American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the nature and varieties of stereotyping of Blacks and Native Americans which occurred in the first twenty years (1954-1973) of the popular magazine Playboy and to identify any changes in the content and frequency of that stereotyping over time. A similar but less ambitious study was done by Houts and Bahr using selected volumes of the Saturday Evening Post. The present study was done, at least in part, to accumulate a corpus of data for use in comparison with the Houts-Bahr findings. As with that study, content analysis was the device used to extract the information from the cartoons. Houts and Bahr were interested in the comparison of data from two widely separated historic periods, 1922-1931 and 1958-1968, and so selected the Saturday Evening Post for study as it was a widely read magazine of some longevity. Different considerations led to the selection of Playboy for this study. First, cartoons are an integral part of Playboy; more so than they are in other magazines where they often are of secondary importance. Secondly, and due in large part to the first, the cartoons are selected primarily on the basis of "quality". Less subjects appear to be taboo, i.e ., motherhood may be assailed outrageously and pubertal girl scouts may show up pregnant; and the principal criteria for selection obviously is whether or not it is humorous - at least to the cartoon editor(s). Schoenfield's' observations concerning the "vast number of 'taboos'" facing cartoonists appears to be much less applicable to Playboy than to other magazines. It may well tie in with the fact that Playboy magazine itself is an organ born out of controversy and iconoclasm. At any rate, Playboy was chosen because it was felt that the relative lack of taboos would make the cartoons therein less restrictive in terms of varieties of stereotypes.