Essay / 16 September 2026 / By: Edit DeAk, Eileen Slightly
Honouring Glamour Women in Disguise: Gloria Steinem, Edit deAk, Playgirls in the Mudd Club
Gloria Steinem died last week, or was it the week before? Famously glamorous, she was what many might call a 'blueprint', in the sense that she went undercover to expose the predictably misogynistic practices involved in the hiring of playboy mansion cocktail waitresses in the late 60's.
Today, there is an endless production and consumption of pale imitations of her real risk-taking (the infamy from Steinem's groundbreaking '68 piece prevented her from publishing for years)- all of it so much less hardcore and in this editor's opinion a complete waste of time: bla bla bla "I am an middle-class 'intellectual' woman read about my secret masquerade behind the scenes of [INSERT RIDICULOUS SLEAZY ENVIRONMENT]'. ETC.
I like, many others, am her igloo sister in the erotics of investigative feminist journalism. The most fantastic thing about risk-taking journalism is that it is an excuse to pretend, lie, and fuck one's life for little to no reward. And still the temptation for pretty girls to go disguise-mode remains; perhaps it's something about Hollywood.
So, in honour of her famous disguises and dressing up, we honour you Gloria, by publishing the work of someone completely different: Edit DeAk. In the same year Gloria Steinem published her playboy piece,1968, Edit DeAk escaped from Hungary to reach New York and all that it offered, freedom-wise.
In 1973 DeAk founded downtown art magazine Art-Rite, which she ran with Walter Robinson until 1978. One of her strengths was her gravitational pull to the sensations and performances of the night club. In November 1980 she organised Dubbed In Glamour, bringing outrageous party-glamour-artists from the Mudd Club to perform in Official Art Area, The Kitchen. Cookie Mueller, Debbie Harry, Vivienne Dick, Tina L'Hotsky, DJ Anita Sarko, Mary Lemley. ETC.
We present here a bit of editorial from DeAk from Art Rite issue 11, 1976. It's about the 'Intellectual Whore', and how you might Hollywood yourself by drawing on a moustache. Performing stardom, performing masculinity.
-- Eileen Slightly
The pencil thin moustache is part of the trappings of a certain kind of masculinity, residually based in the Hollywood of the 30's, certainly a cosmopolitan place, rather ubiquitous in reverse (everyone was there). Any man who would be suave or swashbuckling or sinister in the '30s would wear it; yes the '30s, ten cents a dream and the time of the pencil moustache and the performer as mass hero.
There is more than coincidence for this moustache to appear then as an interclass fashion. Movies were a mass medium. This fashion strangely enough celebrates the star as a new hero with is allusion to the performer by "denoting" a "kind of" masculinity, which was really an indicated masculinity, which can only be meant positively in the world of artificially created reality, that is, the performer's. You do not have to be anything, better that you have a presence. Presence- as the new commodity popularised by the star industry- was in fact easier to get across without the "noise" of the whole thing, with the "real" personality left out.
The movies, through the stars, made role-playing a mass phenomena of the '30s, the decade with more great style than ever, and no reality; when regular people excepting the weird types borrowed the visual jargon of the movie world; the pencil moustache which started as a symbol for morally questionable characters was developed to its purest to represent those esthetes of gangstership, the gigolos. The gigolos were flourishing like never before, at supper clubs, on ocean cruises, by the poolside, in the cafes and on the boulevards, both on and off the silver screen, because they were a style.
It's nothing for a man to wear such a moustache; a certain vanity perhaps. But now women- women do not grow moustaches. They must paint them on. Groucho painted them on.
After I had just finished growing up I was subjected to those "measuring up the entity" type glances. It was during this phrase that my mother remarked: "You have legs like a whore's" . In no time I was slapped again on my other cheek to turn, the combination remained restricted. This gave me a real perspective on Marlene Deitrich. A whore in a man's suit is the intellectual whore, for years the only legitimate style for talent in a woman.
I don't really mean whore, but a woman who takes as a chosen character the branded woman (i.e women are branded by an inherited pile of assumptions made about womanhood, and when a woman consciously assumes this stereotyped role, she impersonates the collective character traits of what is expected of her, the “desired” woman, which is simply the same as the branded woman or simply the whore) so that through her desirability she gains leeway, freedom to sell, to finesse some ideas through a social anti-climate.
The intellectual whore, just like the whore, is going to do that with the support of a self-made and made-from-self structure. Except while the whore might turn all of the way around with a pirouette to refer back to her femininity as a commodity to use as a support structure, the intellectual whore would do that as a double entendre: the intellectual woman plays the whore as a style and then puts that very image in a man’s suit- evoking a simultaneous desirability and distilled sexual imagery of intellect. Social conventions are confused this way. Imitate them a bit, and dress like them.
Since I realised that I had to operate between images of my legs, I tried not to think of my legs. But Busby Berkely really liked shooting under the bridge made from like 100 girls’ legs and Carmen Miranda was sporting a 30 foot high headdress of bananas and still no offense in hollywood.
But do it when its not a pattern not a hundred girls, but you and your life. The images between your legs have to be dealth so that your ideas can find a channel to come out. And how to get them out in a performing situation, without the other 99 girls?
Performers looking for a ‘stage’ persona to distance them from their audience and temper their “true” image, need something to function as a mask, but one of minimal means, since the projected persona must also be a person.
The pencil moustache is such an adhoc style (the sort of thing Style is all about- just pick one to drive them crazy), a kind of minimal cosmetics that is deeply intuitive- an accommodating balance of the intellectual woman artist performer and the sensibility of the gigolo, the utmost of the male stud exploitation roles. The motif generates sexual attention (shades of the new sexuality- female aggression) and is armor at the same time (as cooly ambiguous as wearing sunglasses), or as the slippery hearted gigolo).
The intellectual whore finds a new power and security in the sphere of her oppression- her cool sexual turbulence is disconcerting to her loyal opposition. As a reaction to external cues, to oppression (the flesh market), the thin moustache is surface politics that encapsulates a neurotic adjustment to a neurotic social climate. Out of the movies, the pencil moustache is the subject of a reversed focus, the center of the diffusion of personhood; that is it seems the manifestation of endless different conscious and unconscious structures (sexuality, bisexual chic, self-revelation and self-concealment, presence and role control, etc). Through two carefully applied strokes which indicate the entity as they fail to describe it.”
Edit Iak 1976.
