Site Meter Reflections on Playboy: Cultural consumers can speak for themselves, thank you

October 15, 2007

Cultural consumers can speak for themselves, thank you

I know other black women have appeared in Playboy, but the stunning [August] photos make Garcelle [Beauvais-Nilon] stand out. As a young black woman I feel good about my own body when I see another black woman proudly displaying hers.
Codi Bean
Charleston, West Virginia
—“Dear Playboy,” November 2007

My tribute to the “La Belle Beauvais” pictorial started with a racially insensitive pun on the UPS slogan. But at least I’m not guilty of the common academic bigotry that regards consumers of popular culture as helpless blank screens (blank slates, if you will) for the beliefs and attitudes that pop culture would project onto them. Even professors who defend Playboy sometimes appear to think that way. The above letter demonstrates what those academics fail to notice in their condescension: commercial pop culture is always a dialogue between producer and consumer, never a monologue. Not to be anti-intellectual, but if the weather report contradicts what you see through your window, which is more credible?

Technical note: I didn’t know it until I composed this post, but I had deleted photographs recently from three earlier posts (here, here, and here) while screwing around with my web domain file manager. Blogger.com apparently doesn’t republish JPEG pages that have been lost in another domain. Fortunately, correcting the error was simple.

Update, October 19, 2007, 1:38 p.m.: Damn! I forgot about the photos missing from this other post until today. I noticed they were gone when, through SiteMeter, I saw that somebody had found that page through Google Images.

Update, December 5, 2007, 1:28 p.m.: Yesterday, I fixed this post.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:59 PM

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