Editor’s Letter

When Playgirl originally launched in 1973, it sold itself as Entertainment for Women—a feminist answer to the Playboy of the ’70s. It took that formula—smart, sexy, political—and inverted the gender paradigm. Playgirl was Playboy, but with female racecar drivers instead of male, with Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood standing in for Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer. Even the centerfolds were the same (down to the poses)—just with penises. What more could girls want, than to be just like the boys? 

I’m not convinced that equation ever really worked. The idea that the most women can aspire to is to be on the level with men falls flat for me, personally, and I have a hard time believing that, even in the ’70s, women were beset by such a monumental lack of imagination. It smacks of a boardroom decision made by men, co-opting the language of feminism to make money, but, as always, setting the terms. 

If, in 1973 that formula seems to have been considered provocative enough, pushing things far enough, for its premise to remain largely unquestioned, it most certainly doesn’t translate in 2020. As T. Cole Rachel so eloquently puts it in his essay Naked History, in Playgirl’s original incarnation, “one’s political preferences were given approximately the same weight as truly understanding your own zodiac sign or changing your hair color.” But for many of us, myself included, one certainty—one that has hardened into solid granite as the events of the past year have unfolded—is that there is no division between the political and the rest of our lives. Everything is political.     

That was always true, by the way, but at this moment in time, it is un-fucking-deniable. Embracing any identity outside of the societal norm (straight/white/male) is an inherently political act, let alone having the audacity to celebrate those differences. The goal of a feminist publication is not to put women on the same playing field as men, but to stake a claim for a new playing field—not just for women, but for anyone who would like to play by some different rules. Men have had ample opportunity to show us what a world built on their rules looks like. We are all currently living in that world, and so many of us would do anything to claw our way out of the suffocation of the experience. 

What does a feminine world look like?

Consider this magazine an invitation to join that conversation. The discussion is intentionally diverse. Questions of gender, identity, race, class, sex, and the variety of human experience are not afterthoughts—they are the center. This is not a token nod to diversity because it’s on-trend right now, but an assertion that we can best understand our world, and ourselves, by listening to what people who are different from us have to say. 

I think I've always been interweaving the political and the personal, and my own convictions about the value of diversity are born of experience: I’ve fortunately spent a lot of time around people who are not like me. Raised by a single mom who struggled financially, I attended private schools on scholarships; I spent my formative years in New York City, the only place on the planet where nearly 800 (800!) languages are spoken; I have lived more than a third of my adulthood as an “other” in countries I wasn’t born in, communicating in languages that are not my own; and I have spent many years in church basement recovery rooms, where if you’re paying any attention at all, you quickly learn that you can’t make any assumptions about what someone’s story will be until they open their mouth. I can say with clarity that the greatest gift of these experiences (apart from not dying from my addictions, in the latter case) has been the ability to form connections and see my shared commonality with people who, on the surface, might appear completely different from me. And that has been woven through my work, which has sought to provide space for divergent creative voices, to celebrate beauty that falls outside the narrow lane of the tired gaze of American advertising, and most foundationally, to examine the many layers of female experience.

So this project, as you can imagine, was a fucking dream. But it’s not just my dream. 

I am honored and I literally screamed when I saw playgirl and thought this was fake, one contributor replied to my outreach email. I always wanted playgirl for my generation, so I’m so honored to be thought of about this yes yes yes! I’m in! 

She was not alone; I can’t remember another project I’ve worked on where I have experienced such a level of excitement when reaching out to potential contributors. 

I hope this magazine meets any expectations you had for Playgirl, and more. We were originally slated to release it in April, so almost everything in the magazine was made before March. When the pandemic hit, the publisher decided to hold off on printing. A few weeks, a month. Like so many of our pre-Covid expectations, our assumptions about how quickly life would return to “normal” now seem, at best, quaint, and in hindsight, totally delusional. When we finally regrouped in September, I re-opened the project with apprehension, wondering how the content would read today. 

I was relieved to see that it sat pretty well. The only new pieces that have been added are two first person essays, and a poem. Everything else was edited to ground it in this current world (one where you can’t discuss travel, for example, without addressing the cognitive dissonance of discussing travel when we have all been locked in our homes for over half a year). You will read a lot of addendums where people mention Covid, of course, but also examine the reckoning it has brought to the surface about the failures of the American experiment, and consider where we possibly might go from here. 

I have no clean closing ribbon to offer here. I’m just a woman and mother trying to get through remote-schooling my kids and working from my kitchen table (or, some days, crouched, hiding in the bathroom). But being a magazine editor, too, I have the privilege of considering what conversations might be helpful at this moment in time. The conversations on the following pages are some of those. They are by no means exhaustive, but maybe they are a starting place. I hope you find them useful, and I hope you are able to experience a fraction of the enjoyment reading this magazine that I have experienced while making it. 

Thank you, Jack, for this opportunity. And my deepest gratitude to the talented team that worked so hard to make what you see here.