Reflections on Playboy: Female exhibitionism is a humbling mystery

October 18, 2005

Female exhibitionism is a humbling mystery

Those who criticize Playboy for showing women in “passive” or “submissive” poses have the wrong idea. Just as farmers depend utterly on good weather, Playboy’s photography department depends utterly on women’s willingness to show their bodies. Many beautiful women are bound to decline any offer to pose, and this fact humbles every thoughtful Playboy fan.

Despite the financial and (mixed) social rewards, there’s something self-evidently wild and crazy about the choice to pose, which, for me, only intensifies the gratitude and wonder at this choice. In the new book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy documents one such moment of choice. Waiting in front of a receptionist’s desk at Playboy’s corporate headquarters in Chicago for her interview with Playboy Enterprises CEO Christie Hefner, Levy found herself next to two women. One of these women had entered the building with the intention of trying to become the Fiftieth-Anniversary Playmate. The other, a friend of hers, had apparently tagged along just for moral support. While the first woman followed the receptionist into another part of the building, her friend “flipped through a copy of the magazine she’d picked up off the coffee table. A few moments passed and then she looked up from a spread on college girls, wild eyed. ‘I’m going too,’ she said. ‘What the hell!’ Then she went dashing in after them.” (p. 38) Levy worries that this woman may have been brainwashed by “raunch culture,” but I take it for granted that women have free will and am content to marvel at the mystery of exactly what happened inside her head at the moment she changed her mind. I don’t believe I’m just flattering myself when I say that I show more faith in women’s autonomy than the left-wing feminist Levy does.

However, I concede one important point of Levy’s book: Much of the rhetoric in support of what she calls raunch culture unfairly implies that anyone who is shocked or embarrassed by explicit sexuality must be an uptight prude. Christie Hefner told Levy that Playboy’s growing popularity among women proves that the “post–sexual revolution, post–women’s movement generation...has just a more grown-up, comfortable, natural attitude about sex and sexiness....” (emphasis in the original, p. 39) But sexiness is always at least mildly transgressive, and transgression constantly threatens to make us uncomfortable. Can the libertine and the square each find a way to be right without making the other wrong?

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 7:27 PM

JJ left this comment at August 22, 2006 8:33 PM
Most definitely. Exhibitionism doesn't have to be dirty. b

Salihah סליחה صالحه left this comment at January 11, 2007 2:57 PM
I personally think from this little bit of mention, that Levy is the one brainwashed by “raunch culture". Why can't the "feminists" accept the choices of other women? They want all women to make their choices, see their perspective, live their way. That's not a choice and not a woman.

What's so wrong with submission anyway, when it's a consensual choice? The opponents to this forget that the actual power lies with the submissive woman. Without her, the man has no power. Without her, he is no longer dominant. Without him, she's still all the woman she was before. IMO, the submission position is the real place of power.

Anonymous left this comment at February 19, 2007 11:23 AM
>> Why can't the "feminists" accept the choices of other women? <<

Actually, who says that it's a choice at all ?? I think some women are compelled instinctively to be exhibitionists. We like to think we have full control of our behaviors, but the reality is, some women are given a set of inborn behaviors at conception with very strong exhibitionist instincts.

feminists see this as low self-esteem, merely because they aren't blessed with the same instincts.

males see this as promiscuous behavior for their own edification.

It might well be that both are wrong.

Brian Sorgatz left this comment at February 19, 2007 12:04 PM
Anonymous,
I think you’re absolutely right. At the same time, the genetic component of behavior has to be defined somehow as free will—for reasons that should be obvious to any wise student of civics.

I see Playboy as a harmlessly commercialized ritual of mock-promiscuity that millions of men and some smaller number of women participate in.

October 18, 2005

var a = 4; if(a == 0) {document.write('0 comments');}else if(a == 1){document.write('1 comment');}else {document.write(a+' comments');}