This student at Louisiana State University is pictured much more candidly on page 112 of the October Playboy, for its “Girls of the Southeastern [Athletic] Conference” pictorial. In her shot for the current issue, I see self-confident good taste. It’s a cliché to call Playboy’s nudes “tasteful,” but I choose my written words with care.
Virtually every image Playboy has ever published is less shocking and disgusting than some other representation of the naked female form that most men and women could easily imagine (or even create and have displayed in an art gallery somewhere). Playboy Enterprises’ workshops of model recruitment, photography, and photo editing work so consistently well that tastefulness is embarrassingly consistent in the product. (Even so, the allegedly ruthless corporate machine frightens away women whose hearts aren’t really set on it.) Embarrassingly, I say, because some seem to think that Playboy must earn its status as art rather than mere entertainment by shocking the bourgeoisie. But my political tribe, libertarianism, begs to differ. We’ve been building a consensus that “art” and “entertainment” are interchangeable terms. Like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and to a lesser extent, professional sports, Playboy may be a victim of its own success in bringing sensual pleasures to the masses within reliable—but perhaps aging—perimeters of good taste. Since sports seems to be the least hated of the four institutions by those who would dismiss Playboy centerfolds as kitsch, I’ll try to explain Terri Lynn Farrow as something like a Joe DiMaggio or Muhammad Ali: one who can express beautiful individuality through a medium of mass entertainment with conventions and clichés already familiar to millions through decades of exposure. Whatever the medium under discussion, not everyone can do that!
To follow my argument completely, you’ll need a paid subscription to the Playboy Cyber Club. That link is not work-safe, of course, and neither are many that follow in this post. I first noticed her in the fall 2001 College Girls newsstand special. But later on, I was thrilled to find six minutes of video of her tryout for the New Orleans “Casting Call” (QuickTime, RealVideo). This woman is charming, quirky, polite, daring, and gritty. Unless you hold to the rigid formulas of some (not all) feminists for how a self-respecting woman behaves toward men, you’ll notice this combination of traits, remember it, and love it. She satisfies almost every possible definition of all-American by claiming Swedish, German, French, Jewish, and African-American blood. The headshot in this post comes from her January 27, 2003, Cyber Girl of the Week gig. But in light of the aesthetic choices she made in presenting her body again more recently, she deserves to go all the way to Playmate of the Month at least.
I don’t dislike breast implants for the sanctimonious reasons that some others do. If you can’t agree with me on this, please have the integrity to say “I hate saline!” instead of “I hate silicone!” The former compound deserves the blame for the balloon look of visual adult entertainment in the 1990s. The American silicone market was largely destroyed by pseudoscientific lawsuits that feminists, among others, widely supported out of moral panic. Those lawsuits arguably did more to restrict women’s individual choices than that Marxist demon of good intentions, Catharine MacKinnon, ever can.
But for purely aesthetic reasons, I want a greater variety of sizes and shapes of breasts on the centerfold proper. As it happens, Farrow impresses me by still not having implants of any kind—if the photo on newsstands now is a reliable indicator. The long hair that falls over her petite breasts is an obviously dyed, platinum shade of blond. The October 2007 Playboy won’t tell you this, but her modestly trimmed pubic hair is that darker shade of blond naturally, according to the video. Farrow must have figured that guys would notice the juxtaposition: hair dyed a nature-defying color over nature’s own breasts. In the twenty-first century, Farrow has something in common with the men who ogle her Playboy picture. She can have the complex, Rabelaisian pleasure of understanding the quirky nuances of her own sexual behavior in light of evolutionary psychology. Like the heliocentric astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo and the evolutionary biology of Darwin and Wallace, this paradigm shift frightens and disturbs even as it opens up new possibilities for dialogue on perennial human issues like entertainment and the arts.
If Farrow can be anybody’s muse in any such indirect manner (with all due modesty!), she deserves a centerfold.Labels: ArtEnt, CC, CosSur, Femi, Lib, Lit, MorPa, NSS, OnVi, OthBlo, PM, Sc, Sp, TaoGlam, Theme, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:39 PM
August 10, 2007
Playboy floozies don’t value my minerals—or my metallic habits
I don’t know what that means, but it’s part of the unsolicited advice I received late last night in an email from fellow blogger Kyle Foley: think of pornography’s lies. the pornographer would have you believe that the come-hither smile of the naked model is real, that she truly values your mysteries and your minerals, that she will comfort you in times of agonizing club-defeat and will radiafy your health with devotion and sunshine care. in reality, since the pornographer and the stripper aim for silver, she employs her sparklo-smile solely your dollars to gain, your emotions nil, your dreams mute and will then move on to the next lust-sloth once your cash has been taken. another lie that the soft-core pornographer propagates is that the photograph of the naked femme stares only at you, that her bliss-treasures are only for you to enjoy, that she is your prize, your moon, your ocean and your lighthouse, that you have worked hard, purified yourself of metallic habits, have rendered yourself clean and fit for responsibility. is it healthy to engage any entertainment that builds its foundation on the lie? does it truly have your interests at heart? or is it much more likely that it wants only your capital, your finance and your silver?
You’re absolutely right, Kyle. We need a zero-tolerance policy towards illusion in entertainment. I’m suing a local movie theater because its “motion picture” was actually a rapid succession of still pictures. How did they get away with defrauding us for so long?
Seriously, Kyle, how dumb do you think I am as the sort of man who reads Playboy?
I’ll purify myself of metallic habits right after you clean up your precious bodily fluids, General Ripper.Labels: AesthEth, ArtEnt, BlaSla, Cintv, MorPa, OthBlo, Rom, VW
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:11 AM
February 21, 2007
When economists are obsessed with masturbation
Sure, ’tis nothing at all like the morn in spring. (Finish the song parody yourself.) “Pornography may lead to masturbation much as a novel or film may lead to tears or laughter,” says the Feminists for Free Expression website. Of course, FFE intends this analogy as part of a political defense of pornography. But I’ve found another, ahem, use for it: to help understand the economics (and aesthetics) of pornography.
I don’t have the background in economics to answer the question of journalist Brian Doherty and economist Tyler Cowen, “Why is there (still) a market for porn?,” in the language of that discipline. But I’ll point out that porn doesn’t fuel masturbation in the exact sense that gasoline fuels a car. Comedies, tearjerkers, romantic narratives, and dirty pictures earn fans by having socially complex but agreeable effects on consumers’ nervous systems. (Remember that all solitary behavior has social implications, because all secrets are fragile.)
If economists still can’t rid their heads of the admittedly hilarious image of millions of Glenn Quagmires beating off surreptitiously in their bachelor pads, I invite them to replace that image with the implied, off-screen female masturbation scene about 35 minutes into I Wanna Hold Your Hand, an underappreciated 1978 farce that does for the psychology of fandom what Dr. Strangelove does for the psychology of war. In a moment of solitude and moral weakness, Nancy Allen’s character falls under the spell of the Beatles’ early romantic narratives.
There now, isn’t that image more fascinating economically?Labels: ArtEnt, Cintv, Fant, Femi, Lib, Mus, NPH, OthBlo, Sc, VW
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:52 PM
January 29, 2007
The cultural right and left agree: misery loves company
What do The Atlantic’s Jon Zobenica and National Review’s John Derbyshire have in common? Probably without knowing it, both of them invoke George Orwell’s essay “The Art of Donald McGill” to justify their moralistic views on sexuality. If he knew I existed, Zobenica might think I appreciate his use of that reference to describe Playboy as essentially the lightsaber to Maxim’s blaster. (Star Wars analogies can go surprisingly far here. I recently told an attractive female friend that she has Jedi powers over the weak-minded, i.e. most of us guys.) But on the contrary, I take his essay as an unintended lesson in humility for all us Playboy freaks.
Zobenica wants us to know that he regards his youthful Playboy-ish days with embarrassment:Looking back, I realize it’s not only the clothes that make me laugh. The restaurants we went to were “classy” at best. And none of us particularly enjoyed those New Orleans strippers (one looked like a rheumy sharecropper’s daughter). But there was, in all of it, a deliberate effort at contemporary maturity, an effort that was encouraged by Playboy magazine. Maturity was the key to that great Playboy Club of life—your all-access pass to the jumping realm of adult pleasures and preoccupations. We may have come of age clumsily, but no one doubted that it was the thing to do.
Where did those days go?
One need not be clairvoyant or trained in counseling to suspect him of misremembering those days. If the clothes, restaurants, and strippers were really as unimpressive then as he now says they were, why didn’t he ditch that scene immediately? Zobenica’s boomer exceptionalism makes Playboy a lonely voice for the inherent moral superiority of “commitment” in a lad-mag wilderness of Peter Pan complexes. He scolds an article in FHM for urging its readers to stay single, naïvely thinking that this message distinguishes the magazine from Playboy. I’m no fan of Barbara Ehrenreich’s crypto-Marxist feminism, but I give her credit for documenting Playboy’s original concept as the Maxim of the 1950s in her book The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Although I’ve found more aesthetic value in Playboy than in Maxim or FHM, I cannot honestly claim moral superiority for it as a consequence. Oscar Wilde warned against conflating aesthetics with ethics. To paraphrase that brilliant aesthetician, there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral men’s magazine. Men’s magazines are well published, or badly published. That is all. However sincere and deeply felt, my wish for Playboy to outsell the competition has no more ethical weight than my support for any given sports team.
Besides, what’s so bad about the pro-bachelorhood message? It may be simply rational for a heterosexual man to put little of his energy into romance these days. In 2007, many American women still see their relationships with men as fixer-upper projects. And isn’t it interesting that both conservatives and establishment feminists find ways to justify this condescension? The preferences of the male of the species are widely presumed wrong whenever they conflict with a female agenda. Thus, for example, are paternity suits not recognized as a hypocritical restriction of male reproductive choice in a society that is slowly learning to tolerate abortion. Women protest to liberate themselves; men whine to avoid responsibility—even though the U.S. hasn’t been functionally patriarchal since 1920.
(Hat tip to Playboy assistant managing editor Matt DeMazza, who made me aware of Zobenica’s article by email.)
Update, 3:23 p.m.: A subsequent email:Well, you took away from it something a little different than we did (we see it as a nod to our more-mature approach to being a man vs. the frat boys of Maxim/FHM/Stuff, etc.), but hey, any way to get more people to read it is fine with us!
Thanks, Brian.
Matt
Labels: AesthEth, ArtEnt, ArtPic, BGC, Femi, Lib, Lit, MorPa, MR, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:52 PM
January 17, 2007
Show a friend a Playboy, get called a sex offender
Thanks to Hit and Run, I’ve learned of an unfortunate teenager in Arizona named Matthew Bandy. After being raided at his home in paramilitary fashion by police and hounded for two years by a cruel, sanctimonious district attorney on flimsy charges of downloading images of child pornography onto the family computer—which would have brought a 90-year prison term—Bandy was forced to plead guilty to showing a Playboy to another teenager (technically a crime). For this confession alone, attorney Andrew Thomas tried to force Bandy to register as a sex offender.
Two questions for my readers:
1.) Aren’t you glad this didn’t happen to you when you were Bandy’s age?
2.) Doesn’t this make Playboy look less like kitsch and more like a subversive publication?Labels: AgeMaj, ArtEnt, Lib, MorPa, OthBlo
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:00 PM
January 15, 2007
An MLK day rerun: The January and March 1965 issues are racial milestones
Have a look at this post from a year ago.Labels: ArtEnt, ArtPic, Cintv, PM, Ra, Sp
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 9:37 AM
January 8, 2007
Why I buy Playboy at newsstands now
My subscription, which I chose not to renew, expired with the November 2006 issue. But either a clerical error or generosity on the part of someone in the organization has kept it coming to my mailbox anyway. Although I’m grateful for this happy accident or kindly gesture, I have my reasons for paying the extra money for the newsstand edition (and forgoing the free gifts that come with subscription renewal):
1.) Subscribers as well as newsstand buyers miss out on freebies. A recent newsstand copy came with a free bonus booklet of the women of Brazil. As a subscriber, I never would have known about it if I hadn’t noticed it on a newsstand.
2.) Postal workers tend to be rough on the magazine, not realizing how easy it is to mar the beautiful photographs with adhesion damage [not work-safe].
3.) According to the scuttlebutt among Playboy’s fans [not work-safe], advertisers are less impressed by subscription numbers (a strength for Playboy) than by newsstand sales (a weak area for Playboy). I don’t know enough about the ad business to confirm this, but I like making the switch just in case it helps the magazine financially.
4.) Even if reason 3 proves false, I’m putting more of my money into Playboy Enterprises. A fascinating series of lectures last year by professor Paul Cantor (written summary here; free audio and video here) explains that the ever-intimate relationship between art-slash-entertainment and commerce blurs the distinction between patronage of the arts and voting with one’s entertainment dollars. So why not pay more for what I like?Labels: ArtEnt, NSS, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:11 PM
October 30, 2006
A new addition to my “Intellectual Turn-Ons” list
Better late than never, I’ve finally added Richard Keller Simon’s Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition to my list of “Intellectual Turn-Ons” in the sidebar. I was aware of the book when I originally published the list, but I carelessly forgot to include it. One chapter discusses Playboy in particular, but I’m most impressed by Simon’s judicious blurring of the distinctions between high and low culture in general, which is corroborated by some of my other favorite authors such as Steven Pinker and the editors of Reason magazine.Labels: ArtEnt, Lit, Mil
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 7:44 PM
October 12, 2006
Bring back the ribald classics!
In his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, professor Allan Bloom blamed the sexual revolution for his students’ condescension towards their ancestors. “Many think their older brothers and sisters discovered sex, as we now know it to be, in the sixties. I was impressed by students who, in a course on Rousseau’s Confessions, were astounded to learn that he had lived with a woman out of wedlock in the eighteenth century. Where could he have gotten the idea?” (p. 107-108) Where could Bloom’s students have gotten the idea that our forebears were Doris Day? From bowdlerized textbooks in government-run schools, of course. I support the complete privatization of education partly because bureaucrats have bad taste in literature. For instance, they would seldom ask high-school teachers to assign this passage from the sixteenth-century French classic by François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (1990 translation by Burton Raffel, p. 34-35):At the end of his fifth year, Gargantua was visited by his father, Grandgousier.... And Grandgousier drank a good bit, both with the boy and with his governesses, asking the latter most earnestly, among other things, if they had kept him fresh and clean. To which Gargantua replied that he had made sure that, nowhere in all the land, was there a boy cleaner than he was.
“And how do you manage that?” said Grandgousier.
“By long and careful experience,” said Gargantua, “I have invented a method for wiping my ass which is the most noble, the best, and also the simplest ever seen.”
“What is it?” asked Grandgousier.
“I’ll tell you,” said Gargantua, “right now.
“Once I wiped myself with a lady’s velvet veil, and I liked that very much, because it was so soft that it made my ass feel really good;
—and then with a lady’s hood, made of the same stuff, and it was just as good;
—and then with a man’s scarf;
—and then with an embroidered red satin veil, but the gilt came off and rolled up into all sorts of shitty balls, and they scraped half the skin off my ass—may Saint Anthony’s fire roast the ass of the goldsmith who made the thing—and the lady who wore it!
—I got over that by wiping myself with a page’s hat, handsomely plumed in Swiss style.
“Then, once when I was shitting behind some bushes, I found a March cat and wiped myself with him, but his claws scratched my whole rear end.
“I cured myself of that, next day, by wiping myself with my mother’s gloves—nicely scented with cunt flavor.
Our young scientist goes on for two more pages, then breaks the suspense by declaring “that there is no ass wiper like a fluffy goose, if you keep its head between your legs.” (With apologies to readers elsewhere in the English-speaking world, this Yankee takes nationalistic pride in the translator’s use of ass instead of arse.)
Don’t make the mistake of thinking of Rabelais as an envelope-pushing Lenny Bruce or Howard Stern of his day. Old-time literature is filled with that kind of stuff. (Or will Howard Stern be literature hundreds of years from now? I ask in earnest.) Admittedly, the scatological humor of that example is more Hustler than Playboy. But through the “Ribald Classics” section it published regularly until, I think, the early 1980s, Playboy showed that there’s plenty of sexy stuff there, too. Today’s students are missing out.
A related subsequent post:
Roman Catholicism has a sensual sideLabels: ArtEnt, Educ, Lib, Lit
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:29 PM
April 29, 2006
Artificiality can be sexy
In a review of The Playmate Book for The New Yorker, Joan Acocella finds Playboy pictures, especially more recent ones, too contrived to be sexy:Today—or, actually, by the eighties—one wonders whether sex, as it is experienced by human beings, is still the point. The current centerfolds, buck naked though they may be, communicate almost no suggestion of anything. In Playboy pinups, one is not looking for the note of the divine that one finds in the Venuses of ancient statuary, let alone for the pathos of Rembrandt’s nudes. Nor should one ask for naturalness—a real-looking girl. That is a sentimental preference, and one that many great nudes (Ingres’s, Degas’s) can refute. But what is so bewildering about the later Playboy centerfolds is their utter texturelessness: their lack of any question, any traction, any grain of sand from which the sexual imagination could make a pearl. Kenneth Clark, in his classic book The Nude (1956), repeatedly compares a period’s nudes to its architecture. The Playmates of the past few decades look to me like the “cereal box” buildings that went up on Sixth Avenue in the sixties, those cold, shiny structures, with no niches, no insets—no doors, it seemed. Likewise, the current Playmates seem to have no point of entry. And wasn’t entry the idea?
In reply, I quote François Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind: “It is an event sociological.” The remarkable fact that a woman has given her consent for millions of men to gaze at her admittedly stylized pinup image is enough sand to make a great pearl indeed. For a heterosexual male, real or symbolic female willingness is precious. Wow, she went for it! Many other women wouldn’t do it for any price (although this unwillingness can sometimes have its own distinct charm).
Taken together, all the things in a Playboy photo besides the nude woman serve a similar purpose to that of the video portion of a music video. They don’t need to make logical sense, but only to make a pleasantly memorable visual impression. Wondering out loud why a Playmate took her clothes off in a library is like refusing to pour lemon juice on a fish dinner on the grounds that lemon trees and fish live in separate natural environments.
Acocella’s failure to appreciate the ritualistic affectations of the pinup genre makes the Playmates’ facial expressions an unsolvable aesthetic problem:In a 2002 article in The New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm remarked on Irving Penn’s tendency to crop the heads of his nudes: “There does not seem to be any way that a naked person in front of a camera can fail to betray his or her sense of the...inherent silliness or pathos of the situation. Whether the object of the exercise is art photography or pornography, the model does not know what to do with her face.” If Penn’s subjects were stymied, so were the Playmates, but of course their heads weren’t cropped, and Hefner wanted them to look straight into the camera. The poor girls either smiled (“We’re going to have a good time”) or snarled (“Come and get me, big boy”). Both seem equally fake.
But “fake” images can express real human will as messages in an iconic language. In the video clip of her Playboy Cyber Club photo shoot [obviously not work-safe], University of Kansas sex columnist Meghan Bainum can be seen making the effort, sometimes a bit awkwardly, to speak this language. All by itself, her wish to be the subject of male fantasy is an endlessly fascinating part of reality.Labels: ArtEnt, Cintv, NaBr, NSS, PM, TaoGlam
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:49 AM
March 24, 2006
April articles show vigorous aesthetics and tired politics
The April issue’s “Of Maus and Supermen” by Robert Levine and Scott Alexander is an exciting read about the ongoing comic-book renaissance of the past 20 years. Like all the best writing in pop-cultural studies, it suggests that the future of art and entertainment belongs to those daring enough to consider art and entertainment more or less interchangeable terms. One generation’s trash very often becomes another generation’s gold. Playboy’s decision to print the piece demonstrates a youthful vitality in its outlook on art in the broadest sense of the word.
In contrast, the same issue’s cluster of articles about evolution versus “intelligent design” seems intellectually stale. Even as it laments the apparent lack of social progress since the Scopes Trial of 1925, it lacks the energy to find truly fresh ways of looking at the controversy. Michael Ruse is horrified that America’s politicians and judges may expose schoolchildren to creationism, which he calls “a moral evil”:History shows we are not in a simple fight about science but in a greater fight about life philosophies....We must be prepared to counter those who would repress us and impose a theocracy. Although I cannot honestly confess that I have ever felt the urge to end a long day’s work by slipping into something pink and fluffy, the very thought that this might be a moral issue strikes me as ludicrous. To adapt a saying by S. G. Tallentyre, summing up the philosophy of Voltaire, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” (p. 133)
Ironically, Ruse’s warning against crude moralism is crudely moralistic. (One need not be religious to fall into this trap; the chapter “The Sanctimonious Animal” in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate explains why.) There is less at stake than he thinks. As he acknowledges in his article, about half the Nobel Prizes in science every year are won by Americans even though more than half of the American population doesn’t accept evolution. This proves that the scientific enterprise can flourish without the universal acceptance of its findings among the citizenry. My neighbor’s belief that God created the universe 6,000 years ago in the course of a week does me no more harm than his propensity to wear pink and fluffy things. Before calling creationism evil, Ruse needs to identify the chain of cause and effect leading from creationism to some kind of tangible harm. Otherwise, he’s committing a guilt-by-association fallacy similar to the claim that pornography causes men to rape.
Science matters somewhat less than Ruse implies in many of our cultural battles. Gay rights, for example, are best justified on the general libertarian principle that sexual activities and domestic arrangements among consenting adults are not appropriate matters for the state to meddle in. As fascinating as it is, the scientific inquiry on the causes of homosexuality has no real power to strengthen or weaken that civic principle, which can be defended only in the language of moral philosophy, not the language of science.
In his zeal to promote the values of the Enlightenment in public schools, Ruse never considers the possibility that separation of school and state could yield many of the same benefits as separation of church and state. When government holds a near-monopoly on early education, wasteful battles over excessively symbolic issues like prayer, sex education, and evolution go on indefinitely. Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has a much more creative solution to the problem than anything Playboy’s editors saw fit to print. (Hat tip: Hit & Run.) Come on, guys, you’re falling behind.Labels: ArtEnt, ArtPic, BlaSla, Educ, Lib, Lit, MorPa, OthBlo, RS, Sc, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:10 PM
October 26, 2005
The consumerism of the Renaissance
In The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines Bacchus as “[a] convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.” Likewise, Venus has been a convenient excuse for painting and sculpting naked women. One such naked woman, Titian’s Venus of Urbino [not work-safe] , is the starting point of an article by Charles Paul Freund in the June 1998 issue of Reason that examines the very close relationship between art and commerce over the past 500 years in the West. It turns out that the explosion of creativity in Renaissance Italy was made possible in part by an earlier form of what is now hypocritically denounced as “consumerism.” Freund writes:
Commercialization and, worse, “commodification” are considered by the contemporary cultural establishment to be the mortal enemies of art, and the antithesis of its spirit. But the fact is that art’s great historic opportunities have frequently arisen from intensely commercialized periods, and have often been accompanied—if not set in motion—by periods of explosive acquisitiveness. There is an inescapable connection between the rise of an acquisitive public and the expansion of an audience interested in expressive art, and it is out of that nexus that the recognition of the expressive creator as a visionary artist has developed.
Although Freund does not use this analogy, a kind of virgin-whore dichotomy has been set up between art and commerce. The Venuses in Playboy’s centerfolds are presented as nice girls who also happen to be sexy. Why can’t the artifacts of commercial culture be called art?Labels: ArtEnt, Lib, VW
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:53 PM
October 17, 2005
Please don’t assume I’m a pig
When I tell you that I’m a devoted fan of Playboy magazine, please don’t leap to any hasty conclusions. Please don’t assume that I’m a male chauvinist pig who believes that women should subordinate themselves, sexually or otherwise, to the will of men. Please don’t think that you can instantly guess my point of view on such issues as sexual harassment or rape. And please don’t condescend to regard me as a simpleton who gullibly absorbs all the “materialist” or “consumerist” messages of popular culture.
If I sound defensive, it’s because I commonly find all the above implications in boilerplate criticism of Playboy among self-described liberals. I consider myself a liberal in the rather old-fashioned sense of one who affirms the dignity of individual choice. As a matter of self-respect, I affirm the dignity of my tastes in entertainment. NASCAR fans might well resent the redneck stereotype; Star Trek fans, the nerd stereotype; opera fans, the stuffy stereotype. For my part, I’m tired of being told that I’m a misogynist or a dupe of Madison Avenue if I truly admire Playboy. The Playboy Philosophy [not work-safe] has its problems, and I intend to acknowledge them. But I also intend to defend Playboy as something beautiful and humane.Labels: ArtEnt, ArtPic, Mil, PJ, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 7:14 PM
This student at Louisiana State University is pictured much more candidly on page 112 of the October Playboy, for its “Girls of the Southeastern [Athletic] Conference” pictorial. In her shot for the current issue, I see self-confident good taste. It’s a cliché to call Playboy’s nudes “tasteful,” but I choose my written words with care.