The Short Stories of Playboy and the Crisis of Masculinity: Men in Playboy’s Short Fiction and 1950s America

Abstract

The goal of this thesis is thus to analyze how the short stories in Playboy Magazine (re-)present a male identity in the context of the American 1950s. In American society of the 1950s there was a perceived crisis of masculinity. Changes in the workplace threatened an older, individualist notion of enterprise; men were uneasy about the increasing participation of women in the workforce; a new suburban environment threatened traditional notions of the male role in the family; and finally, concerns about the country’s youth and a Cold War climate made people anxious about the ‘health’ of the nation. It was in this context that Playboy appeared and presented men with an alternative masculinity, one that was based on a consumer ethic of "work and play" and advocated the ideal of the urban bachelor. The exploration of the short stories serves to see if and how issues in society were reflected. This exploration consists of both a content analysis of all short stories published in the period 1953-1959, as well as an analysis of several individual stories. While the short stories on their own did not provide explicit role models or ways to deal with certain issues. Rather, framed by Playboy’s ideology and the many articles that did provide explicit guidelines and advice, the short stories become part of that ideology.