Cupcake v. Sweet Tooth

It seems only yesterday that Helen Gurley Brown told Cosmopolitan readers: "You've got to make yourself more cupcakeable all the time so that you're a better cupcake to be gobbled up." Meanwhile Hugh Hefner was giving Playboy readers lessons on how to lick off the frosting without actually paying for that cake. Like silent partners, Brown and Hefner--Miss Cupcake and Mr. Sweet Tooth--shared the profits of the sexual revolution* while remaining happily oblivious to the militant feminism that arrived in its wake.

What has happened to Cosmopolitan since Women Liberationists let Mrs. Brown know that a cupcake must learn to bite back? What has happened to Playboy since Gloria Steinem told Hefner, "A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual"?

Lib Lip Service. Desperate if not deep signs of change are becoming visible. Now in its 19th year, Playboy is maintaining its posture of dauntless virility while trying to be less of a male chauvinist pig about it. Recently "The Playboy Adviser"--Hefner's answer to "Dear Abby"--piously rebuked a reader who asked if Playboy would help him persuade his wife to give up her career. "To deprive her of a chance to feel valuable to herself and society above and beyond the roles of wife and mother would be not only selfish but cruel," the "Adviser" preached in the gassy rhetoric once reserved exclusively for Playboy philosophy. At the same time, the "Adviser" managed to hint that a woman "engaged in work that is meaningful to her" might well become a more pleasing Bunny in bed.

"The Playboy Forum," the magazine's letters column, also does conspicuous Lib lip service, especially on the issue of legalized abortion, though the guffaws of pregnancy jokes continue to echo from other pages. But other questions seem to trouble Playboy readers--and the editor who selects which letters to print--far more. How much does one tip a blackjack dealer? What is malmsey wine? How does a fellow get--and get rid of--the crabs? Why do Japanese girls think American men smell bad? (Answer: carnivorous Americans eat ten times as much meat as Japanese and their odors prove it.)

A curious datedness hangs over Playboy. The props never change--the stereo wailing, the fake gun collection framed in place on the wall, the satin sheets on the bed. One poor swinger who failed to keep up with his status symbols had to have the editor explain to him why there are so few convertibles on the market. Girls are still called chicks, and the cartoons are often 1930s vintage--elderly lechers chasing gamboling nymphs around the old yacht. Playboy fiction often features the best names--Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene--though not too often their best work. Playboy interviews, alertly conducted with subjects worth talking to--Saul Alinsky, Charles Evers--are the magazine's quality product. But they seem to belong to another world: the real one. Playboy, alas, has become the voice of sexist Middle America, and Hefner its Archie Bunker. When Playboy ventures into the '70s, it is with tokenism --a modest amount of pubic hair on his Playmate and four-letter words in his prose.

Balloon Lesson. For Cosmopolitan readers, "Oh, horseradish!" is about as far as strong language goes. And Mrs. Brown is just getting around to her own centerfolds. Germaine (The Female Eunuch) Greer's estranged hus band will be the first Cosmo boy in April's British edition. For the American edition, Burt Reynolds is the anticipated playmate.

The articles still bear those titles that sound like bad 19th century novels. Example: "How an Unpretty Girl Copes and Conquers." Cope and conquer as she might, the Cosmo girl is still treated like an idiot who can survive only if everything is spelled out for her and then underlined. If she is fat, she must scribble notes to herself: "I who wish to lose weight and am a self-confessed nibbler, do hereby promise to keep the above rules." Nothing is taken for granted. If her man is out of town, she is instructed to send him a balloon with "I love you" written on it--and Cosmopolitan explains just how: "Write when the balloon is inflated, mail deflated." Even if the reader is a mother and a divorcee, she must be reminded to lock that bedroom door lest her stray children wander in while she is funning with a gentleman caller. Unbelievably simple questions receive unbelievably simple answers. Question: "If a girl likes both men and women, what is she?" Answer: "Bisexual." Though the lesbian has thus been more or less identified, the nymphomaniac still gets circumlocuted as "a girl who's the opposite of frigid."

Puritan Struggles. "The One-Night Affair" is accepted, even defended, as nothing shameful. But the sophistication pours out in the melted-marshmallow style of Faith Baldwin: "You're lying face-to-face--two pairs of brown eyes, greeting. Hello. You both smile, remembering last night," etc., etc.

Despite all the contradictions of a formula in transition, there is evidence that Cosmo may be adapting more successfully than Playboy. The going Cosmo philosophy remains: "Every girl needs a supportive man." But the nuance is important: the new emphasis is on "supportive." "He loved me," an erstwhile cupcake goes on to complain, "but he didn't love me enough, or perhaps in the right way, to help me build the kind of life that I would find liberating."

Can Playboy guy liberate Cosmo gal or vice versa? Puritan swingers, struggling dutifully for their orgasms as if doing homework for a self-improvement course, they do seem a couple with much in common. But the Zeitgeist that has failed to move Playboy much is beginning to shake Cosmopolitan. Dangerous words like "self-expression" and "self-fulfillment" are starting to appear. The Cosmo girl is still drawing a straight chalk line down her full-length mirror to check her posture. But does she want her shoulders back for marching down the aisle or marching in a protest demonstration? The answer is no longer clear. And that's the way the new cupcake crumbles.

*1971 circulation: Cosmopolitan, 1,475,487; Playboy, 6,400,573.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.