What Do Free Love, Playboy, and Mary Shelley Have in Common?

Is it just the religious right that wants to control women's bodies?

Photo by Mika Baumeister

Yesterday, at the same moment I was poring over an article about the gutting of Roe v. Wade, a news item flashed on my screen: Afghan women will have to wear the Islamic face veil for the first time in decades under a decree passed by the country's ruling Taliban militants.

Boy howdy, those ultra-religious XY chromosomes love to control women’s bodies, don’t they?

We’re not talking about different sides of the same coin here. It’s the same side of the same coin. Enforced childbirth is slavery; enforced face veils are slavery. This is 2022, and women still have no agency. What little control they have over their own bodies is being violently wrested away.

When are we going to be able to stop fighting this fight? What is so hard about recognizing that women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community are actual people—people who like any other must be afforded protection under the law? And why is so much pushback coming from the religious right who, according to Jesus himself, are tasked to love their brothers as themselves?

It’s not Jesus who told them to hunt down abortion-seeking Texas women like feral hogs.

It’s men.

But the control, or attempted control, of women’s bodies isn’t the exclusive province of the religious right. Early progenitors of the sexual revolution, men like former Playboy CEO Hugh Hefner exerted a similar control over women’s bodies, while at the same time appearing sympathetic to the cause. At Playboy, the message, like the magazine, was seductive: we don’t want women in burqas. We want them gloriously naked on the page, and you’re invited to let your unfettered gaze linger on whichever part best pleases you.

At the same time, women were made to feel as though appearing in the magazine was a coveted privilege. You were special. Chosen. Being desired, having men want you, gave you the illusion of power.

It was a lie, of course, the power. In reality, you weren’t even power-adjacent. You were an amuse-bouche, a perquisite of membership to an all-white, all-male club. Your beauty and your sexuality weren’t being celebrated. You were being simultaneously consumed by Playboy subscribers and exploited by your captors, all under the aegis of sexual freedom. I know this because during my tour of the Playboy mansion’s famed grotto, the Blue Room, the Red Room, the game rooms, and the cottages where the models stayed, bottles of Johnson’s baby oil repeatedly appeared like a creepy form of product placement.

“What’s with those?” I asked suspiciously.

My tour guide, who worked security, gave me a blank stare and said, “Mr. Hefner has specific sexual preferences.”

I was so disturbed, I barely slept that night. Even then, as young and hopelessly silly as I was, I kept thinking about slave plantations and how a chosen few were invited up to the Big House to serve the white master. How was this any different? And why hadn’t I seen it sooner?

Photo by It’s Her Business

My own father, Rodd, had fallen under the spell of free love. He told his third wife that they were in an open relationship (to be clear, his wife wasn’t allowed to weigh in on this decision). She was released from the “feudalism” of a committed relationship, at liberty to do her thing, and he would do his. See how modern they were? No hang-ups here. Jealousy, possessiveness be damned. Those petty emotions were for squares.

Taking Rodd at his word, the third wife slept with his best friend. The next day, Rodd divorced her.

I’d like to think that my father saw the cultural hypocrisy of men indulging in extramarital “adventures” and women waiting chastely at home, but I doubt it. His utopian ideals ran afoul of reality, which is this: the aim of romantic love is possession. That’s the way we’re wired. Some people may like the idea of freedom from emotional responsibility, but that doesn’t mean those feelings go away. I still get a big chuckle thinking about my father’s hubris. How naïve do you have to be to believe you can control the manner in which a woman dispenses her sexual favors?

There’s that word again: control. Men want it. And unfortunately, some women want to give it to them.

It’s alluring, this idea of being taken care of. A friend of mine calls it “White Woman Syndrome,” and as horrifying as it is, I suspect there’s some truth to it. The success, at least in part, of a book like Fifty Shades of Grey was because it offered this titillating fantasy. Hot billionaire Christian Grey was not only supporting Anastasia Steele financially, he was tying her up at night, taking full control of her body—and confirming what I have always believed to be true, which is that everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.

Far be it from me to throw shade, but I don’t think it was merely the transgressive nature of the Grey/Steele union that women found so erotic. It was also the secret wish of no longer having to take responsibility for yourself, of submitting to the biggest silverback gorilla in the troop, the archetypal alpha male. I realize that we can’t politicize sexuality, but that stupid book set feminism back about three hundred years.

Photo by Rochelle Brown

Earlier proponents of free love, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley and her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, roamed 19th century Italy with a band of likeminded Romantic writer-philosophers. Among them was Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Before departing England, she’d had an affair with poet Lord Byron, became pregnant, and bore an illegitimate daughter.

Byron, then undergoing a scandalous divorce and even-more scandalous affair with his own sister, made it clear he wanted nothing more to do with Claire. But what girl of eighteen whose head has been filled with the “spiritual correctness” of free love, no less, believes a man when he says he’s done with her? Of Byron’s many liaisons, only two women, Claire Clairmont and Caroline Lamb, are referred to by him as “little fiends.”

Unsurprisingly, Claire didn’t take rejection well. She hated Byron for the rest of her long life. Percy Shelley, too, with whom she embarked on an affair whose clandestine nature belied Shelley’s philosophy of free love. “Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love, I saw the two first poets of England... become monsters,” Claire wrote. She and Mary had forfeited their place in society in order to follow Shelley’s ideals of sex without obligation.

Only later did Claire realize that women always paid a weightier price. Mary was almost constantly pregnant, lost four children (one to Shelley’s own selfish disregard for her better judgment), and nearly died. Claire might have secretly given birth to Shelley’s child. Both were ostracized by their countries of origin, and the ignominy of shame was theirs to bear for the rest of their lives.

We have nothing like economic parity between the sexes, but enough women are working at this point to make staying in a bad relationship unnecessary. According to Pew Research, “Young women are more likely to be enrolled in college today than young men, and among those ages 25 and older, women are more likely than men to have a four-year college degree. The gap in college completion is even wider among younger adults ages 25 to 34.”

Surely, this panics the old guard lawmakers who secretly yearn for simpler times when women couldn’t afford to leave, and Black people “knew their place.” There’s a reason for this rabid hatred of women, LBGTQ, and people of color. Our continuing insistence on being treated as equal under the law, as *gasp* people, upsets the national myth of white male supremacy. Having treated us so poorly, maybe they’re right to be paranoid about what we might do once the reins of power are in our hands.

But on one thing, let me be clear. We’re not going away. We’re not returning to coat hangers and separate drinking fountains. And I’m not speaking for just myself. After millennia of repression and control, the people are done.

If it’s war the old guard wants, we are itching to fight. What they haven’t figured out yet is that we will win.

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Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin