Before NBC’s The Playboy Club can even be allowed to empower women with its timeless feminist messages about being pretty and docile enough to attract a husband, perennial cold shower Gloria Steinem has joined the chorus of those preemptively condemning the show, calling for a boycott when it airs. Steinem, of course, worked at New York’s Playboy Club in 1963 for a famous article that characterized the experience as fun, sexy, indentured servitude, with women shoved into painful, restricting costumes and run through an ass-slapping gauntlet of frequent harassment. So naturally, Steinem believes that NBC’s take will be historically inaccurate, given that the producers seem to think all of that stuff was a character-building exercise that was “all about empowering these women to be whatever they want to be.” Of course, what the women in The Playboy Club want to be is the Bunny that the richest guy in the room wants to have occasional sex with, a scenario that Steinem believes “normalizes prostitution and male dominance.” Anyway, though their respective reasoning is different, this marks probably the first and last time that Gloria Steinem and the Mormons have agreed on something.
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