i've always felt that Playgirl magazine deserved some credit as an early source of CFnm and FemDom, or at least Fem Supreme inspiration. i grew up in a household with a stay-at-home dad who was naturally submissive towards my bread winner Mother. Trust me that wasn't so easy in the recent past, and not simple to explain to my friends. Today that isn't unusual of course but i was always raised to show respect and deference towards Females. That example has of course served me well and Goddess even better.my own feelings of submissiveness you might think came simply from the environment in which i was raised, and i won't argue that it played a significant part. However i think it goes much deeper than that. i have always felt hardwired that way and i believe, based on my own experiences and extensive observations of human behavior and relationships that males in general are fundamentally submissive towards our Female Goddesses.
The very first time i looked at a Female and felt those stirrings i just knew with every fiber of my being that She was in every way my superior. i craved nothing more than to fall at Her feet and worship Her.
i saw first hand how males fell all over themselves like a stupid pack of animals vying for Female attention, how these mesmerizing beauties wielded Their sexuality like a weapon against which males had no defenses.
Yet the wider world looked nothing like a place that reflected these obvious truths. It was a world of males run amok, where men held the wealth and power and the imagery of selfish, animal-like, male oriented porn drenched everything.
It was also a world on the cusp of revolution, the seeds were planted and soon enough Women would rise up and begin the long push back.
Yet sometimes when home alone I would slip into my parents bedroom and find a stack of Playgirls. Whose they were i was never sure but inside those pages i found a world much more like the one i envisioned and felt was true.i know full well that Playgirl was a flawed concept in that it tried to create a 1:1 equivalent of playboy, in doing so making the mistake of thinking that Female and male sexuality were essentially the same. In doing so it also attracted a gay following probably greater than its Female one.
Nevertheless the concept was essentially correct for in those pages i discovered what seemed absolutely natural to me, that males could be sexually objectified by Women, that men could be stripped naked for Women's pleasure and subject to the Female Gaze. Here it was natural for males to be placed in an inferior if not humiliating position for Women's amusement.
This was a revelation and at least a beginning validation of my own feelings and beliefs.
Here on these pages, like in the world of my peers, Women were the Powerful Superior Sex and males their play-toys.
It wasn't the images of nude men that interested me but the nude men in scenes with clothed Women who spied on them as they masturbated or felt up the naked men causing their uninhibited arousal to be put on full display for the camera. Here was CFnm in its infancy and FemDom too. These Women were in charge and took pleasure in Their power just as the stripped males took pleasure in submission to Their sexual aggression and hunger, and no doubt at the idea that countless thousands of Women readers would be analyzing every inch of their fully displayed flesh.
For all its flaws and silliness Playgirl has to be credited as an early voice of Female Sexuality and male submission to it.
I never really saw any copies of Playgirl. Were the men erect in the photos?
ReplyDeleteThe PLAYGIRL men of the 70’s and 80’s were flaccid with a bush of pubic hair. It seems that only in the 90’s did it become acceptable to show the males with full length, rock hard, erections with accompanying man-scaping. Seems the explosion and mainstreaming of porn in the 90’s probably made fuller visual expressions of male sexuality socially acceptable.
DeleteIn the documentary made by CFNM Films, they interview the female editor of Playgirl. She commented that the female audience wanted more images of men doing submissive acts of service, like vacuuming an laundry, for women while naked. The male editors resisted this, making the magazine more appealing to gay men. In the end, straddling these two world brought the magazine down. Playgirl was a magazine for women, so i think they should have submitted to the woman's needs. However, perhaps the magazine couldn't have been saved since most everyone gets their tastes satisfied on line these days.
ReplyDeleteR. Seifert
Those are really interesting observations. i think you may be right in that trying to balance these two similar yet quite different audiences wasn’t feasible and that with the web these days a magazine like PLAYGIRL would not be sustainable either. Still You/you never know. i do agree however that Women do want men in subservient positions. The degree of subservience varies, from mild and playful to keeping a male or males as a 24/7/365 subs. With Women ever gaining in wealth, education, status and assertiveness males are finding themselves ever more sexually objectified and the pressure on males to be found worthy of Female attention is mounting. The ‘Girls’ know what they want and are ever more demanding in their expectations of males who are undergoing a great adaptation into their new role as the secondary sex. Despite all the turmoil and upheaval society is gradually flipping into a more Feminine age.
DeleteP.S. I haven’t seen the CFNM doc. How is it, did it match your expectations?
Goddess Worshipper, I find it interesting, and not overly surprising, that women would have liked to have erotic pictures of naked men carrying out acts of domestic service, like vacuuming and doing laundry. I have read articles which say that the best way for husbands to make their wives more interested in sex is to do more of the housework. My wife and I are in a FLR, and my domestic servitude is by far the thing she likes best about our arrangement. I have to say that I am also incredibly aroused by pictures of women enjoying leisure time while their men are busy at household chores, whether naked or not. I find CFnm really arousing in itself, so the combination of CFnm and domestic servitude is mind blowingly erotic to me. To that end, I took the initiative of doing my housework wearing an apron and t-shirt but naked from the waist down one day. To my delight, that amused my wife, and she now requires me to do my chores that way whenever circumstances allow.
DeleteDB
DB
Hi Ethan,
ReplyDeleteThey actually made two films. They made their original film, and then a more "serious" version that they wanted to get on TV. The serious version was more intellectual and had more interviews. I enjoyed both of them. The original had a really awesome scene of Loren oiling down a male stripper's chest. You could tell she was enjoying it, getting aroused, and using her feminine power. The second more serious version had some interesting information about women in past. In some ancient culture cultures, women were more sexually free and aggressive It looks like we are returning to that now, which as a submissive, i think is awesome. i donated to their Kickstarter campaign which got me access to both. i assume you could get access their film at their new website, but you will have to support their noble cause by paying for it.
www.dowomenhaveahighersexdrive.com
R Seifert
Fantastic news. It's great that these films got made!
DeleteDefinitely Playgirl was the beginning of the new role of the male body as sex objects and male subservient iconography which is now virtually the norm and will become even more prevalent as the Female age advances. Males have always really been the secondary sex, but this fact was hidden in the past. No longer.
ReplyDeleteOf course males have always really known that we are the secondary sex. Patriarchy and oppression of Women being manifestations of male fear and discomfort with respect to this knowledge. Today Feminine Power is blooming and males are increasingly accepting and welcoming of it, which of course means submitting to It, though that way of phrasing remains too honest for some.
DeleteEthan, that's a great way to put it. Rather than being simply "kinky" or "fetishistic" ... male submission to Female power is simply honest. In a sense it's a typical patriarchal reversal; it's really the subjugation of Women which is a form of forced fetishization of male illusions of male power, which is inherently dis-honest.
DeleteI am old enough to remember when Playgirl hit the newsstands. All estimates for its lifetime, even admitted to by the publisher, had 80% to 90% sold to gay men. Women didn't really buy it.
ReplyDeleteThe women I've talked to that remember it had scored a copy as school girls because they wanted to know what one looked like. They must have been disappointed when real life was several inches less.