Edition: U.S. / Global

THE SEXES; Family Values?

By Walter Goodman
Published: July 26, 1992

ONCE again on the cutting edge of social change, Playboy magazine pays a 10-page tribute in its August issue to Family Values, in the persons of 16 American housewives. Every one, it says, busies herself keeping her home tidy and tending to her husband and children when she is not lying around for a passing photographer. They'd all be given a Good Housekeeping seal if there were any place nice to put it.

The message of the August Playboy is that Family Values have raced past the politicians in ways that the candidates Bush, Quayle, Clinton and Gore could not have forseen. Once again marketers have found a way to turn other people's values into profits.

Playboy's women champion the virtues of home and family, with a twist. Only one, Cindy from Pennsylvania, is shown doing the family accounts (she works on her stomach and keeps warm in fishnet stockings), but all are on a budget. In these hard times, they spend next to nothing on clothes. Jan, a "full-time mother of two from Illinois," makes do with a hair ribbon (the hairdos still don't come cheap) and something pink that hangs.

Others have evidently labored long by oil lamp trimming hubby's wide neckties and using the scraps to decorate this and that corner of themselves, not that they have many corners. Margie must be chilly up against the bathroom sink. The one designer-dressed wife and mother here is Elaine from New York, seen in a see-through body stocking that seems to have been stapled on, which may be what keeps her reclining on one elbow on a polished floor, but if she goes for that glass of wine within easy reach, she'll fall on her head.

It's work, work, work. There's Lisa vacuuming in sneakers, and a few inches away, hair down, taking a breather in high heels. There are sturdy Beverly and Debbie hanging the wash in the California sun, with hardly a change of costume between them, and Gail, who calls herself a domestic engineer, resting from ironing what must be her only dress.

This emphasis on the domestic virtues must not be attributed to mere nostalgia or a Moral Majority-like reaction to feminism. The spread is Playboy's twist on the postliberation spirit. The choice for today's women, as lately announced at the Democratic convention, is no longer between job and family; with a subsidy here, a tax break there, they can have it all. Playboy, loyal to its chronic cause, adds that men no longer need choose between breakfast and bed. Here is evidence that they can have it all, too.

The women were selected, the magazine reports, from hundreds of wives and mothers who answered an ad in the December 1991 issue. A New Jersey homemaker is said to have complimented Playboy on its attention to "women who are doing great jobs raising their families, yet haven't lost sight of their individuality, femininity and sensuality."

This is political stuff. For much of the Family Values crowd, femininity means pinafores; individuality is suspect; sensuality is a sin. It's wholesome of Mary to wash the windows of her Oregon farmhouse while suds splash onto strategic spots, but why is she sitting that way in the accompanying photo? It must be a statement. How about that 38-year-old grandmother whose gardening smock just won't stay shut?

AMONG the Family Valueniks, men are not supposed to be too closely acquainted with the family valuables on display in Playboy. But these husbands are as supportive as the sort of functional underwear that their wives can plainly use but seem to lack.

Kimber from Chicago says that Ted supports everything she does, even when everything she has is hanging over the bannister. Tino is pleased that Elisa -- she's the one holding the pool cue -- is getting "some much-deserved recognition," by which he must mean exposure. The backup is heartening, yet one wonders what Lisa's husband, Peter the firefighter, is hearing from the other guys at the firehouse, who have by now pinned up the shot of Lisa with her strap slipping.

The subtext is plain and fits into the boyish fantasy that Playboy has been purveying since its beginnings, of Superwoman serving Everyman. In the magazine's imagination, these women have moved beyond indignation at the exploitation of female flesh to celebration of what rouses men. And their husbands have advanced beyond possessiveness to pride in their wives' glowing attributes. It portends a more sharing society, and Playboy has always been for that.

There is something in the new Playboy world for the entire extended family. You can imagine Riley from Indiana feeding the icky-looking fruit tart she holds to her uncles, male cousins and interested neighbors, and then, for real dessert, mussing her hair, putting on the stockings and the beads and the shmatte that doesn't reach and extending herself on that settee so everybody can enjoy a good long gawk. At last, a show to compete with television sports.

Photo: Staci Way Epperson is one of 16 housewives featured in Playboy magazine's "Domestic Bliss" feature. (Playboy)