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Abstract
The nude male centrefold spread like a virus through the new women's magazines of the seventies. At the time, and since, the academic gaze has viewed the centrefold as little more than a joke, a failure for feminism and female sexuality. This article returns to the heyday of the centrefold and listens to the responses of ordinary women in reader letters published in the new Australian women's magazine Cleo from 1972 until 1985. It argues that far from being a failure, these representations of the nude male became a practice of popular feminism, one of the early representations of popular feminist desire in mainstream women's magazines.
Notes
1. Quoted in Susan Bordo Citation1999, p. 18. It has proved difficult to get copyright approval from Burt Reynolds (who shares copyright with photographer Francesco Scavullo). Cosmopolitan's seminal centrefold image is available at: http://nw08.american.edu/ ∼ rstreit/reynoldspage.htm
2. The methodology of using reader letters is addressed in far more detail in Le Masurier (Citation2009).
3. CitationPatricia Mellencamp argues that the theoretical tradition of the dominance of the male gaze which followed from Mulvey's influential article trained women to interpret themselves as objects rather than subjects, as trhe bearer not the maker of meaning. It was a pessimistic kind of politics for women. “The model so actively employed by feminists about women in representation did not empower women in real life; in fact, it constantly pointed out what women were not” (1992, p. 87, n. 2).
4. In Australia, a very similar magazine, Australian Women's Forum, ran throughout the 1990s until it fell foul of the censors, The Office of Film and Literature Classification (see Helen Vnuk Citation2003).