The 10 Most Controversial Playboy Covers

Image via Complex Original

That's Playmate of the Year Tiffany Fallon bodypainted as Wonder Woman, an image that sent feminist comic book fans into a rage. According to some of the aggrieved, bespoiling Wonder Woman is bespoiling a heroine to little girls everywhere. Riiiight, and her hot pants and bustier are in no way intended to appeal to grown men. (She was, after all, created by S&M enthusiast William Moulton Brown, which explains the lasso as well.)

Wonder Woman had appeared on the first cover of Gloria Steinem's Ms. magazine in 1972; so some feminists saw the Playboy cover as an attack on 30 years of feminism. But perhaps the most bizarre reaction came from comics writer Greg Rucka, who wrote a post on his LiveJournal blog (since deleted) that called out the cover as an attempt to torpedo Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions.

Rucka wrote: "Do you really think it's a coincidence that Playboy chose this year, the issue for the month containing "Tsunami Tuesday," to run this particular pictorial? Do you really?"

The theory gained a surprising amount of traction—surprising in that it's so batshit wingnutty that any traction was surprising.

In March 2006, Jessica Alba had a fair claim to the title of "Sexiest Celebrity" and certainly belonged on the cover of a magazine celebrating the top 25. Unfortunately, she didn't want to be on Playboy's cover. So, the magazine clipped an image of her from the poster for Into the Blue and ran with it. There wasn't anything illegal about this, and other magazines have done similar things, but some people think being on the cover of Playboy is a promise that you're naked inside.

That was Alba's take on it, and she filed a lawsuit against Playboy Enterprises charging that the mag had done "immeasurable harm" to her reputation and career.

Alba was pacified when Hef said he was sorry and gave some money to her two favorite charities.

This cover was controversial not because of who was on it—Sarah Kozer, the woman from forgettable reality show Joe Millionaire—but because of who wasn't. The cover of the June issue had customarily been the privilege of the Playmate of the Year, a tradition that seemed important to die-hard Playboy fans who see the Playmates as celebrities.

But to those unfamiliar with the Playboy universe, a Playmate, even the Playmate of the Year, is just a nude woman. The industry belief is that celebrities sell magazines—this applies to everyone, be it Vogue, GQ, or Cigar Aficionado—so 2003 PMOY Christina Santiago lost her cover shot to whats-her-name from Joe Millionaire.

Playboy devotees were outraged, and had another item to add to their ever growing list of grievances about what's wrong with Playboy today. Since 2003, a few PMOY's have made the cover, but it's no longer the automatic reward it had been. It's more likely a sign that the magazine failed to wrangle a decent celebrity that month.

Playboy has always prided itself on being on the level that they are now. These girls know what the magazine is about, willingly pose for it, and are paid. That sets Playboy apart from other publications, except on occasions when they forget.

In a huge lapse in judgment, Playboy bought snaps taken of a topless Uma Thurman at the beach and ran them as a cover pictorial, even going so far as to revive the fuzzy Playboy mascot of the '60s and '70s to add a whiff of peeping-tom creepiness.

Thurman was never against nudity. Judging from her first movies, she's the kind of art lover who might have posed for the magazine sooner or later. But thanks to this issue, that "sooner or later" became more like never.

If you've ever thought these "Women of" pictorials—Women of Starbucks, Women of Enron, etc.—might more accurately be called "Women who will soon no longer be employed by" pictorials, you're somewhat right. Two years after Gordon Gekko extolled the virtues of greed in Wall Street, nine women posed for the "Women of Wall Street" issue.

Time magazine looked them up not long after the issue was published; seven of the nine had "left" their jobs.

Pictorials of college girls are now a regular feature in Playboy, and hardly controvesial, but in 1979 the franchise was new. While 1977's "Girls of the Big 10" hadn't been a huge deal, "Girls of the Ivy League," which was changed to "Women of the Ivy League" as a faux concession, struck feminists in the northeast as outrageous. Somehow it was different when it was Yale, Harvard and Princeton, and many writers, administrators and students got their panties all in a bunch.

In the early to mid-'70s, Hefner found himself in a dogfight with the more explicit Penthouse magazine, which had begun publishing in America in 1969. This race to the, uh, bottom was dubbed The Pubic Wars, and Hefner felt he had to follow rival Bob Guccione's lead.

This cover represents Hefner's breaking point; he regretted the image of the model (Patricia Margot McClain) slipping her fingers into her panties to pull a Fred Willard in a movie theater. Before the issue was on newsstands, Hefner had committed to never going there again.

The Pubic Wars weren't over, of course, and it's fair to say that Playboy lost them, as the conflict with Penthouse (and Hustler, launched in 1974) forever changed what Playboy was comfortable showing within its pages. 

Nearly 18 years after its debut, Playboy finally featured an African American woman as its cover model.

The magazine had already featured two black Playmates, Jennifer Jackson (March 1965) and Jean Bell (October 1969). And in fact Bell had appeared, small and nearly cropped out, with a few other Playmates, on the cover of the January 1970 issue.

Somehow, model Darine Stern was considered controversial in 1971, eight years after Martin Luther King led the march on Washington and delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

There's always a rabbit head hidden somewhere on the cover of Playboy, but this cover is known for a different kind of visual trick. Place your hand over the image, covering up the top part including the model's navel. What does it look like to you?

They say it looks like a shot of a woman's crotch with her legs splayed—very splayed. That's what they say. Who is this "they" anyway?

Marilyn Monroe was flat broke when, in 1949, she posed nude for photographer Tom Kelley for fifty bucks. Kelley didn't get much more for the pictures when he sold them to the Western Lithograph Company, which offered the image on a calendar.

Meanwhile, Monroe's career flourished: 1950 saw the release of The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, and she was on her way. Hugh Hefner obtained the image (titled "Golden Dreams") for his magazine's first centerfold, which was called "Sweetheart of the Month" rather than Playmate. Although the picture wasn't new, its appearance in the magazine created a stir, as by 1953 she had cracked the "Quigley Poll of the Top Ten Money Making Stars."

20th Century Fox, Monroe's Employer, fretted about what to do when the scandal broke. Monroe came up with the solution: She gave an interview in which she admitted she was broke and needed the money to make rent. People bought it, and Monroe won sympathy from the public. It's a wonder this shocking strategy of telling the truth is so rarely used.