Though “Minx” and “Stiffed” are set 50 years ago, the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.
On a nightclub stage, a blond woman in a sensible skirt suit runs back and forth in T-strap heels, overwhelmed by her duties to her family, her boss, herself. She stumbles, then falls. “It’s so hard being a woman in 1973,” she pouts, still sprawled. “If only there was a way to make a change.” Then the shirtless men in breakaway pants appear behind her. Women can’t have it all, now or 50 years later. An eyeful of oiled torsos, however muscular, may not have been a perfect substitute for real social transformation.
This playful scene, an imagined forerunner to a Chippendales-style revue, occurs in the second season of “Minx,” which began on Starz on Friday. A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.
“Minx” has plenty of company. The 2023 podcast “Stiffed,” created by Jennifer Romolini, is a history of the actual, short-lived erotic magazine Viva, an inspiration for “Minx.” Other recent work dealing with the debates of this era include the 2022 film “Call Jane” and the 2022 documentary “The Janes,” both about an underground network for women seeking safe abortions, and the 2020 FX series “Mrs. America,” about the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment.
Cultural evocations of the American past often invite a thank-God-we’re-beyond-all-that superiority. But these recent works, despite the paisley and the quaaludes, don’t encourage that same condescension. These pieces are set 50 years ago, but the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.
“It all feels very fraught and it all feels interconnected,” said Ellen Rapoport, the creator of “Minx.” “And you can’t separate the issues.” When it comes to the sexual revolution, she said, “I’m not sure who won.”
The 1970s saw significant advances in women’s rights. Abortion was legalized in all states; hormonal birth control became widely available. A woman could have a credit card in her own name, could apply for a mortgage. Title IX was passed. A concurrent sexual revolution encouraged a new openness around sex and sexuality, while also seeding a backlash still felt today.
This was the environment that birthed Viva, an erotic magazine for women created by Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse and related magazines. Guccione’s goal was both cynical and utopian. Capitalizing on this new sexual candor, Viva was designed as a distaff alternative to Guccione’s other publications. Playgirl, another magazine that began in 1973, had similar aspirations. Viva may have been a cash grab, but as Romolini’s reporting for the eight-episode podcast shows, many of the women journalists who staffed it also believed that it could become a savvy, brainy, feisty publication for women interested in sex and gender. Yet it was, from the first, a study in cognitive dissonance. Articles about rape and female circumcision jostled alongside beauty tips, soft-focus photo spreads and ads for diet pills.
“It never really gelled or meshed,” Romolini said. “Bob Guccione thought he knew what women wanted and, not being a woman, he did not. So it was two magazines. One was this progressive, feminist, smart, fun culture magazine. The other had these soft, flaccid penises in a variety of outrageous poses.”
Viva published its last issue in 1979, having run through a masthead’s worth of editors, Anna Wintour among them, and a throng of contributors including Nikki Giovanni, Simone de Beauvoir and Joyce Carol Oates. Playgirl, which appealed mostly to gay men, hung on in increasingly attenuated form until 2016. Neither approached the popularity of similar men’s magazines. But “Minx,” particularly in its second season, has allowed Rapoport to imagine a different fate, a truly successful women’s erotic magazine, edited and eventually published by women (and gay men) who believe — sometimes haltingly, sometimes fervently — in sexual freedom and women’s liberation.
She likes to think a magazine like this might have succeeded.
“If you truly combined well-written thoughtful articles about women’s issues and actually erotic content, not just a guy on a horse, I think people, at least at that time, would have enjoyed that,” Rapoport said.
In both “Minx” and “Stiffed,” the erotic content ultimately functions as racy camouflage. They may seem like stories about sex, but they are both mainly about work. When she began researching “Stiffed,” Romolini assumed that the governing question of the series would be, Who gets to dictate female desire and why is it not women? But in interviewing the surviving alumnae of Viva, she discovered that the women who worked there had mostly given up on that question.
“Ultimately, ‘Stiffed’ is about professional desire more than it is about sexual desire,” Romolini said. “And I think that’s what it was for these women.”
Rapoport had structured Season 2 of “Minx,” which moved to Starz after HBO Max scrapped the series, around a similar premise. “In the first season, we really just wanted to normalize sexuality, nudity, male nudity, and to have the idea that women were erotic creatures,” she said. “This season is really about this societal drive for success.”
Desire, it turned out, could provide only piecemeal liberation, especially once people — men, mostly — discovered how to monetize it, a shift that fostered the “porno chic” of the late 1970s and the mainstream distribution of sexually explicit films. In the second episode of Season 2 of “Minx,” the magazine hosts the West Coast premiere of the real pornographic film “Deep Throat.” The movie is billed as a celebration of female sexual empowerment. But it also looks a lot like exploitation.
One character, Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), inspired by Viva’s publisher, Guccione, defends the film as feminist. “It’s about a woman searching for an orgasm,” he says.
Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond), the editor in chief of Minx, disagrees. “Which she finds with a clitoris conveniently located inside of her mouth?” Joyce says.
Related debates within the feminist community (often referred to as the porn wars or the sex wars) fragmented the movement, making it vulnerable to attacks — attacks that “Minx” has dramatized, from both the political left and the right. As the ’80s dawned, Ronald Reagan was soon to be elected president, evangelical Christians held new sway and the Equal Rights Amendment had been defeated, leaving many of the liberating promises of the 1970s unfulfilled.
“I don’t think the sexual revolution ultimately happened. It started and then devolved,” Nona Willis Aronowitz, a cultural critic and the author of “Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution,” said. “Ever since, we’ve tried to claw our way back to some of the most utopian ideas and we haven’t gotten there.”
Sexual liberation has real political dimensions, as the personal is only rarely apolitical. But faced with the work still incomplete — a wage gap, though narrowed, remains, and protections against domestic and sexual violence are still lacking — a focus on female pleasure can seem frivolous. So can a show and a podcast centered on a skin magazine for women.
Yet in examining this narrow slice of the sexual culture of the 1970s, “Stiffed” and “Minx” suggest parallels between then and now.
“‘Minx’ felt like a way to think about things that were currently happening, but through this lens of 50 years ago,” Rapoport said. “Conversations about birth control, abortion, gay rights, every social issue is now back on the table again, in a way that I don’t love.”
Lovibond, the star of “Minx,” agreed. “Go to marches, as I do, and you’ll see signs today that we were holding in the ’70s,” she said. A show set then shouldn’t still resonate, she argued. But it does.
Lorna Bracewell, the author of “Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era,” sees these backward-facing shows as offering counsel for the present. “This intense period of reaction that we are living through, it motivates people to look back and say, well, what did feminists do the last time this happened?”
Viva had only a brief run. Minx never existed. But “Stiffed” and “Minx” allow a return to a moment of, as Bracewell described it, “really radical aspirations and fantasies and dreams and desires,” a moment when great social change seemed possible. If we look and listen closely enough, maybe we can learn what went wrong in the past and dream better for the future, with equality and an occasional hunky dance revue.
“I just wonder if there’s a way for all of us to come together, agree on things and try to make progress,” Rapoport said.
Maybe then, she implied, the woman in heels won’t have to fall.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
