I, for one, am excited about “The Playboy Club,” NBC’s new fall show that sounds like a bonus dose of the sex, drugs and cultural upheaval we’ve come to love from “Mad Men.” (Come back soon, pretty please?) But other ladies are less than thrilled, such as the inimitable Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon/all-around badass who went undercover as a waitress/Bunny at the Playboy Club in 1963 for an exposé in Show magazine. In an interview with Reuters to promote a new documentary about her life, the 77-year-old huffed and puffed, “Clearly ‘The Playboy Club’ is not going to be accurate. It was the tackiest place on earth. It was not glamorous at all.” I take her word for this: her exposé revealed many things to the public about the so-called harmless fun of Playboy Club culture, including how all the waitresses were required to have a pelvic exam and a test for STDs. Let me repeat that: waitresses had to get tested for STDs. “[O]ne of the things they had to change because of my expose was that they required all the Bunnies, who were just waitresses, to have an internal exam and a test for venereal disease,” Steinem said, no doubt with pride. She continued to praise “Mad Men” as “a net plus [for pop culture], because it shows the world of the early 1960s with some realism.” However, she added, “I expect that ‘The Playboy Club’ will be a net minus and I hope people boycott it. It’s just not telling the truth about the era.” Keep reading »
