Poker, Power & Playboy: The Hidden Patriarchy in Play

Before a single card hits the felt, architecture has stacked the deck. It’s the covert player holding all the cards, assigning each player their seats and neatly folding them into The Modern Playboy Masculinity.

Back in the 1950’s Hugh Hefner domesticated masculinity, trading hunting lodges for modernist interiors. His Townhouse and Playboy Clubs codified a new rule: space itself would signal male authority. Today’s poker rooms replay this architecture of control. The game looks like risk, but remember, power never gambles.

Short velvet robe, an old fashioned, and a rotating vibrating bed of bunnies. He’s not just a man, He’s The Man. Hugh Hefner created a new masculinity outside of the ‘outside’, one where you can quote Kant by the fireplace, drink martinis (shaken not stirred) and enjoy interior design, all without rumors that you’re a “friend of Dorothy” wink wink.

“Most of today’s “magazines for men” spend all their time out-of-doors-thrashing through thorny thickets or splashing about in fast flowing streams. We’ll be out there too, occasionally, but we don’t mind telling you in advance- we plan on spending most of our time inside.
We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”
-Playboy page 1 issue 1

Hefner’s new style of masculinity arrived in 1953 through his Playboy magazine. It was at a time where women had full social ownership of the domestic space. With catalogs of pastel candy kitchens full of new shiny gizmos designed just for them. The house and the woman became one and the same. Every woman was seen as a housewife and every house was seen as a woman-space.

Not only that, due to the feminist movement women were starting to roam the public streets !Shock horror! In the workplaces as secretaries, pushing prams into the once male dominated cafes, even taking lecturing spots at universities. The public, seen since Plato as the masculine active space, had been totally emasculated. With women fully owning the Private, and feminists fighting their way into Public the traditional masculinity had no space of it’s own.

The young men of this time had no wars like their grandfathers and fathers. No way to show their masculinity through brute strength or sacrifice. Instead the nature of masculinity transformed from physical strength to providing. Essentially:

He who has the money, has the biggest dick.

It created the housewife-provider stereotype. Putting women firmly back into the Private-Domestic and giving the masculine a new Work-Social hierarchy to play in.

As with any societal expectation people will always try to flip the script. The feminists of the time were campaigning to be the “providers” with access to finances and livable wages. On the other side of the coin was the housewife’s mirror, the bachelor. They’re suave womanisers, rich and powerful. So manly they don’t have to rely on the weaker sex, they can buy the comforts a wife would provide.

While feminists were fighting to destroy domesticity and the oppression it caused by perverting the roles. This new bachelor didn’t seek to escape domesticity, but create a new perverted masculine that took back control of the Private space. He created his own cage decked out with the finer things, declaring ‘if women are taking space in the public then men will take space in the private’. For men to take on this traditionally feminine role without being seen as effeminate, they need to balance it with traditional masculine ideals of power and control. Cue the naked ladies…

This new spy/lover power fantasy needed to prove its dominance over women. However, bachelors can’t marry and the stigma around premarital sex was still very prevalent. In comes Playboy with the solution: Pornography. The housewife bending over the stove, the girl next door getting out of the shower, the Playboy imagery perverts the feminine domesticity and destroys the idea of the feminine Private space. It gives men power over the domestic again. They didn’t leave the house, they knocked down one of its walls and put a one-way mirror in its place.

“I’d Crawl a Mile for Playboy”- Reyner Banham

Everything. Go rummage around your dad’s shed and flick through his playboys. Every background, every ad, every article, it’s all about the modernists.

“If you want to change a man, change his apartment. If you want to modify gender, transform architecture. If you want to modify subjectivity act upon interior space.”
-Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics. P84

The modernist house removed women entirely from the domestic but brought her back in as decoration; literally in the Barcelona pavilion, but also metaphorically as seen in Corbusier’s photography in which a woman is placed as ornament on their unornamented furniture. Women in modernist buildings are only accepted as temporary viewing objects not as inhabitants.

This was the perfect playground for Hefner’s new playboy.

It’s not chance that one of Playboy’s first ventures was poker. Its entire modern set-up encompasses the playboy philosophy. With a masculinity based on intellectual dominance and disposably of women, the casino provided a neo-gladiator ring.

So what is it about poker that’s so seductive? Why do men fantasise about winning big to such an extent that they’ll risk it all, and why can’t women (guilty) take their eyes off them fingering the chips? It’s because poker is playing with this new power system. To quote Playboy on POKER by JOHN moss 1957 November “Poker is a game played by men for blood. And by this I mean that the stakes must be high enough to cause pain to a heavy loser. This may sound cruel, but it is absolutely essential if the game is to supply the tension and excitement which poker alone can provide..”

In the modern age you can’t be Spartacus, behead someone and gain the respect of your fellow man. However, you can take the metaphorical WWE metal chair and financially beat them into bankruptcy. In the modern age if you lose a fight, you can get a nose job after. You lose poker, you’re fucked.

The allure for men stems also from the unique architecture of poker. When five guys sit around a table with a deck of cards a new spatial dynamic is created. It’s one of the only spaces in which men can, in women’s terms, have a good natter. Women have brunch, cafes, wine nights, five hour phone calls, the list is too long. Feminine spaces center around communication, masculine around activity. Poker creates the perfect space for the repressed masculine to reach out.

The popularity of football, poker, fishing etc. is that it allows men a space to be affectionate in a patriarchal appropriate manner. In the more physical sports, they can spank, mount, embrace and profess ‘I love you man!’ In the non-physical game of poker it becomes more complex as they are unable to physically show affection. To create the space they export the sexual to their surroundings. In private plush red rooms adorned with women, the rooms hold the sexuality. The man can remove his patriarchal mask and hang it among the velvet for safe keeping. Now, with distance between him and his masculinity, he can connect with the other men at the table.

The design of these poker rooms is essential to fit into the playboy mentality. How many of these die-hard poker players would continue if the venues were pretty pink and the cards were backed with glitter? The design of poker is essential to the masculation of poker.

The original playboy casinos were a call back to the old gentleman’s clubs which had been linked to the womaniser James Bond aesthetic. When we look at the modern poker space, it’s changed but the playboy is still there hiding in the glare of the neon lights. It follows the post-mod ideals of masculinity developing alongside the virtual “gamer” culture.

We can see all the choices that put women off. Firstly, mirrored floors? Just say you hate women. Secondly, is the continuation of using women as decoration. In the majority of poker rooms the only women present are in serving or supporting roles. An extreme of this is masseuses at tables. Often excused as a de-stress mechanism but would a woman player ever get a man to massage her during play? I have a sneaky feeling the male players would feel uncomfortably emasculated if she did.

Poker culture itself is very collaborative but hierarchical (It follows the tendencies of “Communities of Practice”). With prevalent sexism that means women are often put at lower social ranks and thus excluded from collaborating with their skill level. Groupthink & Conformity are common especially as a large wave of players came into poker during the early 00’s in which “flaming” was common practice. I dare not mention the APEademic of 2021.

Poker wasn’t always like this, Jane Austin writes of women winning cards, aristocratic women were thee parlor game players, since their invention women have been playing. It’s only after the new masculinity did women stop, or rather, were pushed out.

Similar to architecture, many women players try to distance themselves from being “woman players”. As a way to minimise any discrimination against them they adopt the playboy mentality and play the neutrality card. However, as Susan Bordo explains “In a culture that is in fact constructed by gender duality … one cannot simply be ‘human’ …. Our language, intellectual history, and social forms are ‘gendered’; there is no escape from this fact and from its consequences on our lives.”

“Are women in design different from men in design? Yes or no. At the moment I would say not sufficiently different, because most of the pressures on us are to mimic and match what men are doing in the field. Is there a woman’s design? I hope there isn’t a style; I think style is what we’re trying to forget about. I hope there is a woman’s attitude and this is what we should be gaining. Women can use their special talents to greatly improve our very mixed up physical world. Women can make great contributions by developing their own personal pluralism, by being both feminine and masculine, and by helping others, mainly men, do the same. At the very best I believe that there are valid expressions of male and female principles in design, and it ‘s the female factor that is decidedly lacking in what is happening in our world today.” Jane Thompson

Poker is starting to embrace the feminine despite draping it under manly words. They call it “tilt management” instead of “processing your emotions”. Some of the larger companies have uplifting schemes to help minorities find their footing.

Poker is the human condition. Highs and lows, risk with the kind of optimism only humanity can pull off. It’s connection. To limit that from women through exclusionary design is wrong. If equality isn’t convincing enough, it also hinders progress within poker. Inviting new viewpoints and playstyles into the game only adds to the excitement and dynamic nature of the game.

I’m not advocating that all women start gambling as a feministic power play. I’m saying that the industry needs to change. Poker in its current form is violent because the playboy masculinity it works within is violent. I’m asking if it’s possible to imagine a poker scene without the creatine coated stock bros? By modifying the space we can modify the behaviour and create a poker scene that supports rather than destroys.

Thank you for reading!
If you enjoyed this you can read more opinion articles here.