The Playboy and The James Bond

5 The Bond women

If the character of James Bond was the kind of man that many men supposedly wanted to be in the 1960s, by all accounts men longed for the beautiful women that he meets. The women in Playboy have inspired similar comments, and also became an erotic ideal of the era. Certainly, women have played a major role in the fantasy celebrated by Playboy and Bond, and success with women was a vital aspect of the playboy lifestyle, in many ways inseparable from the consumerism examined in the previous chapter. Writing about the rise of the magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that, 'From the beginning, Playboy loved women - large-breasted, long-legged young women, anyway - and hated wives.'1 In her book about post-war masculinity, Ehrenreich emphasises the importance of understanding Playboy's love of beautiful young, single women, and dislike of wives (unless they were someone else's), within the context of the 'battle of the sexes' in the 1950s and 1960s, including the fight for female autonomy in the workplace and home, and male rebellion against the traditional breadwinner role. Importantly, for the first time in men's magazines like Esquive and Playboy, the adult male was being directly addressed 'as a consumer in his own right'.2 For Ehrenreich, the now infamous Playmate in the Playboy centrefold was yet another commodity in the long line of consumer goods and services being advertised as accessories and status symbols for men. This discussion is not unlike the way in which some noted Bond scholars, such as Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, analyse the representation of women in 1960s Bond, especially the 'Bond girls', as they have become known. In particular, Bennett and Woollacott argue that the apparent sexual freedom of the women in the early 1960s Bond films is really a male fantasy of 'strategic and selective "liberation" of women - free

only in the areas (bed) and respects (sexuality) that "liberated man" required'.3

This chapter will draw together these and other familiar arguments in order to discuss the women in Bond and Playboy. From one point of view, as the chapter will consider, there is no doubt that the Playboy Playmate and the Bond girl represented a male fantasy of female independence, being the objects of an unmistakably male gaze. From another point of view, though, in the context of discourses on the sexual revolution, they might also be considered to some extent as incarnations of the newly liberated single woman, free from some of the negative social and sexual constraints imposed by traditional roles and norms. The full extent of this debate is somewhat outside the scope of this book and is not without its own difficulties.4 Nevertheless, no matter which perspective is taken, it is clear that, like James Bond and Playboy, the Playmate and the Bond girl became popular icons in the 1960s and were cultural phenomena in their own right. Given the significant role that women play in the lifestyle fantasy and formulas of Playboy and Bond, it makes sense that they might also perform an important function in the Playboy-Bond relationship, in the 1960s and afterwards. The chapter will note that the Playbmate and the Bond girl share some common characteristics, and it examines Playboy's coverage of the women of Bond, closely analysing the November 1965 'James Bond's Girls' pictorial. The chapter will end by returning to reflect on the function of these representations of women in Playboy and Bond in the 1960s in relation to the requirements of male sexuality, and the playboy ideal.

The Playmate bond

Playboy magazine is perhaps best known for the Playmate. In the early years of Playboy, to develop the Playmate centrefold Hefner made some important changes to the standard presentation of the female pin-ups in other men's magazines. Old calendar shots meant that Marilyn Monroe was the first centrefold in 1953, and after her came a series of other professional models, but as Playboy evolved over the next few years Hefner set a different tone for the monthly Playmate model using the concept of the friendly, wholesome, and available girl-next-door. As such the erotic appeal of the Playmate was based as much on this