Hey, and welcome to What Future. I'm your host, Joshua Topolski, and I'm very excited about today's show. We've got a tremendous guest. I've been listening to this podcast which just came out to its early days called Stiff, which is really about I'm not going to get too much into the explanation, is that two of my favorite things, which is pornography and magazines. So we should just get into
the conversation. We've got the creator and the host here, Jennifer Ramalini, and she's going to tell us all about it and talk about this fascinating story.
I don't know if I should bring this up, but I'm just going to bring it up place do. I was like, I know him? How do I know him? Because I, on my own career was a digital media executive and your name came up a lot. But I was mixing you up with some other guy who's a total asshole, and is it I want to know it? Like another boy genius who got to be like the head of something, while like no ladies were getting any funding except if they were strutting around like men. So
that was it. And I was like, is this going to give me PTSD being on this, you know, like, and then I looked up and I was like, oh, no, it's him.
I hope not. I'm pretty I'm pretty harmless for the most part. I think I probably the first off first a huge compliment. I think you kind of off handedly referred to me as a boy genius, which I like sounds great, which one makes me feel youthful, which I'm definitely not, and also like a genius anyhow, Okay, I don't think we've ever actually met, no, but I feel like we know a ton of the same people, which.
Is, yeah, we know a lot of this, all the same scammers.
Yeah, exactly. You know, it's funny. I'm dying now to know who this person is you're thinking of. And I'm like, going through there's so many men who kind of could fit the description of like.
Yeah, just like bullshitters who were just getting all the money in the time when I was working in digital media where I was like getting pats on the head and like that I should wear more fuck me pumps and.
Like, oh my god, somebody somebody actually say you should wear more fuck me pumps.
Oh, one hundred percent. That's like the least of it. I was getting pats on the head, pats on the bare knees, you know.
I know, no actual pats, Yeah, pats, real pets. I now, listen, maybe I'm going to be confronted with something in the future. But I feel like when I hear these stories about guys in media, I'm like, wow, I'm like pretty normal or whatever. Yeah, as far as I know, it never occurred to me to like pat anybody on the head. Of course, you know who knows well.
To be fair. This was the time when like just the worst businessmen, like not a creative in their body, like it could barely even spell. We're like taking over media.
I'm thinking of so many people right now that would fall into this category.
And it was like they're giving you direction. And at this point, I'm doing this for ten fifteen years and they're saying no, no, no, you need a story on this, right. I remember some one guy was like, you should put more nip slips on the webs on the website, and I was like, I don't think women want to see nip slips, certain.
Nip slips, Okay, sorry what website?
Was this just to because I was I was in magazines for a long time. I was in magazines for like the first eight years of my career, and then then for the next ten or so I was in digital. I was at Yahoo for a long time. I love Yahoo, and then come on my favorite Yahoo.
Nobody I worked today, well when I started this business, so.
Nobody loves Yahoo, and nobody's loved Yahoo since it was like a competitor with Alta Vista, Like, it's.
Time to return to Yahoo's what the world I don't.
Even know what it's called now, It's like Verizon Yahoo. It's like Verizon who I don't it's changed names so many times.
Yeah, but no.
A lot of male executives like sort of like circled through there and I ran a very successful women's site for them, and it was not quality, but it was very successful and met all of the demands that needed to meet.
Nip nip slips on that website.
No nip slips, but you know a lot of like you know, things you didn't know you could do with your dishwasher, okay, like low budget recipes. It was like I understood the directive, which was, let's make a USA today for you know, for women online, and that's what we did. And we had fifty million unique users, and you know it was crazy.
It's like a broad consumer offering for the ladies.
Exactly.
Yeah, I get that. I get that. Lots of that on the Internet now, too much of it now. Unfortunately, we have to we have to stop. We have to stop the Internet. Okay, So I've been listening to the podcast. You've got this new podcast called Stiff, which is about a lot of what we're talking about. Actually right now, I assume it's on your mind. Yeah, it's also for me.
I'm a magazine like freak, like I love magazine. Yes, to me, this story is such a media story about the creation of a magazine and all of the things that can go wrong, and all of the personalities and the ways they can clash. But just to get into it, can you tell me if you oka you're describing this podcast as somebody who's never heard of it before, could you give me the description of what the show is about and what you want it to be about.
So, in nineteen seventy three, Bob Guccioni launches a feminist porn magazine called Viva. The price of Admission for these feminist writers, these very scrappy seventies feminist writers, very smart, coming from the village voice, coming from Miz, coming out
of Newsweek. The price of admission for them to be able to write all of these stories that they really want to write, really progressive stories about sexuality and desire and careers and ambition and almost really interesting, meaty topics. They published a lot of fiction, really interesting magazine. The price of admission for them is that they are in a feminist porn magazine. And next to their really smart and compelling articles that have like beautiful headlines and beautiful art,
are these very clumsy pictures of Dix. So it was supposed to be a porn magazine, Eurotica magazine for women, but Guccioni never let them in on any of the decisions. Bob Guccioni, in case anybody doesn't know it, was the founder of Penhouse. Penhouse. When he published it was a runaway success, one of the biggest magazine success stories of all time. It started to beat Playboy right away. He had very good business instincts. He started to show pubis because Hugh Hefner was not.
I mean, that's a great instinct.
I mean, no, I mean it was, I mean the way and the way he showed it was not It was not raunchy at least then he was. He was doing a lot of the photography himself. It was done really cheaply. Some of the people who worked for him, who went on to work at startups were like, working for him was how I to work at a startup because everything was pretty budget but it looked really good. Right. So he's come off this like runaway success with Penhouse.
He's got all this money and he decides or he steals the idea from one of his female editors at Penhouse to start a Penhouse for women, and he hires all of these, as I said, smart feminist, scrappy writers, but he doesn't give them any say on what the erotica looks like. So the magazine is incredibly disjointed. It's like almost a parody of female sexuality in terms of its erotica, and it's porn. I mean, it's just these
like balancing dicks in ridiculous poses. All the editors are like, ugh, I would have never have been turned on by that. But they get to write anything they want. They have a lot of money, they're paying a lot by the word, they're hiring really incredible writers. They're doing like feminist symposiums. It's a really interesting magazine that makes absolutely no sense, and it's beautiful, it's highly designed, it's expensive, and I am also a magazine freak. Like it was the only
thing I ever wanted to do. I've been collecting magazines forever. When I came across this in like two thousand and eight, no earlier than that, like two thousand and four, actually I had never seen anything like it. It was like, this was the magazine I had wished I had worked for. Right, you could feel that this was a time when this was writing and stories and not content. This was before we started calling what we do content. And like Viva
never made any money, and it wasn't about that. It was about like this sort of spirit of creativity and collaboration. And so the podcast just sort of follows the whole arc of the magazine, which is from seventy three to seventy nine, and it really tracks that entire time period, like the early seventies hopefulness, you know, Roe V. Wade has passed to seventy nine, when the moral Majority is coming in, Reagan's coming in, everything's changing, the feminist movement
is fractured and so it's losing all its power. So I really wanted to tell the story about this magazine and tell a really dorky inside baseball story about magazines, but also the arc of the sexual revolution, the parallels to today, how the sexual revolution wasn't actually that revolutionary for women at all, all of that.
Yeah, well, I've been listening to it. I haven't listened to all of it. I don't even know if is all of it out yet or are you're releasing it now? Like it's a week we're.
In we're in process of releasing, so I think we're up to episode As of the time we're recording this, we're up to episode four.
Yeah, I think I've listened to I started the third episode,
so I'm not too not doing too bad. Your description of it encompasses a lot of I mean, it's such an interesting story and the character is in it, and I have to actually say, and perhaps this will make me sound like a complete pervert, but I'm interesting in particularly from these past eras like sixties and seventies Playboy, and so I've collected a few of these types of magazines that you know, like but I had never heard of Viva, and as soon as I started listening to it,
I'm all right, let me Google, let me look at this thing. And it is like extremely fucking cool looking, like it just looks like a really really cool magazine. I remember when I was a teenager, I guess, and I first saw like Nylon, which was a magazine that was not for boys. I guess, like generally speaking, it
was like a girl's magazine. Yeah, And I bought issues of it because I was like, this is so cool and interesting and has such good stories, like I don't even care like who it's supposed to be for or whatever. And I feel like looking at Viva had a very
similar reaction. But like I was looking at images of it and then listening to your show, and there's such an interesting thread of like dissonance that that you kind of center on in a lot of these conversations where in my mind I only imagine Bob Guccioni, and he's sort of like this very tan guy. He's like a very very tan seventies guy.
He's like a caricature of seventies masculine. He's like, yeah, he doesn't even look like a real person. He's got the gold chains, the chest hair, he's greasy's the exactly all right.
And in my mind, because I grew up, you know, the seventies, is you know, sort if I was a baby in the seventies, late seventies. But Bob Goocjdi was in the public light still for a long a long time, and he was like a figure, you know, he was like a Hugh halfnar kind of guy. But in my mind I always imagined him as being this extra sleazy seventies guy like which he definitely was to some extent.
But you have a ton of recordings of him talking, and he sounds so much more interesting and intelligent than I think my or the public perception of him was. As you started to research this, was that surprising to you at all?
I guess it was surprising. But he was a big draw for me because as soon as I started to learn anything about him, I realized that he was a fascinating character and that it wasn't going to be easy to just paint him as a villain, which who wants that? Who wants like a boring villain? That he was multifaceted and he didn't really want to be a pornographer. He wanted to be an artist, Like he really wanted to
be an artist. He moved to Europe when he was like in his early twenties with like a couple of paint brushes and twenty four dollars. And I actually own one of his lithographs. Like his style is like very like Picasso want to be.
You know.
But he really he really loved art, and he really loved women. And he was still a product of his time, you know, in terms of gender roles, and you know, his masculinity and like dominating and everything else. And he was also Italian American, which was also interesting for me because I'm Italian American. But he was a really complicated person and I think did a lot of good for a lot of people. He was really loyal, He paid
women really well. He made women executives. You know, a lot of the women I spoke to said he made me in my career, he let me. That's where I came alive, was working under him. Like it's when it was the best time of my life.
Right.
And I don't hear that shit about Hugh Hefner.
I mean that is interesting. Hefner certainly a larger figure on like this on the global stage when it comes to this space. But I guess not a great person. You know, I haven't done enough of like reading on Hugh Aftn to know exactly all of his flaws, though I understand there were many. One of the things I love about shows like yours, and in particular, what I've enjoyed so far in this is like I didn't know any of this, and I think I had a perception of who these people were in this place in time
that was not actually square with reality. And and so I think like kind of as an aside, not even like your main course is not like let me recontextualize Bob GUCCIONI for you, but it is a very interesting
thing to hear. And on top of that, and this is one that I think you haven't so far, you haven't talked about explicitly, but at the time, like magazines were massively important in a way that they're not now, And I'm interested to know, like you talk about Penhouse, which in my lifetime has always just been like, it's a porn magazine. Yeah, And in fact, my understanding of Penhouse was like it's not just a porn magazine, but like where Playboy was known for the articles or for
the great writers or whatever. Penhouse was like, it's whatever, weird step cousin that didn't care about any of that and was just invested in like showing as much as they could. Is that also an inaccurate perception of like what he'd been doing with Penhouse?
It is. I think Guccioni had a branding problem, right. Unlike hef who was like playing by the rules, super slick, Guccioni was like pushing boundaries everywhere.
Right.
So for the answer to the beginning of your question, it's absolutely Penhouse had great articles, it had great writers, it had no problem, It had amazing celebrity interviews. Because the seventies, people wanted to be associated with porn, which is a weird thing to say now because we can't even imagine that now, right, Like it's just it's a totally different life, But there was pornosk happening in the seventies.
You know, Deep Throat is in mainstream theaters. Celebrities like Johnny Carson and Angela Lansberry are lining up to see Deep Throat like proudly it's separately, but like Jack Nicholson, like it was like a cool thing. It's like, you know, it's it's cultural currency.
Right.
So they had no problem, even Penhouse at the time, getting real writers, real stories. So the journalism was really excellent. Bob GUCCIONI just wanted the world to be different. He thought it was such bullshit that we were so uptight about sex, that we were so uptight about naked bodies. That he just was trying to like break through every sort of taboo. And he was really brave in a way that I think Hugh Hefner was not. And he pushed limits. You know, he did the oh god, why
can I think of her name? The Miss America photos of Vanessa Williams. Vanessa Williams, Yes, right, yes, he published those in Penhouse. He published Vanessa Williams photos and Penhouse and people were up in arms about this, and he was like, he was like, look, she signed the release, she knew what she was doing. There's no reason. But also it's not a big deal. These photos are not a big deal.
Right. That comes up a lot his attitude towards sex and nudity. I mean, it is He's right, I mean it is insane, I think, particularly in America. I mean obviously this is not just an American thing, but we are insanely puritanical and prudish about things that don't seem like that big of a deal. And the point about like it being like this kind of moment where like porn was having a moment is interesting because I do
think it seeped into the culture. I think it's much more like I think if you're like you could be a huge celebrity and then you have an OnlyFans like where you do some nudity or whatever, I don't know that that's a big deal anymore. Like I feel like we've we've moved beyond that, you know, I don't know, like to think about all of this and to kind of think about this like liberation moment or this moment like you were talking about, and frankly, like what what
drives Viva's existence? In some ways, this sort of moment for women where you didn't have to be you know, the housewife or whatever or be ashamed about, you know, your sexuality or whatever. In light of what's going on in the world right now where we've got like, you know, these huge political movements that are like trying to like
rewind the clock in some way. It's interesting to hear how how many women were like wanted to participate in this in this space, like and I think like the hearing like a lot of the people who joined Viva, they were both embracing like the concept that there would it would be about sex, and it would be about porn and all these other things like, but also that
it didn't have to just be about that. And I feel like we've lost That's the thing that feels like it's missing now, that like porn or sexuality or expl duration of that stuff can coexist on a higher intellectual plane in a popular form. That to me is something that doesn't exist anymore, Like we've neutered like that type
of content. And I just wonder, like, you know, can you talk a little bit about what the editorial ethos was for the women working at Viva versus what Bob Goccioni was trying to do.
So Viva comes out of the late sixties early seventies pro sex feminist movement right where they're really starting to talk about the c literal orgasm. They're starting to talk about female pleasure because the pill had come along in the sixties, So now women are sort of free to explore their sexuality a little bit, right, Yeah, and this was a very confusing time for women because they're all of a sudden, they have all this sexual freedom, but
they don't have any sexual protections. There's a lot of sexual assault happening. There's a lot of men demanding that their hip and sexy men pretty quickly comman dear this this sort of sexual freedom and take it away from them.
Yeah, it's crazy. Who could imagine such a shop exactly.
You look at a movie like Deep Throat, which is about a woman who has orgasms can only have an orgasm because her clitteress is in the back of her throat, and she can only have an orgasm from giving a deep blowjob. Right.
Is that's and that's medically accurate. That's a problem for a lot of people.
Yeah, obviously, no, I mean, look so, but what happens is this becomes a mockery of everything that these women in the late sixties early seventies were trying to do, right, which is liberate themselves and say we're sexually free beings. And so what happens is men sort of commandeer it. Let's say, straight white men sort of commandeer this. This liberation,
and then the feminist movement fractures in two. There's still sort of pro sex, sex positive feminine and there's the second arm of feminism, which is the anti porn feminist like Andrea Dworkin, who say, you know, porn equates violence. No matter what, porn is always violent, And these pro sex feminists are saying, well, you know, actually, actually this could be about you know, our desire and our pleasure.
So Viva's like coming right as this moment is happening in the in the feminist movement, and what it should have been able to do was build a bridge between the two sects of feminism, right, the two sections of feminism. It should have been able to build that bridge and say because they did this big rape issue that Bob actually fired a senior editor over because he didn't want their magazine to be about like, you know, sad issues like rape and sexual assault. He wanted to be entertainment.
I actually saw the cover of that one, which is really dissonant. Like the cover I believe is like a man and a woman that look like they're having a blast or whatever. That I think is related to.
He's got a gun. He's got a gun. And she's got a gun, he's smoking a cigar.
Yeah, it's super And then it's like rape. It's like the rape issue or something. I'm like, uh, okay, like what is going on? It's like a yeah, actually it's funny, but it encapsulates a lot of the dissonance you're talking about within that magazine, within the culture of it, like is this serious? Is it joking? Like? And if it's joking, that doesn't seem like a good place to be. So yeah, interesting, he fired somebody over that issue.
He fired somebody over that issue. He didn't know about it. He was one of those bosses who sort of dips in and out, but when he parachutes in he knows best and like he sort of fucks up all the work. You but can I curse on this podcast?
You absolutely can and should Okay.
He would air drop in and so the the other thing is is if you ever have run any like any editorial product, right, you know that one thing that you really need is cohesion. When we worked at magazines, you know, Kim Frantz who was my boss at Lucky Magazine, who had been at Sassy in a bunch of other places. One thing she said to me was she would open the magazine of Luck and she would be like, you see, you know exactly where you are in this magazine when
you open it. There's never a moment where you don't understand what's happening visually with the word. Like the design matches, the words matches, the pacing. You know, this is this goes in the front of the book. This is the feature. Well, this is the back of the book. Viva had none of that. It was just really anything could be happening on any page interesting. It was like am Bancroft and then the next page is like just a really overtan naked man's ass, like.
Nothing, okay, hold on the ass is is to titillate? Or like is that supposed to be? Like the hot part of it?
It was, but it didn't make sense next to this, like Q and A. If you ever have worked in a magazine, you know that on the you know, on a wall of the office you work in, you have the entire issue, the page by page, right, yeah, and you're looking at it and you're moving things around and saying, well, wait, does that make sense there? Does that ad make sense?
There?
You're trying to create one experience, which is part of the delight of the entire enterprise, right yeap. This was when I started to realize this was going to be a really fascinating story, when I really started paging through and was like, oh, there's like there's like nobody really in charge here.
Wow, that's interesting. Okay, So I because I started looking, I'm like, maybe I should buy some issues of this, because I really as soon as I was listening to the story and you begin telling the tale and hearing these people talk about it, I'm like, Okay, this sounds like something I want to look at. And you look at the covering and you're like, that's awesome. But it is exactly to your point. I mean, what makes a
great magazine is that cohesion. It is that you've collected all of these things that seem like they might be disparate in some other contexts, and you've pulled them together and made them feel of a kind like and you've made it feel like a journey from beginning to end.
That's right.
That is what I love about the best magazine. It's like like like in my mind's eye, I'm like thinking of the great moments and magazines that I love and the great sections not just right because you go, oh, there's that.
Thing, the great, great colleague everything. I mean, yes, they're so fun and.
To do this ambitious thing that you're describing, which is like can it change the conversation about like women's sexuality and all this? And it's like, oh, like you we were just doing whatever? I mean? Is that Guccioni, Is that his like air dropping in or is it just like they don't have the person who's like truly every day in charge, Like how does that happen?
Well, it's a couple of things, right, So it's it's Bob Guccioni and his partner Kathy Keaton were not real publishing people. They had one success with Penhouse, and that was a little bit of luck and a fluke, right, he kind of knew what he was doing. It was a little bit of luck. And then he hired some smart editorial people, mostly women actually to run Penhouse, and then because of the success of that, he has a
lot of hubris and he thinks he knows best. So he goes to the next thing and he doesn't know how to hire an editor. And when he does finally hire an editor in Patricia Bosworth, which I don't know if you know Patricia Bosworth at all, but she's a fatacinating figure out.
I know that name. Really, this sounds really familiar to me. Why do I know that?
She was a model for Diane Arbis. She was an actress, She was in a movie alongside Audrey Hepburn, and then she was a big publishing person in the seventies and eighties, and then she wrote a number of celebrity biographies. So she wrote the one on Montgomery Cliff, she wrote one on Marlon Brando, and that was sort of how like she wrote the definitive books.
She the person who unearthed the story about Montgomery Cliff with the Elizabeth Taylor's story. Is that am I thinking of the right person? Who? Do you know? The story? Yeah? I'm not sure about.
The details of it. But she was the celebrity biographer for a while. But for this minute, she was at Harper's Bazaar and Bob Guccioni calls her up and he says, hey, I need a really classy editor to wrote throughout this magazine. And she comes in and she really knows what she's doing, and you can really see from like the end of seventy four into seventy five, even maybe I would say a little seventy six. The magazine is the best it's ever been. It makes sense. It has that sort of
journey feeling. It starts and it ends, it's lovely, and then she's sort of sidelined because who knows why the magazine's not making money. It's you know that he's blaming on her. It's really because they can't get cosmetic ads because there are penises in the magazine. You know, it's like right, but he blames it on her and she
winds up getting fired. And they went through I think I forget the exact number right now, but I think they went through something like seven editors in as many years, which is just not enough time to get people to know, you know.
That's crazy, Like an editor a year is insane. Yeah, However, the idea came up because there is a kind of dispute about who actually had the idea for the magazine, right right, But it seems like it was like, hey, here's a great idea, Like I've done this, I'm sure you've done it. Where you go, I've got a great idea, and it's just the you can just describe the concept to somebody and it's like, hey, that would make a great whatever.
Yeah.
Like I have a book series that I've been talking about jokingly for like more than a decade, and I can describe like the rough outline of the plot of this book. Yeah, but I haven't sat down or written, and I have a feeling that when I do, if I do, which who fucking knows, right, it's a lot more complicated to write the book that it is to kind of pitch the idea to somebody, right, And it feels like this was like a magazine that had an awesome pitch, ye, Like the pitch is awesome, right, Like
it's really good. And when you hear like a GUCCIONI like talking about, you know, his view on women and everything, you're like, oh, this totally checks out. But beyond the pitch, just like if you don't have somebody who's driving it every day and it knows what it's supposed to look like, it's just a pitch.
Right, and knows what it's supposed to be and knows who it's for.
Who is this for? Yeah?
And I think that that's always the question you're asking whenever you're putting out any kind of editorial product, what's our core audience here and how, you know, how do we sort of super serve them? And there was there was not that understanding. But you know, also a lot of these editors. The cool thing about Patti Bosworth when she came in, she's in her early forties. Most of the editors and writers who have worked there were in their twenties. It's it's harder to lead when you're in
your twenties. It's harder to have that big picture vision because you just haven't done that much yet, you know, right.
Yeah, it's complicated works. Yeah, you know, I'm sort of confused though, like and to your point about who it's for and who the audience is and how they get advertising stuff for a product like this, these kinds of questions exist still, Like as you talk about like who's the audience? Yep, I think we're actually returning a bit in media to a who's the audience? Know? But for real, like who is the actual audience? Because we went through this whole phase of oh, there's so many people out there,
just get a huge amount of people to look. It doesn't fucking matter who the audience is, right or it's a whole generation of people. It's the audience. And it's like, no, actually, like what you really need to do is zero in on like this small amount but still very valuable group of people who will really love the thing that you
do and give a shit about it. Yes, And what I'm what I'm trying to figure out is like, you know, the idea is a little bit like a counterpart to a Penthouse or a Playboy for women, right right, And so there's a great writing all the like the first issue or something is like Norman Mailer's in it, which is a hilarious choice. I don't the first issue, but it's early.
It's the first issue.
It's my face.
It's one of my favorite details of the whole shell.
It's amazing the Norman Mailers in like Playboy a lot, and like is I've always thought like it's interesting because you go back and look at old Playboys. There's like an incredible writer. I'm not a Mailer fan, like I know a lot of people are, but I'm not. And but but he's like the quintessential worst choice, like the most perfect bad choice for like a women's publication. He's like a guy who like pretty much hates women. So it's interesting. But like, here's the thing that I don't understand,
and you perhaps can shed some light. Perhaps the show will at some point. This is again be sound like a really fucking dumb question. Let me think of the best way to frame this question. Show me give Did women actually want a magazine with pornography in it like that?
And I'm not saying women don't like porn that's not I'm not suggesting that, But like in the context of like a Playboy or a Penthouse, was there a market demand or did the women who were coming to work at it go I want to have these great pieces or I want to do an issue about rapists. It's like a topic that needs that we need to be talking about more. But also it'd be great if there
was like erotic imagery, because we're talking about imagery. I mean, yes, it could be stories whatever, But like these magazines dealt in Playboy and Penthouse dealt in they sold on sexy photos. Like to just put it simply, was there a market and was there a legitimate interest from the people who made it who were not Bob GUCCIONI for like that type of pornography for women.
So this is a central question of the podcast, and I think that one of the things that I came up against again and again from all of the editors first off, who would talk to me about their sex lives at the time and be very open about that, but then would say, oh, you know, can you cut that, or I'm so sorry I told you about the people I had sex with. Like, there was still a lot of shame surrounding sexuality and sexual freedom for these women. Now.
Like I said, this was a really challenging time for them because they didn't really know what they wanted yet. And I don't know if they can answer that question accurately given everything they were up against, given the internalized patriarchy, given all of that, right, yea, they certainly didn't want male photographers and male art directors. They didn't want the porn that was in Viva, which was a man's idea
of what a woman wanted. Now, if there had actually been erotica through a literal female lens, I don't know how that would have went differently, But that was sort of unheard of. There weren't women out there shooting porn. I mean, right, there were, but it was very niche they didn't, you know, they weren't connected to Bob GUCCIONI. I think that Candy de Royale doesn't really come along till the eighties and we really get into like really
quality feminist porn. But to answer your question, most simply, none of the women who worked there wanted these dicks. What they wanted was to make an Esquire for women. Yes, that was what they desperately wanted, because Esquire, you know, at this time, was like amazing, and they're like, why do I have to work on this stupid bullshit A good housekeeping?
Right?
I want to I want to make an Esquire for women, and that everybody wanted. I mean when I got into magazines in two thousand, we were still like, why is there no Esquire for women?
Right? Right? No? I mean that's why I asked, because like, what it feels like is like, you want an adult magazine that is like addressing women as like complete human beings, not like a housewife or like the girlfriend or whatever
it is that all these magazines would depict. You're pointed about Esquire, and there are lots of other publications at the time, and certainly Play a Boy was doing this where it was for adult men, like he was trying to capture this full picture of like your experience as a man, you know, and things you might be interested in, and things that would titillate you, and things that would
educate you and you know, struggles or whatever. To me, it's like it feels like it's all that but not the porn like for women, Like it's all the media
adult stuff. And I think it's interesting that like maybe in some way at that point in time and maybe today still like what looks like like I don't know, adult content's the wrong word, but I mean it in the most direct way of saying, an adult like for people who want to think about more than just the surface shit, right, Like for it's like stuff that's like real and not just like porn. But at that time, like if you didn't merge the two, like was sort of like how can you make the product right?
Right? Well, because there weren't as many delivery systems, let's put it that way, right, there just weren't there weren't as many delivery systems for porn, right. I mean, I think that we can go down a path that I think is inaccurate and like is overly generalized. And you know, oh well, one of the things that the women said to me, the women who work there, many of them said to me, was you know, well, women are just not turned on visually like men are. You know, women
need touch, they need softness, you know. And then when I talked to some like modern day feminist pornographers, they were like, that's absolute bullshit, right, like straight women are turned on by by looking at men's penises, Like this is this is absolute garbage, like that women are like soft and oh my god, read me a romance novel.
We have a clout in there or an audio stimpet of somebody that you interviewed saying that exact thing, which and I was like, yes, I was like, this is a thing I've heard, I feel like all my life and has been like it's like a cliche about women. It's like men are visual and w and need all of this other. And I'm not saying that's not true, but it's also like, yeah, this is sort of like what's so interesting to me is like because it is very straightforward, but you're saying it's not. Is it pictures
of nude men or whatever? It's like what those pictures? How those pictures are done like what the right like to some extent, there's.
Shot they were shot by male photographers. They were shot by straight male photographers, right. And what's interesting is that, you know, Viva, like Playboy's readership wound up or a subscriber base. At least I don't know about the readership. I don't know about women who read it. But let's just say the people who subscribed to Viva once they really got into the subscriber list, it's mostly gay men, right, I mean because there were very few places, oh right, see,
and that's the same thing with Playgirl, right. Yeah, But it also makes sense to me thinking about these these male photographers shooting male nudes. It's a male lens. It's gay men enjoy it, right, Huh.
That wasn't like forty chests or something, right Like, it wasn't Bob GUCCIONI wasn't like I'm saying, I'm making a ladies magazine but really making a magazine for gay men. No.
I think he really thought he was making a ladies magazine. And I think that in part, you know, whether it was his idea or not, I think he did it because Playgirl had just come out earlier that year, and I think he was obsessed with Heffner. He Guccioni hated Hefner, He hated everything about him. He found him to be a phony and a starfucker and just like the worst. And they warred with each other until Guccioni died basically right, So I think that Viva was for sure him keeping pace with Hefner.
Oh so Playgirl precedes Fiva.
By a couple of months.
Because Playgirl seems like, I don't know was it successful. I feel like, do they still make Playgirl or did they make it up until pretty recently, I feel like it never went away play Girl.
According to Bob Guccioni's son, Bob Guccioni Junior, Yes, Playgirl knew it was for gay men. It really had a better idea that it was for gay men. Where I don't think that the Viva editors understood how many what they're that their readership was mostly gay men, or at least they're subscribers.
Right.
Playgirl just wasn't as ambitious in any way. It was smaller, the trim size was smaller, the photo shoots were not as ambitious. The writing was for sure not as ambitious. And I mean when I looked at old issues of Playgirl, I was like, this is like a nothing burger. I don't care about this at all.
Right, there's no substance to it.
Viva's dreamy and weird and magical, Like there's just so many strange things that happen in it. And then you know, at some point Ana windtur comes on and is the fashion editor, which is like so wild. And also every major feminist writer in the seventies wrote for Viva at some point, and I just think that that is so. I think I just can't believe nobody knows about it, right,
And I really wanted to resurrect this. I really wanted to showcase this work because one of the things that happens with not just magazines, but any kind of writing we've ever done, is it just goes away. It's just gone forever, you know. Yeah, I knew this was special. I could feel it, and I really wanted to showcase all of their.
Work, right. I mean, I have to say, just the fact that it's been buried the way it has, I mean, like, up until I started listening to episode one, didn't really know anything about its existence nor the kind of scope of first off, it was around for a long time, like a pretty long time all things considered. Yeah, longer than a lot of publications that start these days, you know, and had, like you said, like some pretty incredible talent. Like now, I don't know, you've you get more into
the Anna Wintour aspect. Obviously she was pretty early in her career. I assume, yeah, she was.
It was there second job.
Yeah, but like you don't hear about that mentioned a lot in like when people talk about in wintor that. Oh, by the way, she was the fashion either at like Bob Guccioni's like Ladies porn magazine, which is cool. It's like one of the coolest things I've heard about her. But yeah, I mean it's striking, Like to your point about how things go away, you think about all the
art and thought and sort of love that went into it. Yeah, it's easier to write off this stuff, right because there are like, you know, dicks in it or whatever.
Yeah, I mean a lot of my work is already gone. I wrote for magazines that went under, you know, some of my favorite stories are just they're just gone. Yeah, right, Like maybe I have a clip somewhere, but it's just like goes away. And I don't know if that has to do with GUCCIONI or just sort of the fleeting nature of all of this. You know, I don't know.
Of all of this, like meaning existence or the magazine world.
Well all, well, I mean everything. I mean the magazine world, publishing media. I mean think about like, you know a lot of these women. What was interesting is a lot of them wrote books and I couldn't find their books. You know, yeah, they're long out of print.
Well yeah, We've had this belief that the internet would save everything. I mean honestly for real, in the nineties and stuff, people talked about the Internet and you're like,
you'll never lose anything ever again. And what I've found to be true, and it particularly in regards to things like this, to physical publications or you know, things like records, and not only have they gone away, but they're almost impossible to get again to find again, right, Like I don't know, they're digitized versions of Viva that exist anywhere.
Like no, I was like, oh, in my buying one, like somebody's selling a copy of for one hundred dollars, which is not a tenable way to you know, keep that I could build my own archive of it. But it's a big investment, right Like magazines, I guess are by nature or seem to be an ephemeral sort of medium, right like you throw it out, but you're done with it. This month is gone, like a newspaper. But magazines have I feel like the stories that are in them and
in the product that they became has value. Of course. I'm sitting in a room that just off camera, there is a I think you have one behind you. It looks like one of those Ikia bookcases. I think they used to be called Lack They're now called Calyx or something. And I have the larger version over next to me, and it is filled with magazines. But for me, I'm like, I need to keep these for some reason, and I don't know why. I don't crack into them very often.
The other day I was cleaning up and I found Frank Sinatra has a cold, which no, really, it's amazing sitting just over there. I actually put on Instagram, so I was like, here it is. I forgot that I had it, like the original, you know, issue, and maybe that's worth something. I don't even know. But it was meant as an ephemeral medium, but there's so much value to it. Actually, the work you're doing is like has interesting like archival value. I feel like to it.
I feel yeah, I think that, you know, information is just too diffuse. Like what this is all about, the nostalgia for this and why we all are like, oh print please magazines is we're all nostalgic for monoculture, right, Like we all want that moment. If you pick up a couple of magazines from nineteen seventy eight, you understand
a lot about that year because magazines were so hugely influential. Yeah, right, you don't have that by reading a couple of pages of a or you know, a couple of screens full of a website. Really it's not the same thing, right, And I think we all miss that, you know, I mean, everything's even worse now than it was, you know, ten
years ago. I was thinking about. I found a deck the other day, found an old BuzzFeed deck that I had held on, I had gotten my hands on when they were really you know, the biggest name in town.
There are billions and billions there were with.
Billions, And it was a deck called sixteen Ways to Viralize, right, And it was around the time of like the dress, and I was thinking about how quaint the dress was that we were all sort of like, is it gold? Is it blue? Like it doesn't feel that way anymore.
Right, Yeah, that's an interesting observation because the dress doesn't feel like it was that long ago. God, even saying the dress, there's a whole generation of people who probably when we say it, they don't even know what we're talking about. Right, Like, if you're a person who lives on TikTok right now, you probably are not thinking too much about what the dress means when we say it.
But no, I mean, you're talking about something that I spent a lot of time thinking about and listening to your podcast because it's so much steeped in the culture of a time that it just we could never I feel like we can never recapture unless we like literally turn off the Internet. It's hard to and I mentioned this before, but it's hard for people, I think to understand.
I certainly understand it. The power of magazines, like like the power of publications, because there weren't that many of them. It was hard, like there were not that many time magazines because it was really fucking hard to make a magazine that every that almost every person or some amount high amount of people in like a country would want
to read it every week, you know. And I think, like, in one way it's wonderful because we've distributed like information in a way that's like makes it more accessible for other people, people who would not normally. I mean this, this podcast of yours is about people who did not get a shot to make the kind of publication they wanted to make, trying to make that publication and getting like getting kind of screwed and and defeated in the
process in many ways. I mean, also having great like successes, like you said, like and going on to do amazing stuff. But we've leveled that you can now if you want to create this weirdest fucking publication that you you know, or a new one that doesn't exist, you can go
do it. So we've removed keepers. But at the same time, to your point about monoculture, we can't even imagine that cultural moment of everybody reading, like seeing the cover of Time this week that's right, and going and going, oh my god, like this you know, whatever story it is becomes the topic of conversations for.
The magazine or even smaller, like enough people rallying around something like spy, right, like this is. But the thing is what I really attracted me so much to this was there was a lack of self consciousness about this because there's no Internet, because they don't have to put their shit on Twitter. There's a lack of self consciousness, right. And there's also they're really working together in this very
pure way of what makes a good story. What's a compelling and fun headline that will sell this not for fucking seo, right, but we'll actually like look good and be cool. And what's the art that goes along with this story? All those creative collaboration of components that I think that's what we all want again, that kind of feeling, that's something, it's something tangible. It feels good to make.
No, I mean this is to me is like it's why I still feel attracted to magazines. I think it's because like you can create this singular sort of object, right, it's and it's it's real, it's physical, you hold in your hands, you like, it lives in your house, like it's not an abstract, floating bit of data that exists.
Like and to your point about like the SEO, and I think perhaps, like if you're listening to this and you are not in the media world, which is like, I hope, I fucking hope there's a bunch of people that you're not part of that world. But I do think it touches on these things, like when you talk about stuff like that, if you look at the landscape of information, you look at the complaints or the arguments
against like monolithic media. It's funny because this cuts slices so many ways when you people talk about the media narrative and monolithic media and how you can't trust the media or whatever they are describing the thing that we're talking about having a desire for. Yeah, and yet at the time of that of that thing, that monolithic media sort of existence, people, most people, most consumers of it,
weren't like this is bullshit, I can't trust this. They were like, these people are telling me what I need to know, like and to make a magazine like the one that you're talking about, like Viva to add to that conversation was not a small feat because he couldn't just appear. I think there's so much that is relevant, like to you know, in listening to it, this relevant
to this moment. I think particularly in just thinking about how the stories that we see and hear and read get from somebody's some unique person's brain to like into existence. And here's an example of like a lot of people striving. GUCCIONI to some extent, though he in a very wayward sense, like you know, it's striving to make something that's legitimately, you know, valuable to an audience, and it is a cynical and.
Not cynical, which is like, oh god, how refreshing.
Right, I definitely what makes me want to return to a time when like those people are making that's they're making the content, and it's not called content. It's like just great stories.
That was That was what ruined us when it switched to content. That was when it was over.
That was it. Do you think there's any going back. Do you think we can fix it?
I don't know. Look, I mean this podcast that I got to write, it's not going to be in the same form, but I got to write this podcast. I got to report it out. I worked with a brilliant editor who edited it. I worked with a producer who knew when to dip in and when to like let me kind of go wild. So this was the most satisfying creative project I have, writing project I've had in I can't even remember how long I had that same journalistic like just real that I had early in my career,
like chasing down stories in New York. So I don't think that it's going to look the same way, but I think that we could still tell stories.
I think it's a perfect place to leave it. It's sort of it's it kind of makes me feel a bit hopeful. I mean, I think that's a great that's a great point. Like there are I mean, there are avenues that we didn't have that those that those folks would have never had. So you know, the fact that you get to tell this story and tell it in such detail is like it does kind of harken back to what they were trying to do. Yeah, amazing, Jen,
this has been such an interesting conversation. It's such a good listen by the way, like just on top of all this stuff we're talking about, all this heavy shit about media, it's a fun show to listen to. It's like entertaining. You've got tons of great like interviews and comments and quotes and some like Bob GUCCIONI texts that are read and like, it's a really great listen. So beyond the podcast, if people want to find you elsewhere, how can they how can they follow your work?
I am Jen Ramalini us all platforms D E N N R O, M O, L I N I.
That's smart, that's smart. That's to keep it consistent. And also your name. I've done the same thing.
It's a very old person. It's a very old person thing to do. But that's that's what I should. Yeah, it is. I think the young people are like, I'm like tiny lyon or whatever.
Yeah, that's that's a good that's a good way to but that way you can escape quickly. Now I can never get away from this ship like exactly. I can never just Joshua Tepolski all over social media forever. So it's not like I can hide. Yeah no, I can't. George Santos, this situation.
Nope.
Thank you for coming on and talking about this. And next time you create something a work like this, you got to come back and tell us about it. This was great, Well, that was great. I have to say. I I like talking to people who know about magazines and have a love for them, even if it's misguided like my love for magazine. But that was super fascinating and everybody, if you haven't listened to it, haven't started listening to it. Definitely listened to it. I highly recommend it.
You will not be disappointed. It's highly entertaining. And that is our show for this week, where Rat We're just gonna wrap up. It's gonna get right into the end of this. We'll be back next week with more what future, And as always, I wish you and your family the very best.