The Story of ‘Viva,’ the Radically Ambitious Erotic Women’s Magazine of the 70s

In the 1970s, as Penthouse grew increasingly famous (and controversial) for its sensational pornographic content, its creator Bob Guccione began publishing a magazine about something even more salacious than women’s breasts and pubic hair: women’s actual desires. 

From 1973 to 1979, Viva paired feminist writing from women like Betty Friedan and Erica Jong and stories on anti-rape groups and female circumcision with full-frontal male nudity and frank sex advice. As the first erotic women’s magazine, it embodied the fight to push forth the conversation about women’s sexuality amid the patriarchal influences of the decade—including Guccione himself. 

Stiffed, a new iHeartPodcasts and Crooked Media podcast by journalist Jennifer Romolini, traces the story of Viva, its writers, its aspirations, and its eventual downfall. Though it only lasted seven years, Romolini’s retelling of the Viva story highlights how relevant and radical its aspirations are today. 

VICE: How did the story of Viva become an interest of yours? 
Jennifer Romolini: I had been a magazine freak my whole life. That was what my first career was about. I was in love with Sassy magazine, and I was in women’s magazines for almost a decade. While working at Lucky magazine, I wrote a daily blog called eBay Obsessed about eBay shopping.

One day in the mid-2000s, I came across a Viva magazine, and it just looked like nothing I’d ever seen before. I’d been kind of disillusioned in women’s magazines. They weren’t what I thought they would be—they were really misogynistic, and there was a lot about diets and how to please a man, and when I saw Viva, it was totally different than anything I had been working on. I thought, ‘This is so weird,’ because this was made 30-40 years before, and it seems like the kind of women’s magazine I had wanted to work on but couldn’t find. It was so ahead of its time in that they were talking about bisexuality and open marriage and consent decades before anybody was talking about that stuff.

I really wanted to understand how these feminist journalists put this out under the umbrella of this sleazy porn king’s empire. I was also intrigued by Bob Guccione, who wasn’t the two-dimensional machismo caricature I think everybody’s made him out to be. He’s a fascinating figure to me, and so was his partner, Kathy Keeton, who was at one point the highest-paid exotic dancer in the world and became a massively successful publishing executive.

Looking through the history of this type of magazine, it’s almost as though Viva represented a moment of brightness that went completely dark in the decades that followed. Do you have any sense of what happened between then and now? Do you feel more optimistic about how media is approaching women’s issues and desire today?
I think that there are cycles of progression. This is a cyclical situation, right? We have progress, then we have a backlash, and then we move forward again. Conservatives are why this ended. There was the “moral majority,” there was Reagan in the 80s. We’re seeing it happen again. I interviewed people who were literally sitting in restaurants in New York when Roe v. Wade was announced who said they went into the streets and were screaming and celebrating. They were so excited when that happened and thought, ‘This is done, this is fixed.’ To watch that erode slowly and then quickly is terrifying and doesn’t make me feel optimistic.

But at the same time, there’s all kinds of bright spots in the way that this generation thinks about sexual identity and our openness about sex. There’s more ethical porn than ever, even though it’s hard to find and it’s not well-funded. We’re talking more about issues that matter. We’re talking about consent and desire and what we want, and we’re not so afraid to put forth what we actually want. It’s not all about pleasing a man anymore, it’s not all about men anymore, and it’s not even about gender anymore. So I do see a lot of progress, but at the same time, things obviously worry me like everyone else.

In the first two episodes, you explain how the first issue of Viva doesn’t quite meet the expectations of the women involved in the development of the concept and how later, the writers figure out how to fit in conversations about the issues they find pressing while almost going undetected by the men involved. Where does the story go from here? 
We’ve all worked in dysfunctional workplaces. We’ve all worked for bosses who think they know best and don’t understand what they’re doing. The sort of identity whiplash of Viva is mostly because of Bob Guccione. So the series tracks the scrappy feminist journalists with their best intentions coming up against the reality of Guccione, of the patriarchy, of the limitations of the time. It tracks them trying everything, throwing the spaghetti against the wall to see what will stick. This is an innovative, experimental, radical, daring magazine, and the world’s kind of not ready for it.

So there eventually comes the point where they’re trying to build a bridge. The anti-porn feminist movement is starting to pick up some speed, so you have these pro-sex feminists and these anti-porn feminists, and there’s some infighting. We should have been able to be a bridge between the two, but they can’t pull it off. I track the magazine making progress and then getting smacked down and then making progress again and then getting smacked down.

Eventually, Anna Wintour comes on the scene, all the dicks go away, and it becomes this very typical women’s magazine. It becomes about capitalist pleasures instead of about pleasure itself. It becomes about how to get a man and how to get a fur coat. It’s about money, which perfectly ushers in the 80s. Viva ends in early 1979, and it’s representative of the decade, I think. 

Do you see any traces of Viva persisting in media today?
I think that most publications are failing to meet the moment, but at the same time, I don’t think it’s their moment to meet. I don’t think that we think in terms of men’s and women’s magazines anymore. These women were trying to make an Esquire for women. They wanted something smart for them. The world isn’t like that anymore.

When was the last time you bought a magazine, right? I was looking at Cosmo before this interview because I haven’t looked at that in years. On the site, there’s a lot that’s super progressive, and they even just recently published a really interesting article about safe porn sites for ethical content. I think it’s out there, but I don’t think we consume media in the same way. There are a million TV shows. There are a million ways to get information. I don’t think something can have as big an impact as something like Viva could have.

Why then is it important to tell this story today? What are you hoping to convey in doing so?
My career in the past decade has been focused on understanding women and work. One thing these women desired was a platform and a voice when people were not giving women platforms and voices and giving them a place to speak out. And I was really interested in telling their story, which is such a New York story, such a scrappy story, such a story of tenacity.

I loved watching them work around Bob, and I loved watching them work collaboratively together. I loved listening to what they remembered. We so quickly forget the past. We can watch the cycle of Viva, and it informs us exactly what’s happening today. I thought it was important to tell a parallel story to help us understand our moment. I wanted to center the voices of the women who worked there to tell their stories accurately. I wanted people to remember their work.

I asked all the women I interviewed, “How do you feel 50 years later? Do you feel like everything you did has been erased?” One of them said, "Well, no, because we planted a flag, and someone like you came and found it.”