The Tackiest Place On Earth

She may have sported the Bunny ears herself, but Gloria Steinem is no fan of NBC's "The Playboy Club." In the 1960s, the feminist icon rose to public attention after posing as a Bunny in the New York Playboy Club for an investigative piece that ran in Show magazine. It did not leave her with a warm feeling about the joint. The veteran women's rights campaigner said on Friday she hoped TV viewers would boycott the upcoming show, calling the 1960s nightclubs tacky and far from the glamorous places depicted in the show. "Clearly 'The Playboy Club' is not going to be accurate. It was the tackiest place on earth. It was not glamorous at all," Steinem told Reuters in an interview.


Steinem, one of America's leading crusaders for women's rights for 40 years, went undercover to work as a Bunny at the New York City Playboy Club in 1963 and wrote a ground-breaking expose about the onerous conditions for women who worked there. "When I was working there and writing the expose, one of the things they had to change because of my expose was that they required all the Bunnies, who were just waitresses, to have an internal exam and a test for venereal disease," she said.

Steinem said she regards the Emmy Award-winning drama "Mad Men", which is also set in the 1960s as "a net plus, because it shows the world of the early 1960s with some realism." But she added; "I expect that 'The Playboy Club' will be a net minus and I hope people boycott it. It's just not telling the truth about the era."

"The Playboy Club", set in the first Playboy Club in Chicago, debuts in September as one of the centerpieces of NBC's new fall television season. Speaking to TV reporters last week in Los Angeles, network executives, producers and the show's cast all rejected opinions by critics who feel the series will glamorize the porn industry and is demeaning to modern women.

NBC entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt called the show a "really fun soap opera", while executive producer Chad Hodge told TV reporters that the program was "all about empowering these women to be whatever they want to be." One NBC affiliate, in Salt Lake City, has already said it will not broadcast the show but NBC says it does not expect others to follow.

Steinem, 77, may have an unlikely ally in the Parents Television Council. The parents' watchdog group and opponent of all things salacious has been busy pressuring affiliates to refuse to broadcast the nightclub drama. Steinem said on Friday that it was important to reject the TV series, despite the fact that it is set 40 years ago. "It normalizes a passive dominant idea of gender. So it normalizes prostitution and male dominance...I just know that over the years, women have called me and told me horror stories of what they experienced at the Playboy Club and at the Playboy Mansion," she said.