Oh, Playboy, How I Will Miss You!

Looking back over the semester it is amazing to think about what our group has been able to put together and what I personally have learned.  Just three and a half months ago, I was very apprehensive about having to create an exhibit using Omeka.  Technology is cordial to me at the best of times, and so having to put together something so massive was very intimidating.  I had never even blogged before this class, and just the prospect of writing the entries made me nervous.  Now having digitized so many items and placed them in my exhibit, I have become much more confident with my abilities involving technology.  I now know some technical jargon, like what a slug is, and can even use Photoshop.  Having these very basic skills now to build off of can only be a good thing as more and more aspects of life go digital.  As more historians and museums go digital, this project has had invaluable real world applications.  While I am not claiming to be a wizard with computers now by any stretch of the imagination, having created a digital exhibit using the Omeka software will only help in my search for a job.

The road to creating our online exhibit has not been a smooth one by any means.  When we first sat down and began looking at the Playboy magazines that were available in the Special Collections at the J. Murrey Atkins Library, we noticed that the magazine is so much more than just Bunnies and the centerfold.  There were interviews with famous actors and musicians, activists, and scientists.  There were essays on social issues and federal legislation.  There were book and movie reviews.  There was, of course, Hugh Hefner’s editorial, the Playboy Philosophy, which outlined his feelings on how society should look at certain issues, especially sex.  We decided that we wanted to share how Playboy portrayed and even played a part in the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s in America.  Jay Requard would focus on the hippie counterculture, Jessica Injejikian’s focus was to be the Sexual Revolution and Women’s Liberation Movement, and I would research the continuing African-American Civil Rights Movement, all between 1965-1975.  We hit a snag with expressing our original project idea and so the project took a bit of a detour for a while, having all of the focus on the sexual revolution and the portrayal of the sexes in Playboy.  Eventually we were able to get it together and express our idea in a way that made sense, and so the original project was back on.

            

Creating and sticking to our contract has been one of the struggles in our group.  We really had seemed to underestimate the amount of time that all the different parts of the project would take, and were a bit overwhelmed once we actually got into the magazines.  It turned out that we really needed to flip through every single page of every single issue so that we would not miss anything, something that had not been anticipated.  Though we really tried to stick to the schedule laid out in our contract, a couple of the deadlines turned out to be completely unrealistic.  Life got in the way and the enormity of the project was fully realized and, in the end, we kept in contact via email and met frequently in person whenever any of us had a breakthrough or silly question, always letting each other know where we were in the project.

            

Looking through every single page of the magazines was not a true hardship, though.  At almost 200 pages each, the magazines were filled with so many fascinating things.  It was interesting to notice that suddenly the cigarette advertisements carried a Surgeon General’s warning that they cause cancer or see the fashion change as the 1960s became the 1970s.  A fascinating section was the questions readers would send in looking to Playboy for help in their sex lives or just for a good drink recipe.  The layout itself eventually became familiar enough that it was easy to know exactly what you were going to be looking at in certain points of the magazine.  There is always a page of Playboy’s party jokes on the backside of each centerfold with a cartoon opposite, for example.  Just to compare, Jessica and I bought the September 2012 issue of Playboy only to find that this layout had not changed.  Even the layout of the interview page remained the same fifty years later.  Going through all of this made it so hard to narrow down the items to be included in the site.  I had at one point easily fifty possible items and it was difficult to cut the number down because I wanted to share all of the amazing things that I could not believe were published in Playboy magazine.

            

Our project also evolved as we did more research on Hugh Hefner and his magazine.  My exhibit on the African-American struggle for equality during this era has undergone many changes from what I had first envisioned.  I chose this topic after seeing that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been interviewed in January 1965.  I had also found some articles related to civil rights in the essays written for the magazine.  This exhibit did not make it very far as I remembered that the legislative portion of the Civil Rights Movement really ended in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act.  I simply changed gears and focused instead on the ideology of Black Power, which came to national prominence with the Black Panther Party in 1966.  Connecting this to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy has worked out, and is now the main focus of my exhibit.

            

Although this semester has taken more twists and turns than we may have liked, in the end the exhibit we have put together tells a story that not many know about Playboy.  I am excited to show that Playboy could be read for the articles; it really is not all just Bunnies and playmates.