It Took 39 Years to Write This
It's never too late to understand what you might have been
I am standing in front of my sorority roommates and a mirror. We are all looking at my reflection. It is May, 1985, and I am wearing my favorite grey and pink plaid ankle-length pants with a pink polo shirt and a pair of White Mountain moccasins.
“Nope, nope, nope,” K says. She is a year older than me and always knows the right thing to wear. When she marries in July, it will be in a chic, lacy dress with a mermaid silhouette.
“You need to look sleazy,” she says. “You look way too sweet and innocent.”
We are preparing me for my latest reporting assignment for the University of Washington’s student newspaper, The Daily. I am going undercover to report on Playboy magazine’s recruitment of women for an upcoming “Girls of the Pac-10” feature. I have an appointment to meet with a photographer to have photos taken.
When the photographer had called to arrange a time for my appointment, he told me to be sure to bring a two-piece bathing suit.
“Oh, I don’t have one,” I’d lied. I was not going to have my picture taken in a 2-piece by Playboy!
“That’s OK,” he’d said. “We can just take pictures in your bra and panties.”
“I’ll see if I can borrow one,” I’d said.
We consider a suede mini-skirt and a sweater that hits the top of my bellybutton, but I don’t think I can pull the outfit off. Our other roommate says, “I know what we can put her in—my varsity sweater.” She pulls out of her closet a bright, Benneton-like garment descended from the kind of letterman sweater our dads wore in high school, and K gives me a pair of lycra leggings, a long rope of fake pearls, and a silky, black, v-neck tank. I contribute my own pair of red heels, the kind my sorority sisters and I call “come fuck me pumps.”
“Better,” K says, once they have dressed me up. “But you need a lot more make-up.”
The assignment was a riff on Gloria Steinem’s first breakthrough piece of journalism, “A Bunny’s Tale,” her exposé of what it was like to be a Playboy bunny in one of Hugh Hefner’s clubs.
The piece was not my idea; two male editors pitched it to me one spring afternoon in The Daily’s grubby office, sun streaming through its dirty windows and lighting up its graffiti-covered cinderblock walls. The fall of my freshman year, I’d almost walked out right after I first walked in. On one wall, someone had scrawled “Fuck Objective Journalism” in giant black letters, which did not jibe with my understanding of what journalism should be. No one was even polite to me, much less interested in my interest in writing for the paper, but they told me I could cover some sports events if I wanted to.
I had neither experience covering sports nor any desire to, and I was pretty sure that the people working there were not going to become my friends, but I took the first offered assignment because, in addition to having been a class president and cheerleader, I’d also been the co-Editor of my high school newspaper and thought I might want to be a journalist. Also, they paid $15.00 an article, and that seemed like a much better way to earn money than the job I’d gotten sitting at the door of the graduate library and checking bags for stolen books.
By spring of that year, I was assigned to cover our national championship crew team. I reported on their entire season without ever attending a race. My sophomore year, they let me branch out from sports to write a few features.
“No way,” I said when they told me they wanted me to go through Playboy’s interview process and write about it.
They cajoled. They flattered. They suggested a Steinem-like breakthrough for my writing.
“Why me?” I asked. I looked across the room at another female reporter, a plain-looking young woman in baggy clothing who regularly got important assignments and appeared to be paying no attention to us. “Get someone else to do it.”
One of them said, quietly, “You know you’re the only one on staff who can do this.”
“Why?” I asked.
“C’mon.”
I looked again at the other woman in the room.
“You’re the only one who would be believable,” one of them finally said.
“So you’re giving this to me because of how I look, not because of how I write.”
One of them shrugged. “Both,” he said.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it, but you have to pay me double.”
They grinned at each other.
Walking from my sorority house to a tall hotel in the University District, I’m surprised to like the way I feel in my costume. I like the clicking of my heels on the pavement, the swing of the sweater about my hips. I am also anxious, though, wondering what kind of people I am going to encounter and what I will be asked to do. I expect it all to be seedy, like the strip club my senior boyfriend and his best friend had taken me to the previous spring.
They’d decided it would be good to show “the sheltered English major” something of “real life,” and I went along with their plan. When I scurried into a pocked stall in the women’s bathroom, after trying to hold my drink in my bladder so that I wouldn’t have to leave the safety of our table, I failed to secure the bathroom door. Music blared into the room. “Close the fucking door!” a woman yelled angrily from the stall next to mine. Too afraid I’d encounter her if I went back to close it, I perched on the toilet seat, unable to release my urine until she left, banging the door on her way out. I wonder if this experience is going to be like that one.
When I arrive at the hotel, the person behind the desk smirks when I ask for the room number of the photographer. When I get to the suite, the door is open. I’m greeted by a woman, who tells me that she is a make-up artist, and a man, the photographer.
I fill out a form, and then the photographer interviews me, asking questions about my hobbies, interests, and ambitions. He explains that those selected will be able to choose from three options for their photos: Fully clothed, semi-nude, or full-nude. Pay is commensurate with degree of exposure: $50, $150, or $300. He asks me if I am sure that I would want to be semi-nude, the option I had checked on my form, assuring me that the magazine doesn’t want girls to do anything that would make them uncomfortable.
The woman shows me into the bathroom to change into my bathing suit for Polaroid photos. She tells me that she will be in the room the whole time, and that I should tell them if they ask me to do anything that I don’t want to do. When she leaves me alone to change I remember that I am supposed to be feeling exploited and degraded, but I don’t. I feel fine.
Actually, I don’t feel fine.
I feel unsettled. I’m thinking about K’s assertion, which I didn’t question, that I needed to look sleazy for this interview. I’m thinking about how my editors agreed to give me double pay for this assignment I got because of my body, and because of what it’s requiring me to do with my body. I’m thinking about how this isn’t at all what I expected, and I’m wondering why I feel better about the photographer and the make-up artist than I do about my friends, my editors, and myself.
The photographer directs me to take several different poses, then shows me the photos that morph from shadows into clear images. I have a nice smile in them, I think. I wonder what they will do with the photos after my article appears. Will they save them after they see my writing, in case I become someone important some day? Will I end up like Vanessa Williams, undone by photos used in a way she never intended?1 Will I regret this whole thing?
They ask if I have any questions. I say I do not.
In early evening sun, I walk across campus as quickly as I can in my heels, back to The Daily offices, so that I can file my story in time for tomorrow’s paper. I’ve been given an extension beyond the regular deadline, but I don’t have a lot of time.
Here’s what happened: I wrote the story the best I could, talking about the assumptions my friends and I made about the women who would be applying, my reasons for getting the assignment, my insecurities about my appearance and feelings about being judged by it, my erroneous preconceptions about what the experience would be, and what actually happened. In my conclusion, which came to me as I was writing, I suggested that in agreeing to do the assignment for extra pay I was “really not so different” from the women who would appear in the magazine, writing that “I have sold my body as much as they do theirs just by choosing to do this assignment.” The sentence made me uneasy. I knew readers would disagree with it. I felt like I was getting at something important and true, but I knew I hadn’t fully connected the dots of my experience. I could see the blurry shape of what I wanted the piece to say, but I couldn’t bring it into focus.
I ran out of time.
Letters to the editor are mixed. Some are scathing, attacking my intelligence and proclaiming both me and the paper irresponsible for not condemning the magazine. Some women write in to say that they’d been afraid to try out, but my story had convinced them to do it. I’m not sure which letters bother me more.
A few days after the story appears, I get a phone call from the photographer; he’d like to schedule a photo session so that I can be included in the magazine.
“Did you see The Daily on Friday?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah,” he says, “we saw your story.”
I explain that I applied only so I could write it. “Oh, we know. We don’t care about that. We’d still like to use you.”
I write a few more stories for The Daily, but “I Was an Undercover Bunny” is the beginning of the end of my work as a journalist. After that, I admit to myself how much I dislike cold-calling people or asking questions that make them uncomfortable. I admit that it bothers me that I covered an entire season of the crew team without ever attending a race. I admit how much I hate that, for my editors, the Playboy piece was mostly an attention-getting gimmick, and that my “victory” of getting double-pay feels like defeat. But what puts me off most is feeling I didn’t have enough time to get an important story right. That is the deal-breaker.
I switch my writing focus from non-fiction to poetry (no deadlines there!) and get a different job that pays more. I also, finally, break up with my boyfriend who took me to the strip club.
I began writing this essay weeks ago. Frustrated with my slow writing process, I wanted to explore the issue of time for people who create. I thought I’d use the Playboy experience as an introductory anecdote; wanting details I no longer remembered took me to my attic in search of the story I wrote.
The box I found it in was filled with yellowing essays, poems, journals, and papers from high school and college. The few I looked at made me cringe more than once, and more than a little. My writing was often as overwrought as my understanding was shallow. I felt myself going to a place where I feel shame about the writer I once was and doubt about the one I am today, where the answer to all the questions I have about writing and publishing is a simple one:
Don’t do it.
I left the box in the attic and turned my attention to a different essay, one I wrote and shared quickly.
More than a week after my trip to the attic, I read Diana Strinati Bauer’s “Do Your Best,” about the practice of creating pottery. She tells the story of a potter who responds to a question about how long a piece took to make with the answer, “30 years.”
She writes:
“It takes ridiculously long to become a potter of any quality and just when you think you have it figured out, a pot with chemically-bound water explodes in the kiln, sending shards that knock over other pieces, and you feel like throwing the pots - and the kiln - out the window.”
As I sit with her words and consider my response to re-reading mine nearly 40 years after I wrote them, I feel the decades-long story I’ve told myself about the Playboy story shatter.
Picking up the pieces of it and seeing them new, my deadline is no longer its most salient fact. More important is that I was a 20-year-old sophomore from the suburbs who’d left my then-sleepy home state only three times in my entire life. More important than that is that it happened in 1985, years before I’d hear anyone talk about internalized misogyny and more than three decades before I’d encounter debates about the legitimacy of sex work.2 Only then would I finally, more fully understand what I’d started to grasp as I hurried to meet my deadline on that warm, late-spring night: That women’s bodies are an economic resource; that there are all kinds of ways in which our bodies and sexuality are used for money and other kinds of power; and that the lines all of us draw between those ways can obscure, justify, and perpetuate harm to women.
This all seems obvious now, but it certainly wasn’t to me then. In the emerging revision of my story, I see that at 20, living through the last years of the second wave feminist movement, I didn’t have the language or conceptual frameworks I needed to help me understand my experience, much less the courage to strongly state ideas that seemed antithetical to feminism as I understood it. I see that even if I’d had days or weeks to write my story, I probably wouldn’t have gotten it right back then, however I might have defined “right.” I just wasn’t where I’d have needed to be, as a writer or a person.
As Diana concludes in her essay: “Yeah, the mug takes thirty years. It absolutely does.”
Years later, the Playboy experience is an anecdote my second husband likes to tell for laughs at gatherings with people we don’t know well. “Has Rita ever told you about the time she was in Playboy?” is his usual opener. He never fails to include the phone call from the photographer after my story had run. That seems to be his favorite part, that his wife could have been in the magazine. I am always quick to make it clear that I did not, in fact, appear in it.
More than 20 years after I write that story, after losing an alarming amount of weight, struggling through debilitating insomnia, working with two different therapists simultaneously for more than nine months, and suffering through a disastrous, Hail Mary pass weekend seminar at an institute famous for improving relationships, I tell him that I am going to file for a divorce.
He gives me several reasons why I should not. None is that he loves me, and a primary one—which he will return to again and again in coming months—is that it will bring financial ruin to both of us. He will repeatedly assert that I should not be able to leave our marriage just because I want to. When I tell him that he is saying I should stay married for money and ask him how that would be different from prostituting myself, he tells me I am ridiculous.
I know most people would agree with him, but I also know that I am not ridiculous. A truth has bloomed for me from the seed of that time I went undercover, and I see enough to know that what he wants is “really not so different” from what so many want from so many women in so many different kinds of situations. I see enough to believe that I should have the freedom to do what I want with what I make from whatever assets I have because they are mine, and if anyone is going to enjoy them, it should be me.
I will continue to make choices I later regret—because I am as human as any of us, and we all see some of our actions differently as we grow and change—but leaving that marriage will never be one of them. And eventually, nearly 40 years after writing my original story about trying out for Playboy, I won’t regret the choices I made with it, either.
So many things happened during the weeks I worked on writing and revising the words you are reading here. In the context of Supreme Court rulings and growing understanding of what it would mean to be a woman living under an authoritarian, Christian nationalist government, the Playboy story took on different meanings for me.
I recalled the summer of 1986, when I first read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. By then I had left the sorority and was living with a boyfriend I would marry a year after graduation. I’d return to our dingy, sweaty apartment after working all day as an editorial assistant for a tech-based company in which all the scientists and engineers were men and all the secretaries were women, collapsing on our mattress on the floor and immersing myself in Atwood’s dystopian future. The world of the novel’s flashback scenes felt so familiar and yet, at the same time, so remote and impossible in the world of the novel’s Republic of Gilead. I remember not believing—even though it was plausibly explained—that the latter world could emerge from the former. I knew Atwood’s novel was a response to the rising religious Right, and I assumed she was using hyperbole to make her points. A literal transformation like the one in the book felt impossible in the United States as I then understood it to be.
I thought also of where we are now, and of those currently working in the United States to strip women of rights that give us the possibility of owning, enjoying, and benefitting from our bodies in ways we deem best for ourselves. I thought about all the ways in which my life has intersected with issues currently in the crosshairs of the Right—birth control, “pornography,” no-fault divorce, IVF, abortion, high-risk pregnancy, late-pregnancy complications—and about how differently my personal stories might have gone if they had happened in the world that many are working to manifest.3
I struggled with wondering what it would now mean to get this story right and with thinking that it was too small and long-ago to matter in the big picture of the world so many of us are feeling overwhelmed by today, but what is the world if not an anthology of small stories, imperfectly told? Isn’t it in our individual lives and the stories we tell about them that the meaning of most “big” movements and events is made and revealed? I wondered then what it might do for us if we all told our stories, no matter how seemingly small they are or how incomplete our understanding of them might be. No matter how too-soon or too-late they might feel.
So I kept writing, knowing that you would make of my words what you will, and that together we’d help each other understand what it all means.
For more information and different perspectives: “Sex work is real work and it’s time to treat it that way,” “Understanding sex work in an open society,” “The problem with the phrase ‘sex work is work,’”
Rita!!!!! Oh my gosh I am so glad you wrote this. It feels like you were waiting to write it just this way and at just this moment. It reads like it was written for me, and I bet every person reading it will feel the same way. The Benetton- esque varsity sweater and the details of the dismissive but co-opting ex, the yuk yuk editors, the professionalism of the Playboy staff, the lead up to now- so freaking powerful. Thank you thank you for writing this. It is amazing.
This is so great! My favorite part was about how you were more comfortable with the photographer than with your friends and editors. I never had a very professional playboy photographer to compare it to, but definitely had some moments with friends that make me uncomfortable looking back. Oh, and the way your ex wanted to share about you in a way that raises his status in the machismo pecking order. Been there.