July 3, 2008
Reason.tv: Playboy alum Marty Klein on America’s war on sex
Sex therapist Marty Klein has written articles for Playboy at least as far back as the late Eighties. His summation of his new book in this Reason.tv video makes it sound like something worth reading, doesn’t it?
Labels: ArtPic, Lib, OnVi
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 9:39 PM
June 20, 2008
Phony libertarian Bill Maher hates religion
ANNE FRANK HOUSE, Amsterdam: When you stand in front of it—a nondescript house on a busy street—you really feel how true the phrase “banality of evil” is. One of the most common arguments in defense of religion is that Hitler wasn’t religious and neither were Stalin and Mao, and they were bad, so religion must be good [emphasis added]. But like religion itself, this argument relies on one’s not thinking too deeply.
—Bill Maher, “Religion 101,” Playboy, July 2008
It’s a goddamn shame, no pun intended. Up until that paragraph and the ones that follow it, the article is funny and insightful. Maher misrepresents the sophisticated libertarian argument for the dignity of religious freedom. Religion per se is not good or bad but neutral in terms of good libertarian civics.
In other words, Thomas Paine had the cause-and-effect relationship between religion and behavior exactly wrong when he said, “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.” Men who were cruel to begin with pick cruel Gods to worship. In a sobering irony for Playboy’s legacy, the scapegoating of religion for cruelty looks like the scapegoating of pornography for rape.
You stink, Bill Maher!Labels: ArtPic, Lib, RS
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 7:40 AM
June 17, 2008
An open letter to Dr. Drew’s teenage daughters
Playboy: It’s a scary world out there. What’s it like with your triplets being 15? That’s the age when all the sex, drinking and drugs kick in, right?
[Dr. Drew] Pinsky: I’m less freaked out about the sex than about drugs and alcohol.... I don’t think kids ever tell you if they’re using drugs and alcohol, but I put it on record that if there’s even a hint of something, I will bring the whole thing down. I’ll have their asses hauled in by the police.
Playboy: So you’re not one of those parents who say “You can drink as long as it’s under my roof”?
Pinsky: To me that’s the worst kind of parenting. Drink here but not there? Please! It becomes “You can drink everywhere,” because that’s how the adolescent brain works. Kids need very clear boundaries. My thing is, if you do something illegal, you’re going to jail and I’m not bailing you out. And they know I’ve got perfect radar, too....
Playboy: What’s your history of drug use?
Pinsky: Mine personally? Because my kids may read this, I’m going to follow the advice I give to parents, which is that talking to your kids about what you did or did not do as an adolescent is the equivalent of issuing them a license to pick up where you left off. I guarantee you. I’ve been through this thousands of times. When parents tell their kids, “Well, I experimented with pot when I was 15, but that was all,” the kids will think, Of course I’m going to experiment with pot. They did it; why shouldn’t I? It would be hypocritical.
Playboy: So what do you say to kids?
Pinsky: You say “We don’t talk about it.”
Playboy: Come on! Tell kids that and they immediately think it means you did it!
Pinsky: When the child hears that, it has an entirely different impact on his behavior than my saying “Let me tell you about my experience.” If you did or didn’t do drugs, it’s not up for discussion. Don’t lie to your kids—never do that—but you aren’t obliged to tell them everything.
—Playboy Interview, July 2008
Hello, ladies! I don’t care what the state of California says about you as “minors.” If you let me, I would gladly buy you beer and cigarettes. I’m not kidding. Having been politically abused by your sanctimonious father, you’re entitled to self-medication.
The kernel of truth in parental anxieties about teenage sex and drug use is that postpubescent adults (i.e. 15-year-olds) need intergenerational dialogue to behave wisely and safely. Don’t take it personally when your dad spoils any hope for dialogue by condescending in his attitude towards your “adolescent brains.” No discovery in cognitive neuroscience will ever “prove,” for instance, that teens should abstain from alcohol. This is for the same reason that science can never “prove” the correct highway speed limit: the relevant political question always boils down to management of conflicting value judgments.
I don’t doubt your father’s honest wish to keep people safe with the value judgments he imposes on the supposedly diseased brains of teenagers, alcoholics, abuse survivors, and so on. The trouble is that he is a civil-liberties moron. If he had to actually think about that stuff, his brain would herniate. OK, fine, there are some bad brains.
So how about it, ladies?Labels: AgeMaj, ArtPic, DruPo, Lib, Sc
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:20 AM
June 15, 2008
Thanks for, um, the Y chromosome, Dad
16 Things You May Want to Know if You Win a Date with Cindy Margolis
by Josh Robertson....
12. Even in nudity she remains family-friendly. “The first time I posed for Playboy I did a signing in Times Square,” she recalls. “Families came to it together—fathers, sons, moms. I hear from fathers, guys who’ve collected Playboy their whole life, who tell me, ‘This is the only time my son and I agree on anything.’ It’s heartwarming and weird. My nudity brought them together. It’s like the only thing they can talk about is my boobs.”
—Playboy, July 2008
If the Fathers’ Day sentiment of the post title appears ungrateful and stingy, it’s because Dad was a reverse puritan (and “Crafter Artisan” ISTP) without the decency to allow me any sexual shyness. In case anyone wonders, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree with the Playboy thing. But erections can be damn scary for little boys, and a father who leaves his Playboys on the living room coffee table doesn’t necessarily earn his son’s trust to talk about them.
Besides, his tendency to say “boobs” in mixed company told me that he wasn’t a chun tzu on the finer points of sexual etiquette. In my considered opinion, he lost the Mandate of Heaven by doing it. Except in bed, where lovers demonstrate mutual trust with dirty talk, that word is a sisterly prerogative among women.
I’m afraid the best I can do to get into the spirit of Fathers’ Day is a friendly warning to fathers of boys.
An earlier post about Cindy Margolis:
Playgirls of the Western worldLabels: ArtPic, Celeb, Femi, MR, Rom, TaoGlam
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 8:43 PM
June 10, 2008
Pseudoliberal Trojan horses in Playboy: Frank Owen and Dr. Drew Pinksy
Bill Maher: Okay. Last time we talked to you, you wanted to say something about Proposition 215 [California’s 1996 medical marijuana ballot initiative].
Dr. Drew Pinsky: I was really offended by 215. As you know, what I am mostly against is misinformation. And 215, to me, seemed like a sham. It was some sort of Trojan horse, concocted to try to get people—using the sympathies of people about individuals with chronic illness, to try to cram this thing into legality.
—the panel discussion show Politically Incorrect, May 15, 1998.
When no one remembers a time without a Food and Drug Administration, important philosophical questions about drug policy, drug manners, and drug morals can fall down the memory hole, too. It’s intellectually irresponsible for Playboy to call Pinsky “a guy who knows how to be a responsible pleasure seeker,” as it does in the “Next Month” page anticipating the July issue with Pinsky as the Interview subject. Besides him, Frank Owen, author of the March article “The Medical Marijuana Murder,” is also dangerously overrated by Playboy as an authority on drug issues. Both men would lead us on a road to hell paved with good intentions.
I’ll give Owen his comeuppance first. (I’ve had to deal with him before, by the way.) He writes,
A close look at the customers of these dispensaries reveals a not so shocking truth: Many are not ill at all. Exactly how many medical marijuana patients are really sick and how many exaggerate minor aches and pains in order to get high is impossible to gauge....
There is as yet no solid proof that smoking pot cures anything. Instead, there is a small mountain of evidence—both anecdotal and scientific—that suggests pot is a useful palliative for some people, good for boosting appetite among HIV patients and suppressing nausea among cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Patients may feel better after smoking marijuana, and life may seem more bearable, but until further research is done it’s impossible to say whether the drug is doing anything to retard the progress of their disease.
Nearly all illegal drugs possess some medical utility. Heroin was introduced in the late 19th century as a treatment for opium addicts. In the 1950s methamphetamine was used to treat everything from depression to alcoholism to Parkinson’s disease. Yet nobody is talking about medical meth.
....
A year after [Denver med-pot seller] Ken Gorman’s murder the police have yet to make an arrest. In the end, who killed Gorman may be less important than why he was killed. His friends blame prohibition: If pot were fully legal, this wouldn’t have happened. But Gorman’s death resulted from a poorly thought-out system that puts patients and growers in peril even when they act within the limits of the law.
I agree with Owen that it’s dangerous to implement a poorly thought-out system. Unfortunately, Owen’s article is a poorly thought-out system, because it doesn’t give enough thought to who is empowered to implement what kind of system at what level of authority, and why.
The medical marijuana situation in the U.S. is chaotic, and Owen is doing exactly the wrong thing in response to the chaos as far as the Playboy Philosophy is concerned. Social chaos deserves to be exploited for the purpose of everyone’s individual liberty whenever possible. Eastern Europe in 1989 is a shining example of chaos done right. “Chaotic” individuals opportunistically decided to say fuck you to the Iron Curtain. When I use Proposition 215 to vaporize cannabis several times a day psychotherapeutically (for want of a better adverb), I’m effectively saying fuck you to drug prohibition by acting as if it never happened. When I treat pot as merely another item I deserve to be allowed to pick up in a store, it acts slowly but surely as a self-fulfilling prophecy for everybody. If I claimed, as some of my fellow libertarians do, that 215 is “a bad cause in bad faith,” I would be hesitating inappropriately in the name of intellectual integrity. Excessive analysis is paralysis—especially when chaos needs to be exploited and a fuck you needs to be said.
Pinsky is as clueless as Owen on where the prerogative of a citizen to use a substance comes from in the first place. On the 1998 PI panel, he essentially agrees with the federal government that more research is needed to be sure whether the people can handle as much freedom as they get under Proposition 215. Meanwhile, history proves that the government is neither competent nor morally legitimate as the pharmacological gatekeeper of the citizenry anyway. Pinsky’s point of view on this is difficult to interpret from the show’s transcript, and it’s probably because he knows he doesn’t really have a point of view on it. He is too intellectually lazy to imagine a world that much freer than ours, so he falls back on his modus operandi of self-righteousness. He can do this all he likes, but he can’t convince me that this is the voice of “responsible pleasure seeking.”Labels: ArtPic, DruPo, Lib, Sc, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:45 PM
June 7, 2008
Whence justice for misnamed Playboy models?
On the night of the Hollywood premiere of the first movie with you in the starring role, would you resent it if your name were misspelled on the marquee? I think it’s only natural. In case you missed the errata in the January “Dear Playboy” about the October “Girls of the SEC” pictorial, I reprint it below. We attention-seekers need to help each other!
We switched the names under two photos: The Florida student on the upper left on page 112 is Neenah Dreslin, while the Florida student on the upper right on page 116 is Natasha Combs. Also, the photo in the middle of page 117 shows not Brittney Brookwood but Alyssa Tyler.
In my personal life, it’s a time of crisis, risk, and opportunity. Situations like this tend to put the value of my friendships into focus. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Terri Lynn Farrow, a representative of LSU in that pictorial and also a friend of mine, deserves to be a Playmate of the Month.Labels: ArtPic, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:49 PM
May 17, 2008
Miss June 2008 is everybody’s fantasy and nobody’s fool
Playmate of the Month articles are usually written by magazine staffers. But once in a great while, a foldout model with a knack for writing pens it herself. Juliette Fretté writes very well—although the phrase “dying my hair” should have been “dyeing my hair.” Am I a hopeless nerd for being distracted even for a moment from a beautiful woman by a misspelling?
Then again, maybe I’m not a nerd but a bully. Even my Lord and Savior can’t get a break from me. Jesus cracks me up with a goofy verb* in A Course in Miracles: “Your bridge is builded stronger than you think, and your foot is planted firmly on it.” He never sinned, but He got a B in English (and Aramaic, presumably).
Fretté’s essay ends thus:
Now more than ever, I can explain why a feminist would appear in Playboy: because it’s fun. It’s creative. And I feel like it. And that adds to my joy and empowers me as a human being.
What’s more, it freshens my perspective on my book. Ah, yes, my book—the climax to this entire journey!
Yeah, I had to end with a bang. I hope it was as good for you as it was for me.
But the biggest cultural watershed in a very watershed Playmate spread has to be an item in her list of turnoffs: “being a pussy.” This is not contempt for the female anatomy but a qualified appreciation of, um, cockiness as an androgynous virtue. Camille Paglia has fairly criticized the feminist movement for its grim obsession with words. But in Fretté, womankind shows itself to be the co-creator of language rather than its victim.
And praise Jesus, she’s well builded, too.
*Update, June 7, 2008, 3:42 p.m.: Yeesh! Jack T. Chick had better not have the right idea about Jesus after all.Labels: ArtPic, Femi, PM, RS
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:34 AM
April 30, 2008
Spoilers and the aesthetics of surprise in the information age
Off-site spoiler alert: this* blog post by another Playboy fan reveals the identity of the new Playmate of the Year. You won’t read it at my blog in advance, though.
At 36, I’m just old enough to remember the slower travel of information before the Internet. Naturally, being a blogger, I wouldn’t go back to those days. But spoilers were somewhat easier to avoid then. The “Next Month” page at the end of the May Playboy brought a smile to my face by avoiding the mistake of showing a spoiler photograph of the new Playmate of the Year. I want to honor the spirit of that choice by imitating it here.
*Point of style: I happen to agree with The Chicago Manual of Style that the first word after a colon is not necessarily capitalized. Hmm. Is Chicago known for any other publications that one could describe as manuals of style?Labels: ArtPic, OthBlo, PM
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:20 PM
February 29, 2008
OK, Brian, time to write about your favorite Playmate. Gulp!
The Playboy Cyber Club has posted test shots of Cynthia Gwyn Brown, the shots that made her Miss May 1995. This time around, my prose has to be really good. Uh-oh!
Cindy Brown demonstrates how well blue eyes and brown hair can go together. In images I wouldn’t dare post here for fear of Playboy Enterprises’ lawyers, the wonderfully idiosyncratic shape of her medium-sized breasts defies the balloon cliché in too many centerfolds since the mid-1990s. Variety is indeed the spice of life. (With regret, I acknowledge a kernel of truth in the criticism that Playmates look too much alike these days.) Her centerfold, with her back to the camera and her front to a full-length mirror, reminded me of the joy of stumbling on the word callipygian in the dictionary so many years before.
Men’s magazines are notorious for fibbing about the women in the pictures. But just in case some of Cindy Brown’s Playmate story is true, I copy it here:Rhapsody in Brown
miss may makes her move from popcorn peddler to playmate
Cindy Brown is in the middle of a spirited discussion about the environment and destructive human appetites when temptation turns her pretty head. Six Hell’s Angels roar up on Rose Avenue, rattling the open windows of the café where we sit, just off the beach in Venice, California. “Oh my God,” Cindy exclaims, her eyes suddenly gleaming. “I want a Harley real bad!” What? A gas-guzzling vestige of our unenlightened past? “Oh man!” she says, immediately launching into a new story. “I was sitting at Johnny Rockets on Melrose Avenue one night, and this woman drove up solo on a Harley. That’s supposed to be a man thing. Everybody gave her respect right away. I’m constantly looking for a way to do things that women aren’t supposed to do.”
In another day and age, this extraordinary girl next door might have been an outlaw or a revolutionary. Raised on a small farm in the desert town of Boron, California, two hours north of Los Angeles, she threw a broccoli stalk into the family works when, at 15, she became a vegetarian. The folks at home had to adjust. “We raised animals—horses, sheep, goats, pigs, cows, chickens. My dad is a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, and he was raising most of these animals for our food. I grew up accepting that, but when I got older I realized that I like feeding the animals more than I like eating them.”
Cindy is certain that her Cherokee ancestry, mostly ignored by her parents, guides her environmental consciousness. “I would love to work for the Environmental Protection Agency someday,” she says. “I’d like to straighten it out because it’s as crooked as it gets. I could help companies clean up their acts.” (Note to Al Gore: she couldn’t hurt.)
Life is always a little bumpy for a maverick, but Cindy says her mom—with whom she lives now, along with her stepfather and two stepbrothers—is her inspiration. “I can’t believe how much I’ve become like her,” she muses, smiling. “I’m a very strong and independent person because of her. She’s always telling me, ‘Sooner or later you’re going to be on your own. You’re going to have to make your own choices then, so you might as well start doing it now.’” One of those choices was to pose for Playboy. Cindy and her mom are proud of the decision, and we applaud it too. After all, what use is a natural wonder if no one can see it?
—Clint Gila
Technology is good. Nevertheless, the Playboy Cyber Club is inferior to the printed magazine. For one thing, the little paragraphs surrounding the main text of Playmate articles never get transcribed online—not even when they’re this delightful:“I used to wear baggy clothes all the time,” says Cindy, “but I don’t anymore. I’m proud of my body. It’s fun to be sexy. It spills over into the rest of my life. When the photographer was shooting and he said, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s good,’ I was thinking, All right! I’m good! That feels very sexy.” [May 1995, p. 97]
To the best I’ve been able to research, Brown is a “lost Playmate.” The world of Playboy fandom doesn’t know where she is now or what she’s been up to since 1995. If she chooses to avoid the limelight now, I can appreciate that choice. After all, her insistence on doing as she pleases is so much of her charm.Labels: ArtPic, CC, PM
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:53 PM
February 2, 2008
Why is libertarian propaganda so sexy?
As devotees of free minds and free markets, we spend our nights pining for a major-party politician who not only looks dreamy while reading a Teleprompter but shows some passion for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.
—Nick Gillespie and Tim Cavanaugh, “Building the Perfect Candidate,” Reason, April 2004
“Why are Russian women so hot?” asks Radley Balko at my source for the above photo of beautiful Maria Sharapova, the libertarian blog Hit & Run. To answer his own question, Balko approvingly cites Anne Applebaum of Slate, who credits the collapse of communism and the opening of markets in the former Soviet Union.
As a libertarian, I’ve been falsely accused of admiring Ayn Rand. Her novels reportedly have some kinky sex in them, but even so, I haven’t been motivated to read them after reading her March 1964 Playboy Interview (complete transcript; paid subscription required). Her assertion that “man does not possess any instincts” and her belief in “Objectivism” as a viewpoint structurally incapable of turning into fanatical dogma tell me that her view of human nature isn’t refined enough to merit serious study. As an alternative, I recommend a careful reading of the libertarian implications of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
I don’t necessarily speak of libertarian literature in general, but Reason has been sexing up its act for a while. More power to it, I say. Playboy and Reason are two magazines that can benefit mutually from a willingness to resemble each other a bit from time to time.Labels: ArtPic, BlaSla, CC, Lib, Lit, NPH, OthBlo, Sp
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 2:04 PM
January 3, 2008
Ron Paul for president—in the California primary, anyway
Playboy recently disappointed me by paying unnecessary attention to Fred Thompson’s boring presidential run instead of acknowledging Congressman Paul.
If principled, freedom-loving Californians act quickly, they can register as Republicans in this closed-primary state in time to help Paul become president. On the immigration question, he sinks to panicky pandering, and I disagree with him on the admittedly challenging ethical question of abortion. But he is certainly the best Republican candidate this year.
Unlike Andrew Sullivan, for instance, I’ve never liked John McCain. He has always creeped me out. But I’m certainly glad to see a conservative with Sullivan’s cachet choosing Paul over McCain. If conservatism as a distinct political movement isn’t completely overshadowed soon by Reason-style libertarianism, it will only be because intellectual giants like Sullivan come up with a convincing enough “yes, but” to keep the two philosophies separate in enough people’s minds.
With all due modesty, I’m not even sure he’ll do it, though. We’ll see.Labels: ArtPic, BGC, Lib, MorPa, OthBlo
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:40 AM
December 19, 2007
Dear John Updike: a vivid literary image is not necessarily an interesting one
I appreciate it when an artist in any medium describes appropriate self-consciousness and deliberateness about craft. It reassures me that I will be well taken care of as part of the audience. In the January 2008 “Playbill” section introducing the major items in the magazine, fiction artist John Updike says, “Short stories now seem to just end, as if the writer ran out of typewriter ink or paper or something. I have this old-fashioned notion that stories should snap shut in the last line and throw light back to the first sentence.”
These words gave me hope of enjoying an Updike short story, for a change. But it didn’t happen for me with his January contribution, “Blue Light.” All I could do was skim it—with boredom punctuated by mild disgust at the elderly protagonist’s bigotry against young people and fat people. I’m charitable enough not to accuse him of racism, although the hoity-toity symbolism of his WASP skin problem serves mostly as a vehicle for dreary identity politics. My generation of entertainers (Quentin Tarantino, Seth MacFarlane) doesn’t care anymore, and neither do I. As a Gen-X white boy living under the glorious First Amendment, I feel little compunction about dropping an N-bomb here and there for rhetorical purposes [time-sensitive link].
As for the promised end-of-the-story zinger, there’s no there there. If only Updike had been a little more old-fashioned about the art of the short story, he would have put a plot in that thing. Paradoxically, at the same time, Updike displeased me by failing to be hip enough in his manner of writing. Novelist Jamie Malanowski, for example, knows what the written English language has to do to compete with television and YouTube in the twenty-first century. One of Malanowski’s friends and associates, Rebecca Lavoie, gives his novel The Coup five stars at Amazon, yet she complains in passing that “the prose is so tight as to provide almost no exposition at all.” What she calls lack of exposition, I call appropriate pacing to tell a good written story these days.
Updike’s unforgivable hubris lies in being too cool to want to tell a story. The bitter old fart at the center of “Blue Light” is essentially dying of boredom. But anyone would, with the kind of psychedelic depression that Updike provides for the inner monologue. Lighten up, dude!Labels: ArtEnt, ArtPic, Lit, OthBlo, Ra
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:27 PM
December 12, 2007
The women of the Playboy Interview
When I learned that Tina Fey would be the capital-I Interviewee of the January 2008 Playboy, I smiled, remembering the Internet gossip I had traded with some guys a few years ago about how great a Fey pictorial would be. Her face will reportedly be naked, anyway—although I happen to agree with Charles Taylor of Salon [free archive; no paid subscription necessary] that spectacles can be beautiful on a woman.
The ratio of women to men in the Playboy Interview has been low. But the ethnic, professional, and political diversity of the Interview’s female subjects looks pretty good in comparison to that of its male subjects. If you see any errors or omissions in my list of women in the Playboy Interview, please let me know. I want it to be complete. I’ve provided Wikipedia links for only those names from outside the worlds of show business and sports. (Judgment call: for my purposes here today, literature and predominantly written journalism are outside of show business.)
If Playboy wants to capital-I Interview any more women in 2008, I nominate Judith Rich Harris, scientist and author of The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike. Many political discussions need her wisdom desperately.
April 1963 — Helen Gurley Brown
March 1964 — Ayn Rand
October 1965 — Madalyn Murray (O’Hair)
January 1966 — Princess Grace of Monaco (i.e. Grace Kelly)
May 1968 — Virginia E. Johnson (with William Masters)
January 1970 — Raquel Welch
April 1970 — Mary Calderone
July 1970 — Joan Baez
January 1971 — Mae West
January 1972 — Germaine Greer
September 1972 — Bernadette Devlin (McAliskey)
April 1974 — Jane Fonda (with Tom Hayden)
March 1975 — Billie Jean King
September 1975 — Erica Jong
October 1975 — Cher
June 1976 — Sara Jane Moore
July 1976 — Lily Tomlin
May 1977 — Anne Beatts, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner, Rosie Shuster (with the cast of Saturday Night Live)
October 1977 — Barbra Streisand
May 1978 — Anita Bryant
October 1978 — Dolly Parton
May 1979 — Wendy Carlos (formerly Walter Carlos)
November 1979 — Virginia E. Johnson (again, with William Masters)
April 1980 — Linda Ronstadt
January 1981 — Yoko Ono (with John Lennon)
May 1981 — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
November 1981 — Oriana Fallaci
March 1982 — Patricia Hearst
July 1982 — Bette Davis
December 1982 — Julie Andrews (with Blake Edwards)
October 1983 — Barbara Bosson, Veronica Hamel, Betty Thomas (with the cast of Hill Street Blues)
April 1984 — Joan Collins
September 1984 — Shirley MacLaine
December 1984 — Linda McCartney (with Paul McCartney)
January 1985 — Goldie Hawn
March 1985 — Diane Sawyer (with the cast of 60 Minutes)
January 1986 — Dr. Ruth Westheimer
March 1986 — Sally Field
May 1986 — Kathleen Turner
November 1986 — Joan Rivers
June 1987 — Whoopi Goldberg
August 1987 — Imelda Marcos (with Ferdinand Marcos)
December 1988 — Cher (again)
May 1989 — Susan Sarandon
December 1989 — Candice Bergen
June 1990 — Polly Draper, Mel Harris, Melanie Mayron, Patricia Wettig (with the cast of Thirtysomething)
November 1990 — Leona Helmsley
February 1992 — Liz Smith
September 1992 — Betty Friedan
October 1992 — Sister Souljah
December 1992 — Sharon Stone
March 1993 — Anne Rice
June 1993 — Roseanne Arnold (with Tom Arnold)
November 1993 — Joyce Carol Oates
May 1995 — Camille Paglia
June 1995 — Joycelyn Elders
September 1995 — Cindy Crawford
January 1997 — Whoopi Goldberg (again)
September 2000 — Jennifer Lopez
December 2000 — Drew Barrymore
October 2001 — Allison Janney, Janel Moloney (with the cast of The West Wing)
January 2003 — Halle Berry
July 2003 — Lisa Marie Presley
February 2005 — Nicole Kidman
November 2006 — Arianna Huffington
December 2006 — The Dixie Chicks
January 2008 — Tina FeyLabels: ArtPic, Celeb, Femi, NPH, Sc
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 9:21 AM
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?Labels: ArtPic, CC, Lit, NaBr, PM, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:27 PM
November 7, 2007
A complete reprint of the first Playboy—and for a reasonable price, too
As a retrospective on an institution, the 50th-anniversary issue of Playboy (January 2004) was something of a dud. It’s common knowledge among serious Playboy fans that it was established in 1953. So how the hell did “Class of ’54,” that idiotic blurb from the January 2004 “Playboy After Hours,” ever make the final edit? When I think about it, I still get mad. What an insult to our intelligence!
Point of clarification: It’s easy to be misled on this point by what one sees on, for example, the December 2007 table of contents. The issue identifies itself there as volume 54, number 12. If you don’t know that Playboy never published a March 1955 issue, you’ll count wrong and think the whole thing started with a January 1954 issue.
But that’s simply false. The issue marked January 1954 has Margie Harrison instead of Marilyn Monroe in it. Fortunately, an incredibly cool reprint of the original December 1953 Playboy is on sale at the official online store. And now that I’ve made my purchase of this limited-edition item, it’s safe to tell you guys, heehee.
Update, June 11, 2008, 8:07 p.m.: Sadly, I’ve had to move out of my apartment in such a hurry that I’ve probably lost the copy I ordered online. The complete digital archive of Playboy in the 1950s that I bought in a bookstore happens to include another reprint of the first issue. But I’m greedy enough to smart that I don’t have two of them anymore. Ouch!Labels: ArtPic, PM
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:25 PM
October 31, 2007
A Halloween rerun that has stood the test of time, if I say so myself
I was relatively green as a writer back then, but in two years, I’ve seen the need for only two minor corrections to my post for Halloween 2005—and one of those was before Reflections on Playboy was a month old. I hope you find it very scary sexy, kids.
But whatever you might do to get scared this Halloween, kids, don’t frighten yourself into a moral panic. The best part of the intellectual dimension of Playboy’s legacy will surely be a tendency to resist moral panic. But at the time I write this, not one single post at the official Playboy Blog mentions moral panic at all. Through Google, I found precisely one comment on the subject—and that was me under a pseudonym. You’re welcome, salaried keepers of the Playboy legacy.
Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy” [not work-safe; online transcription not yet complete] of the 1960s predates the sociological term “moral panic” (coined by Stanley Cohen in 1972, the year I was born). But as a phenomenon, moral panic goes at least as far back as circa 428 B.C.: the date of the first production of the Greek tragedy Hippolytus (stress the second syllable, so that it almost rhymes with “hippopotamus”), by Euripides. Since Euripides must have seen self-righteousness around him to be inspired to write it, and since Plato was born around the same time as the first production, we know we can’t blame Platonism—for example—for self-righteousness in general. Since Euripides lived in a polytheistic society, we can’t honestly scapegoat monotheism, as the Sam Harris types do. Blaming either of them for a perennial human tendency is—guess what?—just another moral panic.
By the way, whether you leave a comment at the 2005 post or this one, I’ll read it promptly through my automated email notification and publish it. Note also that a Blogger.com account is completely optional—even if you want to leave a URL with your name. After all, there’s nothing scarier than giving up a little of your privacy forever, kids! Ah-ooo, or whatever a vampire is supposed to say, I guess.Labels: ArtPic, Lib, MorPa, OthBlo, Sc
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:11 PM
October 22, 2007
For Playboy, Ron Paul, not Fred Thompson, should be the Republican to watch
Playboy’s critics are right after all. The magazine promotes superficially attractive bimbos while ignoring those with substantial, inner beauty. But I’m not talking about the models. I mean the presidential candidates it chooses to aid. Fred Thompson doesn’t deserve his three pages of publicity in the November issue (“Straight Talk Expressed”) nearly as much as Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), who, of the two, has much more to offer the sort of voter who reads Playboy.
To be fair, Playboy’s editors didn’t have the benefit of the latest financial news from the race when they compiled that issue: on the Republican side, only the Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, and Ron Paul campaigns have decent cash flow as I write this. But Thompson’s own words from his conversation with Jeff Greenfield show his relative lack of substance:One time I remember a vote about the legislation to federalize the Good Samaritan law. That law said if you stopped to help someone on the highway, they couldn’t sue you. I thought this was something the states had been taking care of pretty well for 200 years. They have reasons to give partial coverage, no coverage or total coverage, depending on such factors as whether someone was helpful but also unbelievably careless. So my view was that the states should handle it. The vote was 99 to one. I went back to the office, and the staff was battening down the hatches for an onslaught. It never came. I got some positive feedback but nothing negative. So back to the point: If you’re a little risky and do what you think you ought to do and say what you think you ought to say—as long as you don’t get too carried away or say totally stupid things—it’s a good political strategy, if one wanted to make a strategy of it. [p. 96]
Here, Thompson congratulates himself for doing once what Paul does routinely. Paul has earned the congressional nickname “Dr. No” for his habit of saying no to the expansion of the federal government when most of his peers say yes. But never mind that. While Paul can invoke the Constitution to justify most of his legislative decisions, Thompson places sincerity far above any other political virtue:I decide within 30 seconds whether I like a guy. I don’t know what party he is. I don’t know what his beliefs are. You feel as if you know whether the guy believes what he’s saying, whether he is sincere, whether he’s just another manufactured politician. In the future the person who steps out from all that protective coating will have something special going for him. [p. 98; emphasis added]
Such anti-intellectualism! Thompson may be somewhat earthier and more spontaneous than the average Washington politician, but so what? Almost anyone could have made the banal points about our phony politicians that he makes in his chat with Greenfield. By necessity, monthly magazines are among the slowest of the news media. But even by their standards, this journalistic leftover (from 2005, by its own admission) isn’t news.
At Reason, David Weigel explains in more detail why Thompson’s campaign is a big yawn.Labels: ArtPic, BGC, Lib, OthBlo
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 8:55 AM
October 18, 2007
November Forum: Stephen Duncombe wants to encourage what James Hillman helped start
To that end, specifically, I support him. I don’t happen to know whether Duncombe has even heard of Hillman. But by design or by chance, Duncombe’s article for the November “Playboy Forum” reminds me of territory that Hillman has been tentatively but usefully mapping for years. Being libertarian, I take objection to the Marxist strain in both men’s thinking. Yet I respect, admire, and encourage the epistemological revolution they would foment.It is a common mistake to think reality and fantasy inhabit separate spheres. They don’t. They coexist and intermingle. Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. To embrace dreams and make peace with spectacle doesn’t mean you have to abandon your faith in a politics ruled by reason. It means you acknowledge that it’s only a faith. Perhaps people can, and probably should, study the reality of the world, make reasoned political judgments and act accordingly. But this way of seeing and being doesn’t have any taken-for-granted epistemological foundation. It is, to use academic jargon, a system of discourse that must be (re)created, imagined, operationalized and dramatized to appeal to the public’s imagination.
—Stephen Duncombe, “Why Don’t Liberals Dream?”, Playboy, November 2007, p. 43-44
Compare that with this transcription of a spoken conversation between Hillman and Michael Ventura, from the 1992 book they co-wrote, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse:HILLMAN: Look. Our assumption, our fantasy, in psychoanalysis has been that we’re going to process, we’re going to grow, and we’re going to level things out so that we don’t have these very strong, disturbing emotions and events.
VENTURA: Which is probably not a human possibility.
HILLMAN: But could analysis have new fantasies of itself, so that the consulting room is a cell in which revolution is prepared?
VENTURA: What?
HILLMAN: Could—
VENTURA: —could the consulting room be a cell in which revolution is prepared? Jesus. Could it?
HILLMAN: By revolution I mean turning over. Not development or unfolding, but turning over the system that has made you go to analysis to begin with—the system being government by minority and conspiracy, official secrets, national security, corporate power, et cetera. Therapy might imagine itself investigating the immediate social causes, even while keeping its vocabulary of abuse and victimization—that we are abused and victimized less by our personal lives of the past than by a present system.
It’s like, you want your father to love you. The desire to be loved by your father is enormously important. But you can’t get that love fulfilled by your father. You don’t want to get rid of the desire to be loved, but you want to stop asking your father; he’s the wrong object. So we don’t want to get rid of the feeling of being abused—maybe that’s very important, the feeling of being abused, the feeling of being without power. But maybe we shouldn’t imagine that we are abused by the past as much as we are by the actual situation of “my job,” “my finances,” “my government”—all the things that we live with. [A personal example of my own.—B.S.] Then the consulting room becomes a cell of revolution, because we would be talking also about, “What is actually abusing me right now?” That would be a great venture, for therapy to talk that way.
VENTURA: Let’s double back a second. You said, “Could analysis have new fantasies about itself?” What do you mean by fantasy? For most people that word’s associated with “unreal.”
HILLMAN: Oh, no, no. Fantasy is the natural activity of the mind. Jung says, “The primary activity of psychic life is the creation of fantasy.” Fantasy is how you perceive something, how you think about it, react to it.
VENTURA: So any perception, in that sense, is fantasy.
HILLMAN: Is there a reality that is not framed or formed? No. Reality is always coming through a pair of glasses, a point of view, a language—a fantasy.
VENTURA: But if therapy is to take this new direction, have this new perception or fantasy about itself, it seems we need some basic redefinition of some basic concepts. [p. 38-39]
Of course, Hillman’s line of thinking won’t lead inevitably to better democracy. It could, for instance, potentially replace “government by minority and conspiracy” with majoritarian tyranny—always a serious threat in a society where almost everyone belongs to a lifestyle minority of one kind or another. Nonetheless, Hillman’s wary eye on the political uses and abuses of psychotherapy is a model for every American.
Almost certainly, Hillman is no fan of many of my other favorite authors, like Steven Pinker, Judith Rich Harris, and Virginia Postrel. In that way, I see my own Hillmania as unlikely, like the friendship between R2-D2 and C-3PO. My measured libertarian optimism provides a useful counterbalance for Hillman’s left-wing Malthusian gloom. The world is generally getting better, not worse. Lighten up and relax, Dr. Hillman, and get in the damn escape pod.Labels: ArtPic, Cintv, Lib, Lit, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:31 PM
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.Labels: ArtEnt, ArtPic, BlaSla, Celeb, Educ, Lib, Ra, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:59 PM
September 27, 2007
October’s “The Ranch”: the self-righteous despair of an aging hippie
One seemingly trivial fact becomes increasingly significant to me the more I think about it and the more I compare these guys [in their thirties] with kids their age who didn't grow up in [utopian communes]: Not one of them owns an iPod.
On the night of the Hollywood premiere of the first movie with you in the starring role, would you resent it if your name were misspelled on the marquee? I think it’s only natural. In case you missed the errata in the January “Dear Playboy” about the October “Girls of the SEC” pictorial, I reprint it below. We attention-seekers need to help each other!
Playmate of the Month articles are usually written by magazine staffers. But once in a great while, a foldout model with a knack for writing pens it herself. Juliette Fretté writes very well—although the phrase “dying my hair” should have been “dyeing my hair.” Am I a hopeless nerd for being distracted even for a moment from a beautiful woman by a misspelling?
As a retrospective on an institution, the 50th-anniversary issue of Playboy (January 2004) was something of a dud. It’s common knowledge among serious Playboy fans that it was established in 1953. So how the hell did “Class of ’54,” that idiotic blurb from the January 2004 “Playboy After Hours,” ever make the final edit? When I think about it, I still get mad. What an insult to our intelligence!