mission statement, it is clear that our site heavily relies on images and PDFs. Each of us uploaded at least ten items to Omeka, I personally uploaded many articles as PDFs (some of which were longer than ten pages), and we collectively used only a little over half of the free 500MB. However, the appearance of the exhibit is not as customizable as I expected. Honestly, the social networking site MySpace allows more aesthetic customization. Omeka also forces users to create their website within Omeka’s layout, which was difficult for my group. It took me an extremely long time, and a lot of hard work, to organize my exhibit and the website as a whole. There was a disconnect between the ideas I knew I wanted to present and the medium, Omeka, I had to use to illustrate those concepts. After bouncing ideas off my group members, I found a way to present my topic, and so did Sam and Jay.

I was finally able to translate my research into Omeka by focusing on the Playboy Philosophy. We initially considered an article published in the magazine, “The Decent Society,” as our unifying concept for all three of our exhibits. This article discusses ways to achieve a better society and specifically addresses issues in regard to our three topics. We realized that this article is essentially a proposed implementation of the Playboy Philosophy. During this decade, I would describe Playboy as a soapbox for Hugh Hefner. The Philosophy is basically Hefner’s strong belief in individual freedoms, as long as no one is harmed, and this is apparent throughout the magazine. It was common during this time to have a section just about the Philosophy, often discussing donations to groups working to ensure civil or women’s rights, or protesting the war. The Philosophy had definite views on the social movements we examined throughout the decade, allowing us to explicitly consider this time through Playboy. Since this is the purpose of our website, we were able to organize our exhibit after this breakthrough, supporting our contract.

Throughout this process, Team Playboy has kept in touch and worked together by email and meetings. I think we met to discuss our project more often than we met for Digital History, in an attempt to keep everyone on track and to help each other with issues we encountered, such as the creation of PDFs. We also watched documentaries about Hefner and Playboy, and Samantha and I purchased the October 2012 issue of Playboy for further insight and comparison. While we have hit many mental roadblocks, we figured out ways around them. I consider our exhibit an effective exploration of the social revolutions occurring during 1965-1975 from the perspective of Playboy, yet I’m not ready to show the world our exhibit just yet. We are tweaking a few things before our presentation Thursday; once it is perfect, I will be posting it everywhere!

Team Playboy representing the Playboy Philosophy in our own way.
Robe (Sam). Pipe (Me). Bunny (Jay).