Playmate & Me: Feminist at Playboy

Josh and I recently finished our collaboration for The Big Feminist BUT, an anthology of comics exploring feminism in our backlashy era. Editor Shannon O’Leary put out questions like these to the contributors.

Specifically, why is there so much discomfort with the idea of feminism?

Does feminism have an image problem, or are we living in a post-feminist era? And if we’re not living in a post-feminist era, what are the aims of a third-wave feminist movement?

What do women really want for themselves, each other, and the men in their lives nowadays? Can feminism provide it for them?

And what kind of effect has the women’s movement had on men?

All good questions. In response, I wrote a meditation in the form of a short comic memoir on my experience as a young feminist working for Playboy magazine in the 1990s. In the many iterations of the piece, my gratitude to editor Joan Reilly, what emerged through the many iterations of the piece was my own ambiguous feelings about the omnipresent Playmate (and by extension sex, sexuality, body image, feminity) who literally (since images of various Playmates through the ages hung in the office corridors) filled my days in the office. Here’s a sample page from the forthcoming anthology.