Podcast review — Stiffed looks back at a groundbreaking erotic magazine for women

“I was brought up to respect women and I’ve never lost that respect. I’ve added to it. I’ve contributed to it.” So says the late Bob Guccione at the start of Stiffed, an illuminating new podcast about Viva, the long-forgotten erotic magazine for women, founded by Guccione 50 years ago. Guccione was the controversial brains behind the men’s porn magazine Penthouse, the more explicit rival of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. (Penthouse was the first publication of its kind to show women’s pubic hair, which in turn prompted Playboy to dial up the nudity.)

One of the more unexpected ideas explored in Stiffed is that Guccione was a champion of women: he not only had them as models in his magazines but hired them to manage, edit and write in them too.

Written and hosted by the journalist Jennifer Romolini, the series veers between playful and sceptical as it assesses Guccione’s legacy. We learn how he changed the publishing landscape for the better with Viva, but stole the concept of an erotic women’s magazine from Gay Bryant, a young journalist on Penthouse who went on to coin the phrase “glass ceiling”. Romolini says Guccione was “kind of a genius” at spotting talent when it came to staffing magazines, but his editorial ideas were dreadful. He bragged about employing women, but paid them significantly less than his male employees. Another fun fact: Guccione wore a gold medallion engraved with the image of his own penis.

As for the magazine itself, the first issue, published in October 1973, was a disaster: the cover had a close-up of a woman’s face in the throes of ecstasy while the inside featured, to quote Romolini, “a 15-page centrefold where a moustachioed man and a brunette woman in a bonnet cosplay as old-timey people in a picnic. A picnic where all they seem to be serving is a woman’s naked body.”

Talking to Romolini, Bryant notes that early issues were “a man’s idea of what women wanted”. It was only later, when Guccione began to lose interest and female staff could take the reins, that the magazine was able to shake off the male gaze and become truly radical, running features by leading feminist writers and activists such as Betty Friedan and Anaïs Nin.

There are echoes here of the 2021 podcast Welcome to Your Fantasy, about the exotic dance troupe The Chippendales. There, beneath the campy theatrics of men bumping and grinding in G-strings, was a more serious story about female desire and emancipation. In Stiffed, Romolini is interested in the political and social context of Viva, taking in second-wave feminism, pop culture and female sexual empowerment. At the heart of the series is the question of whether a magazine funded by a man who made his fortune exploiting female bodies could really change women’s lives for the better. The short answer? It’s complicated.

crooked.com/podcast-series/stiffed