Reflections on Playboy: The Prince Regent Hypothesis

May 5, 2006

The Prince Regent Hypothesis

Most Americans are culturally deprived for never having seen the British sitcom Blackadder. In the show’s third season (its third “series,” as the Brits say), Rowan Atkinson plays Edmund Blackadder, butler to King George III’s eldest son, the Prince Regent (Hugh Laurie, who now plays the title character on the medical drama House). In one episode, Edmund loathes having to accompany his extremely gullible master to the theater. “The problem is, he doesn’t realize it’s made up,” explains the butler to his assistant. “Last year, when Brutus was about to kill Julius Caesar, the prince yelled out, ‘Look behind you, Mr. Caesar!’” Criticism of the mass media very frequently assumes your critical-thinking skills and mine to be scarcely better than the prince’s.

Pornography incites rape. Violence on television causes violence in reality. Song lyrics can drive teenagers to suicide. Advertising makes us buy things we don’t need. Our government is corrupted by unfettered funding of political campaigns by the wealthy (as opposed to, say, chronic bad judgment among the electorate). All of these notions implicitly take media consumers for mindless dupes. “Liberals and conservatives are as tight as Beavis and Butt-head in agreeing that consumers of popular culture—the very people who make it popular—are little more than tools of the trade,” observed libertarian journalist Nick Gillespie in 1996. “Joe Sixpack and Sally Baglunch—you and I—aren’t characters in this script. Just like TV sets or radios, we are dumb receivers that simply transmit whatever is broadcast to us. We do not look at movie screens; we are movie screens, and Hollywood merely projects morality—good, bad, or indifferent—onto us.”

The Journal of Popular Culture has recently published a fascinating study titled “Tough Women in the Unlikeliest of Places: The Unexpected Toughness of the Playboy Playmate” by University of Louisville sociology professor James K. Beggan and University of Richmond psychology professor Scott T. Allison (vol. 38, no. 5, 2005, p. 796-818). Unfortunately, the Prince Regent Hypothesis influences their analysis:

As counterintuitive as it might seem, Playboy magazine represents a unique means of socializing within the collective psyche of men, a new definition of femininity that includes, as a subtype, the tough woman. Playboy is an especially effective change agent because it appears embedded in an ideology consistent with dominant male patriarchy. As such, it is seen as representing the interests of men. Thus, when Playboy presents images of Playmates with tough elements, it encourages men to assimilate nontraditional images of women. In this fashion, then, Playboy acts as an effective means of altering stereotypes about women. (p. 814)

I don’t deny that I’m potentially capable of leaping to false conclusions about any given woman because of my assumptions about women in general, or that problems for justice can arise if millions of men do this. But Beggan and Allison go too far in describing my mind as a passive receptacle for images of gender in the media. I am not a bimbo! If I don’t believe I can survive a fall from a high cliff just because I’ve seen Wile E. Coyote do it, I should be able to figure out, through my own brainpower, that the Playboy centerfold doesn’t represent most women in physical appearance or temperament.

The remarkably androgynous quality in Playboy’s male and female ideals raises interesting questions for psychology, social history, and aesthetics. Beggan and Allison deserve much credit for describing the androgyny in detail for an academic journal. But their essay would have benefited from acknowledgement of a fact that Gillespie put in italics: “The audience has a mind of its own.”

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 2:31 PM

May 5, 2006

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