This post was written by Guest Contributor Saira Mahmood. Follow Saira at @sairamhmd and through her personal blog.
Noor Tagouri became the first Muslim woman in a hijab to be featured in Playboy in October of 2016. This was viewed by some people as a radical decision for a magazine that had earned its fame publishing nude photographs of women in various sexually titillating poses ever since its inception. The issue was named Renegades and featured “a group of eight unconventional men and women” – including Tagouri – “who aren’t afraid to break the rules”.
Tagouri certainly fits the bill. She is a young journalist who aims to be “first hijabi anchor on commercial television in the US” and is involved in projects tackling a plethora of women’s issues, including sexual trafficking. Yet — along with the astounding praise and publicity, her feature earned both her and the magazine — a variety of critics were disappointed with her decision. The flurry of outrage that the feature prompted came from both religious and feminist critics, with many intersections given the diverse makeup of the international Muslim community.
Noor Tagouri via US Magazine.
Playboy released its first issue in 1953. It was at the cusp of the American ‘60s, known for anti-war protests, second wave feminism and the struggle for civil rights. Hugh Hefner – Playboy’s founder — fancied himself a champion of racial justice and women’s rights. His organisation funneled money into pro-abortion causes, and was an amicus curiae in Roe v. Wade. At a time when segregation was commonplace, Playboy Clubs insisted that all customers (regardless of race) were welcome, and the magazine featured columns and interviews with important Black writers, including Alex Haley’s 1963 interview of Malcolm X.
At the same time, though, feminists and womanist critics of Hefner insisted that his worldview and philosophy were degrading to women. Ariel Levy has noted many of Hefner’s problematic remarks in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, which includes the following anecdotes and sayings. Hefner demanded that “Playboy girls have a very high morality” and they “lose their job” if they do not maintain chastity. Private detectives are hired to find out if they accept a date. In 1967, Hefner told Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that the bunny – a longtime symbol of Playboy – represented “the girl next door” who is “never sophisticated”. He was not interested in “the mysterious, difficult woman” who is “sad and somehow mentally filthy”.
From its very beginnings then, Playboy was a mess of contradictions. Whilst seemingly progressive in the public sphere, a cursory glance at the philosophy of its founder reveals that Playboy employed an insidious double-standard in its perception of sexual liberation for men and women. The former were to reaps the benefits of the revolutionary changes in American society, for the latter shrugging off what was oft thought of as the repressive and Puritan morality of the Church equated to them becoming “mentally filthy”. The newer demands on women of purity – whilst packaged in a liberal way – seemed glaringly like the old.
The 1970s are usually associated with the “sex wars” of second-wave feminism, wherein (primarily ‘radical’ and ‘liberal’ feminists) battled over the issues of pornography and women’s rights.
A branch of the movement was convinced that demands of outlawing pornography were akin to siding with the religious right the movement had so staunchly opposed, and a major hindrance to women’s progress. Others believed that pornography – with its violence, racial tropes, infantilization of women, and eroticisation of abuse – was a system inherently anti-woman. They were not opposed to erotic displays of sexuality, but rather the male-centric institution of pornography.
This view is perhaps summed up the best by Audre Lorde in her 1978 essays titled ‘The Uses of the Erotic’ in which she maintains that porn is oppressive, but that the erotic is a powerful force for women and the two should not be conflated. She writes:
“…pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”
This view finds echoes in many radical feminist writings and talks. In 1970, Susan Brownmiller confronted Hugh Hefner on The Dick Cavette Show calling him her “enemy” who had “built an empire on oppressing women”, and today’s leading anti-porn feminist Gail Dines has drawn on extensive research to link pornography to sexual assault and misogyny. The forty-odd-year gap between these two women and their remarks reveal a troubling truth how the internet has made magazines like Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler nearly obsolete in favor of even more violent online videos.
According to Gail Dines, Playboy laid the “economic, legal and cultural groundwork for the images that now makeup much of the mainstream porn industry”. In 1953, pornography was associated with ‘sleaziness’ and had a distinctively classist tint: it just wasn’t something that the ‘sophisticated’ man discussed in polite company with his friends.
Hefner knew this. Seizing the sexual liberation of the ‘60s, he marketed the very first Playboy to the upwardly mobile middle-class man. The issue spoke about the new playboy, a man who enjoyed jazz and discussing Picasso – who would benefit from the political and social commentary in the magazine. Pornography was now a lifestyle, and one associated with refined tastes.
Missing from this discussion were the feminist concerns raised by women as they witnessed the industry’s misogyny.
In 1963, Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Bunny at the New York Playboy Club and wrote a scathing expose. She described appalling work conditions (mandatory heels that made feet swell, clothes so tight they left marks), poor compensations (very few of the women working there were able to keep tips, and the pay was far less than advertised), and rampant sexual harassment. To that end, things remain pretty much the same. In 2006, ex-Playmate Izabella St. James published Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion in which she writes about feeling coerced into sex:
“…having sex with Hef was part of the unspoken rules. It was almost as if we had to do it in return for all the things we had.”
Carla and Melissa Howe — two 24-year-old former Playmates — in January 2015 described their experience of living in the Mansion as “like being in prison” with strict security, a 9 pm curfew, Instagram and Twitter monitoring and much of the guests being “pervy”. The porn industry also makes use of violent, Orientalised tropes in its depiction of Muslim women – often resorting to putting non-Muslim women (like Mia Khalifa) in hijab to serve as fetishes.
In the world that Playboy has helped create — a multi-billion dollar industry surrounding commercialised sex-work has come under fire from many feminists, sociologists and ex-sex workers themselves with many linking it to abuse and sexual trafficking. In mainstreaming porn, Playboy inadvertently made itself obsolete. Magazine sales plummeted from 3 million in 2006 to just 1.5 million in 2010, and have kept falling ever since.
In a bid to save itself, Playboy is trying to sell a new product these says: the guise of diversity, women’s rights and inclusions. Playboy wants to package and market ‘wokeness’.
In March 2016, the magazine decided to forgo nudes — a major factor in Tagouri’s decision to pose — insisting it was to better represent “the political and sexual climate” of today. (In February 2017, it was announced that the nudes would be back when it became obvious that the decision was not as good for business as originally thought). Later that year, the Renegades issue came out.
When faced with critics, Tagouri has often expressed that she feels the Playboy avenue is a good place to normalise the image of Islam and – hopefully – counter Islamophobia. She also reveals her spiritual and theological struggles in reconciling her decisions with her faith. Missing in this conversation are the feminist and anti-capitalist debates surrounding Playboy and the industry it has spawned. Like women’s rights, diversity is gimmick for the magazine: to be employed when convenient and discarded when bad for business.
Tagouri retains her right not to agree with this assessment of the magazine. There are feminist advocates of pornography, after all — but it’s a loss that (in the wake of the interview) debates surrounding the cover tended to oscillate between representation and modesty with very little attention paid to concerns relating to social justice. Tagouri not properly addressing these concerns — particularly as someone worried about trafficking — is also disappointing, in my view.
The Muslim American community must also give room to conversations about abuse and oppression within the porn industry that focus on something more than purely religious opinions. Especially given how Muslims are now being seen as potential consumer base for a plethora of companies – and how diversity is now very important in mainstream media, these conversations are important to ensure that exploitation not be brushed under the rug in pursuit of representation.