Mrs Playmen – When Female Desire Defied the Vatican
How do you sustain an erotic magazine in a country where the Catholic Church watches from the windows of your own editorial office?
Where does sexual emancipation end and the objectification of the female body begin? Adelina Tattilo didn’t just edit Playmen—she built an editorial battlefield where female desire found its voice while police knocked on her door with censorship orders and the Vatican glared disapprovingly from St. Peter’s Basilica.
Netflix debuts “Mrs Playmen,” directed by Riccardo Donna, offering a fragmented reconstruction—half documentary, half fiction—of Tattilo’s vertiginous rise as editor of the Italian erotic magazine that rivaled Playboy but with an absolutely distinct identity. The series opens brilliantly at the launch party for a landmark issue and rewinds from there: the mysterious disappearance of Saro Balsamo, Tattilo’s business partner and husband; her radical decision to feature non-celebrity women on the cover; the inclusion of Elsa, a young woman whose intimacy becomes problematic editorial content; and the relentless pressure from authorities attempting to shut down the publication for obscenity. But Playmen wasn’t pornography or a cheap knockoff of Hugh Hefner’s magazine. Tattilo passionately defended her content as softcore, aesthetically crafted, prioritizing beauty over vulgar or exaggerated exhibition.
America is a matriarchy, Tattilo observed shrewdly. “That’s why American men prefer women with exaggerated, voluminous breasts.” Her magazine, in stark contrast, published interviews with Henry Miller, openly debated recreational marijuana, divorce, politics, fashion, and sports. She even dared to include male nudity, though the editorial focus remained predominantly female. The series navigates with admirable intelligence the contradictions inherent in this complex position: Tattilo championed progressive sexual freedoms while operating within an editorial system riddled with unavoidable ethical tensions. Feminist groups pointed out that Playmen perpetuated the objectification of the female body, while Tattilo argued she was democratizing desire by featuring real women, not just glamorous actresses or professional models. The fiction doesn’t attempt to resolve this debate—it presents it with brutal honesty and allows viewers to draw their own uncomfortable conclusions.
Through Playmen’s pages passed figures who later skyrocketed to fame: Pamela Villoresi, Patty Pravo, Ornella Muti, Amanda Lear. The media bombshell hit in 1972 when they published a photo of Jacqueline Kennedy nude in a pool—an image never seen in the United States—alongside one of Brigitte Bardot. The success was resounding and simultaneously scandalous: editions violently seized by police, issues sold out within hours, constant and systematic censorship. “Mrs Playmen” visually constructs 1970s Italy as vibrant, colorful, and profoundly contradictory territory. The Playmen offices, strategically located with a direct view of St. Peter’s Basilica, function as perfect metaphor: from there, Tattilo gazed at the Vatican while publishing exactly what the Church considered sinful and obscene.
The series includes fictional characters to enrich the editorial universe, but the center is always Adelina: the “Hugh Hefner in a skirt,” as Time described her, who didn’t ask permission to redefine the rules of the media game in a Europe debating divorce, abortion, and emancipation as much in the streets as at newsstands. “Mrs Playmen” is essential viewing if you’ve ever wondered what price women paid who dared to say that desire also had a female name, even as traditional morality tried to silence it with closures, censorship, and ecclesiastical condemnation.
