Back in the mid-aughts, right before the internet made Play-Doh spaghetti of the magazine industry, Jennifer Romolini was an editor at Lucky, a Conde Nast property dedicated to all things shopping. It was while researching her column on eBay and Etsy finds that she stumbled across something even better than a secondhand Laura Ashley frock: a back issue of a chic and not a little absurd erotic magazine geared for the thinking woman of the 1970s.
Viva had soft-focus photography by artists like Helmut Newton, and portfolios of male pubic topiaries styled by none other than future shampoo mogul Paul Mitchell. The articles bore the bylines of Patricia Bosworth, Betty Friedan, Nikki Giovanni and Anaïs Nin, and the fashion and beauty spreads were orchestrated by Anna Wintour. The British fashion editor had been fired from Harper’s Bazaar, and came to the crotch-centric magazine to resuscitate her career.
The magazine took a funny view of female desire, depicting English-style picnics en deshabillé or couples arrayed on groovy Italian furniture, engaged in acts simultaneously acrobatic and languorous. “It was utterly wild,” Romolini says.
Her discovery of an all but forgotten magazine that didn’t make it out of the 70s launched a personal collection and, 50 years after the first issue’s debut, her riveting podcast investigating the publication’s heady and complicated backstory.
Stiffed belongs to the school of podcasts that open a lid on creative scenes of the near past, including Lili Anolik’s runaway hit Once Upon a Time… at Bennington, which focused on a band of rising It-writers at the Vermont liberal arts college, or Helen Molesworth’s Death of an Artist, a true crime podcast that doubled as a tour of the 80s art scene of New York City. Stiffed is a trippy romp down a corridor of magazine history where second-wave feminism was both funded by and at dramatic odds with its publisher, pornography titan Bob Guccione.
Romolini is already a well-known podcaster. She cohosts Everything Is Fine, a chatty and sneakily subversive program for women over 40, with her former Lucky boss and on-the-record magazine biz skeptic Kim France. The two’s weekly discussions center on everything from the trouble with friendship and fillers to the clarity that goes hand in hand with aging. “I am not interested in shiny pictures of girl bossery,” Romolini says. “I want to talk about how much I grieve my youth sometimes.”
Romolini has a warm voice and her mien vacillates between distressed and amused. It’s a perfect fit for an investigation into Viva, which was a consciousness-raising clubhouse inside a literal den of pornography (the editors worked out of Penthouse’s Upper East Side office). Viva attracted a cadre of women writers who didn’t want to play a part in the Cosmo complex or work at a news magazine where they would likely be slotted into an assistant role. “In 1974 you either went to Ms magazine or you went to Penthouse because there was no other place that was hiring women,” a former employee shares with Romolini.
While women of the time had recently obtained the right to abortion and obtain birth control, in some cases their husband’s permission was required for them to obtain a credit card. “It was a messy mess,” says Romolini, who taught herself how to make narrative podcasts at the age of 50, having most recently made a living as an office manager. Many of Viva’s staffers passed away over Covid, and Wintour does not speak about her time there. “I wanted to know what they were trying to do,” Romolini says of her interviews with the remaining staffers she could track down. “I wanted to understand what they were trying to say.”
Romolini explores the traps and contradictions of the ready-made female empowerment complex, and mixes in soundbites from the cable television programs where Guccione, who is no longer alive, once appeared, often clad in gold necklaces and unbuttoned-down-to-there shirts that Romiloni describes in glorious detail.
A New Jersey native who initially flirted with living in a monastery, Guccione positioned himself as more than just a provocateur. Pornography made him rich but he saw Penthouse as a political vehicle, its very NSFW pages challenging conservative laws (and the empire of Playboy, whose pages looked, by comparison, like they belonged in Life magazine). Guccione talked a big game about liberating America of its hang-ups. “The pubis is one of the most beautiful parts of a woman’s body,” he said. “I thought the world should look at it that way.”
He oversaw Viva’s beautifully ludicrous photo spreads, and paid less attention to the rest. A non-glossy insert inside the magazine called Graffiti featured book reviews, author interviews and long-form features about things like gender roles, open marriages and birth control. In 1975, the magazine put out a survey for readers who were victims of rape. “It was a secret magazine within the magazine,” a former employee recalls.
Men always had the upper hand at the magazine, and a shaky grasp on what turned women on. Stiffed is a story of workplace strife that doesn’t feel entirely historic. “I feel like [Viva] failed,” Romolini says, “and I feel like it failed because white men did not like the idea of losing power, which is always the fucking story.”
• This article was amended on 4 April 2023. An earlier version stated that women in the 70s “couldn’t get credit cards in their own names”; in fact, only some women needed their husband’s permission to obtain a credit card during this era.
Stiffed is available now
