Photo: Central Press / Getty Images
After enduring a brief but grueling stint as a bunny in Manhattan’s Playboy Club, feminist writer Gloria Steinem published the first half of his historical story, “A Bunny’s Tale“, in SHOW magazine on May 1, 1654.
The reports Steinem’s undercovers raised his profile and stripped back the glamorous façade of Hugh Hefner’s empire to reveal a world of misogyny and exploitation.
SHOW commissioned Steinem, a freelance writer, to solicit a job at the Playboy Club under a false name and document your experience.
Advertisements for a job as a waitress at the club, whose employees were all known as bunnies, portrayed the job as something akin to paid participation in a party straight out of Playboy magazine.
As Steinem quickly learned, the truth was much uglier. The bunnies were paid less than advertised, they could be penalized for rudely refusing to go out with a client (although the bunnies were strictly forbidden to date most of the customers) or allowing the cotton tail on the back of their uniforms to get dirty.
Steinem’s account was replete with examples of the cost bunnies were paid for by the job: uniforms so tight they could barely move, feet swollen and blistered from hours of working in high heels, and near-constant harassment from the drunken businessmen who made up the bulk of the clientele’s work.
After a night in which about 2.000 people came through the doors of the club, Steinem estimated that there were perhaps ten who “did not look at us as objects… but as if we could be human beings”.
“A Bunny’s Tale” was one of the first feminist attacks against Playboy and the “sexually liberated” but male-centric lifestyle it embodied.
Hefner tried to take it in stride, stating that Playboy was on the side of the women’s liberation movement and stating that applications to work at the Playboy Club had increased thanks to Steinem’s article. she also ordered the club to stop carrying out mandatory blood tests and gynecological exams on new Bunnies, practices that Steinem had questioned in her article.
Though she helped an early-career Steinem establish her credentials as a reporter and feminist, regretted the article for years after it was published, appalled by a slew of offers to take on sexualized undercover roles and haunted by photos of herself in the Bunny costume, which had been taken during her brief time as an employee.
Over time, however, she has said that she is glad to have written the article, an exhibition that exposed the struggle of women that were more or less dosed to earn a living.
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