Podcasts 2023: New series probes legacy of Penthouse founder Bob Guccione’s feminist magazine Viva

Porn bible Penthouse is renowned for glossy spreads of naked women but in the 1970s its founder Bib Guccione also published a subversive feminist magazine.

Bob Guccione announcing his anti-censorship campaign in 1986. Picture: AP

Pornographic bible Penthouse is renowned for glossy spreads of naked women but in the 1970s the founder of the men’s mag also published a subversive feminist magazine.

The mag, Viva, aimed to sexually and intellectually arouse women as the free-love revolution and female liberation was up-ending traditional dynamics across society. What Viva actually achieved was more like what Penthouse founder Bob Guccione thought aroused women.

The first issue included a 15-page centrefold of a couple on some kind of erotic picnic.

Cosmopolitan eat your heart out.

The February 1976 edition of Viva. Picture: Supplied

The January 1976 edition of Viva. Picture: Supplied

Podcast Stiffed, from Crooked Media and iHeartPodcasts, probes Viva’s legacy and examines why the groundbreaking magazine failed.

The magazine world is sparse these days – thanks, internet – but there is an interesting question over why a women’s equivalent of Penthouse has never really taken off.

Presumably it’s because they don’t sell, in which case the question is why do women buy magazines full of beautiful women but not beautiful men?

Guccione (pictured) is a complex character and is depicted in the podcast as a kind of archetype of 1970s sleaze, all disco and gold chains.

In Guccione’s editor’s letter in the first issue of Viva he describes the erotic women’s magazine as his “newborn child”. He wrote: “Fragile, undisciplined, painfully vulnerable, this child of love is my child and I want to see her grow and have all of the advantages and success that love and ­attention can provide.”

It’s a bit much. Guccione was a bit seedy by contemporary tastes but in some ways he was decades ahead of his time, namely in that he paid women to work and excel in jobs they wanted, like some kind of nascent champion of change.

Although only existing between 1973 and 1978, Viva served as a launching pad for a number of doyennes of the magazine world, including longrunning Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

The full-frontal male nudes were published next to ­articles written by now established women literary figures including Patricia Bosworth, Betty Friedan and Anais Nin.

The Decembder 1975 issue of Viva. Picture: Supplied

So was Guccione just a gross man peddling sleaze or was he a pioneering feminist hero? Is it possible he was both?

If it seems slightly weird a podcast about a women’s-lib mag centres on a man, that’s because Guccione ultimately did have the power and – no spoilers – that could provide a clue as to the magazine’s ultimate failure.

The podcast is heavy on bombastic ’70s disco beats. Historic interviews with Guccione (he died in 2010, aged 79) are quite the ride.

“If you’re looking at a woman’s anatomy it must be viewed in all of its parts,” he says in one interview in the early 1980s.

“We cannot take one part of the anatomy and say this is vulgar or obscene and the rest of it is okay, the rest of it is decent. That just simply doesn’t work.”

Sasha Vinni, left, Guccione, and Leslie Glass, right, in New York City in 1994. Picture: Getty

The more you know …

Stiffed is a fun podcast and a fascinating look into the world of pornography amid a budding feminist movement.

In the queue

Modern Love – The podcast adaptation of the New York Times dating column

For the Record: The 1970s – All about the music of the 1970s

The Orgasm Cult – A BBC investigation into wellness company One Taste