If you’re anything like me, you listen to your fave podcasts practically every single week on the designated days they drop. Mondays? A little bit of true crime. Wednesdays? A hilarious, culturally relevant interview. But just when I thought there’d be no newness on my audio roster, along came a new program slated for Thursdays called Stiffed: a podcast that chronicles the history of magazines, namely the first-ever erotic women’s magazine, Viva.
Host Jennifer Romolini—a former Cosmo staffer whose name may be familiar to listeners already from her work on the Everything Is Fine podcast alongside former Lucky magazine editor-in-chief Kim France—talks about everything from Viva’s groundbreaking full-frontal male nudes and iconic cover stars like Bianca Jagger and Shelley Duvall to Anna Wintour’s stint at the mag as a fashion editor.
Here’s more about Stiffed, straight from Crooked Media:
“New York City, 1973. Bob Guccione, founder of the men’s magazine Penthouse, is about to drop his latest project, and it’s not quite what anyone is expecting. Enter Viva, an erotic magazine for women published by a porn king but staffed by—drumroll—a bunch of feminist writers and editors. Viva features groundbreaking full-frontal male nudes, writing by feminist icons like Betty Friedan, and profiles of literary legends like Maya Angelou. Its cover stars include Bianca Jagger and Shelley Duvall. Anna Wintour was even Viva’s fashion editor at one point. But what is originally conceived as a high-end, progressive, sexual utopia for women…doesn’t quite turn out that way.”
Ahead, check out an exclusive sneak peek at tomorrow’s episode of Stiffed, courtesy of Crooked Media and iHeart Radio.
An Excerpt From Stiffed
Jennifer Romolini: It’s late 1975, just a few months after Bette-Jane’s fired from Viva. And Viva publisher Bob Guccione is under fire. Bob’s a central figure in the sexual revolution, but he’s also a central enemy of anti-porn feminists, a group that’s expanding with a chorus that’s growing louder by the day.
[News Clip]: The marchers’ aim was clear. Let’s kill the $4 billion industry that exploits females and female bodies, young and old. / I’m ripping this up for incest survivors and rape victims. This is what I have to say to Bob Guccione.
Jennifer Romolini: The early ’70s famously ushered in a new kind of get hip, get sexy sexual liberation, which was mostly liberating for men. But we’ll get to that in a minute. But by the mid-’70s, porn makers like Bob are sorting out just how far this liberation can go. So while Kathy has been ramping up the cocks at Viva, Bob has been pushing the limits of what porn can be at Penthouse, which means more vulva, shown more explicitly than ever before. Bob’s getting attacked in both courtrooms and the court of public opinion by groups on both sides of the political aisle. By some, he’s considered a free speech martyr and a hero. But mainly, he’s seen as a larger-than-life symbol of everything that’s wrong and misogynistic about porn. Here’s Bob defending himself on 60 Minutes around this time.
[News Clip]: What do you say to those people, particularly women who say the sole purpose of Penthouse and the other magazines is to demean women?
[Clip of Bob Guccione]: We laud women, we uplift women. We make life seem impossible without them. We were the first people in New York to help finance the Equal Rights Amendment.
Jennifer Romolini: He’s talking about the ERA, a proposed constitutional amendment which would have guaranteed equal rights for all sexes. An amendment that came close. But for a variety of reasons, conservatives being one, never passed.
[Clip of Bob Guccione]: We were the first corporate group to come out and donate money to the equal rights movement was Viva. And I have more women working for me than I have men, more female executives working than I have male executives.
Jennifer Romolini: Bob loves to talk about how pro-woman he is, how many women he employs, how much he pays. And all of this is true. His approach to business and sexuality is incredibly progressive for the time, but he’s not letting his argument stop there.
[Clip of Bob Guccione]: If it wasn’t for the fact that we are, all of us, so damn dishonest about sex, we wouldn’t have the guilt that we have about it. If we didn’t have the guilt we have about it, we wouldn’t have the problems that we do.
Jennifer Romolini: Now, the guilt and shame that Bob is referring to is a very real thing for everyone. But guilt and shame regarding sex for women arguably comes from a very different place than it does men. It’s a lot more complex, and it’s made even more complicated by men like Bob and despite what he seems to think. The get hip, get sexy attitude of Viva and Penthouse isn’t necessarily helping alleviate that guilt in a lot of ways. It might even be making it a little bit worse for some women. So Bob’s now at war with anti-porn feminists while publishing a feminist porn magazine, which means Viva, well, it’s kind of at war with itself. And in order to understand what happens next at Viva, in this episode, we’re going to zoom out from the day-to-day Viva story and dive into the ’70s feminist porn wars. Because like any war, this one’s complicated, full of skewed history, conflicting motivations and beliefs. And the good guys, they’re not quite as easy to identify as you’d think. From Crooked Media and iHeartMedia, I’m Jennifer Romolini, and this is Stiffed episode 5, “Not So Porno Chic.”
The first five episodes of Stiffed are currently available on iHeart Radio, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
