Reflections on Playboy: Will the real “Coed of the Month” please stand up, please stand up, please stand up, please stand up?

November 8, 2007

Will the real “Coed of the Month” please stand up, please stand up, please stand up, please stand up?

Twice in two days, I have to report on a kind of intellectual laziness from the editors of the magazine’s “Playboy After Hours” section that shows contempt for the history of the publication they work for. In the first Playboy, Hugh Hefner defined the magazine as something for the sort of single man who might invite a single woman over “for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” (Despite his good record as an impresario of literature, Hefner is seldom particularly quotable. But his use of the word sex in that sentence is virtuoso wordplay. Is it the object of the preposition on or the preposition for?) There is a legacy to uphold, folks. What the fuck?

What the fuck, I mean to say, is the deal with the stupidly redundant “Coed of the Month” of the November and December “After Hours”? Who is responsible for failing to notice the well-established Coeds of the Month at the Playboy Cyber Club—who aren’t the corresponding women for either of those months? To make things as confusing as possible, Sarah Porchetta is the Cyber Club Coed for November and the magazine Coed for December. Nude modeling for any branch of Playboy Enterprises is enough of a hindrance on other career options to merit clear, undisputed, unambiguous titles for various venues. I think it’s only fair. Besides, “After Hours” had already had a good thing going with its Employee of the Month. When it started just a few years ago as an opportunity for female Playboy employees to pose, I saw it as a delightful sort of tribute to the groundbreaking July 1955 centerfold of Janet Pilgrim:

We suppose it’s natural to think of the pulchritudinous Playmates as existing in a world apart. Actually, potential Playmates are all around you: the new secretary at your office, the doe-eyed beauty who sat opposite you at lunch yesterday, the girl who sells you shirts and ties at your favorite store. We found Miss July in our own circulation department, processing subscriptions, renewals and back copy orders. Her name is Janet Pilgrim and she’s as efficient as she is good looking. Janet has never modeled professionally before, but we think she holds her own with the best of the Playmates of the past.

Quickly, the concept behind the Employee of the Month expanded to include women of other workplaces besides Playboy. But at least that change fit logically with what had come before. What the fuck?

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:27 PM

November 8, 2007

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