Reflections on Playboy: PMOY spoiler on the May issue’s “Next Month” page

May 10, 2009

PMOY spoiler on the May issue’s “Next Month” page

I detest spoilers, which is my only reason for not having mentioned the 2009 Playmate of the Year already. Aesthetics may be frivolous by its own admission, yet I can’t help taking pride in adherence to an aesthetic principle such as “no spoilers.” Now, the organization has officially spoken. In a ceremony in Las Vegas early this month, Ida Ljungqvist, Miss March 2008, has been awarded the title. If you’ve seen the “Next Month” page in the back of the May 2009 issue, you’ve probably guessed it by now:

Playmate of the Year — To give you a taste and fuel your guesses about our favorite Playmate from 2008, we have provided a picture on the upper right of this page.

Said picture doesn’t show the face, but the gorgeous brown hair and brown skin obviously belong to Ljungqvist.

“PMOY hint: not a blonde,” quips a caption just below the photo. I may be paranoid—or pronoid—but I have to wonder if that’s a subliminal message from the organization to my unofficial blog. My pick for this year’s contest was fair-haired Juliette Fretté of June 2008 (congratulations to Ljungqvist nonetheless). This has not been my first experience of paranoia or pronoia in a subtle message from big-time media, either. Late last year, in a CNN story that mentioned Playmates appearing at a convention somewhere, the anchor ad-libbed, “Reflect on that.” The similarity to my blog’s title can’t be a coincidence, can it? Are high-profile newspeople reading my blog and refusing to give it any publicity? If so, it’s both frustrating and flattering.

This paragraph will interest Playboy nerds and bore everyone else with its pedantic distinctions in terminology. Ljungqvist is the 50th Playmate of the Year and, with her Swedish father and Tanzanian mother, the first African-European to win the title. However, African-American Reneé Tenison became the first black PMOY in 1990. The first black Playmate of the Month is March 1965’s Jennifer Jackson, but black non-Playmate models had already appeared at least as far back as April 1963, which included a multiracial “Girls of Africa” pictorial. Aren’t factoids fun?

A related earlier post:
The January and March 1965 issues are racial milestones

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:21 PM

May 10, 2009

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