“Composer Artisan” ISFP. Socially and economically libertarian for reasons having nothing to do with Ayn Rand. Current fields of study:Playboy, A Course in Miracles, building a new life in Humboldt County.
Hollywood, California, is my spiritual hometown. I actually grew up in three other communities in California, but it hardly seems to matter which three. How could my heart take root anywhere under the tyranny of American public schooling?
I don’t have to work for a living. After my father died in December 1997, my family and I won a legal settlement.
The Blog About
Nothing: Sudheer of Hyderabad, India, is a big fan of Playboy and an
even bigger fan of Seinfeld. In this blog, he composes humorous
dialogues for the show’s characters.
Hit & Run: the official
blog of my other favorite magazine, Reason: Free Minds and Free
Markets; winner
of the 2005 Weblog Award for Best Group Blog; “the best
libertarian blog” according to the October 2005 issue of
Playboy.
Scoobie Davis Online: a self-described “filmmaker, surfer, and party crasher” in southern California. He’s also a Playboy fan, a left-leaning political gadfly, and a connoisseur of Jack T. Chick religious tracts.
The Search for
Health in Decadence: poetry and philosophical writings of Will, who has
engaged me in lengthy, good-natured debate through comments on my
blog.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven
Pinker. With stylistic flair, a Harvard cognitive scientist
refutes myths about human nature underlying a multitude of political
beliefs—including many of those that would either favor or
oppose the sexual revolution.
God in Popular Culture by Andrew M. Greeley. A liberal Catholic
priest sees quasi-Christian messages of grace abounding in the
allegedly soulless realm of commercial pop culture. For all I know,
Greeley is not necessarily a Playboy fan. But his
interpretation of Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin” has
influenced my impression of Playboy. (In case anyone wonders, my religious heritage is Lutheran on my father’s side and secularist on my mother’s.)
According to a Hindu proverb, it takes a thorn to remove a thorn. I’m finally getting over the “Why did they always tell me I’m wrong?” thing by being told by Someone Else (through A Course in Miracles) that, in a manner of speaking, I’m literally always wrong. Meanwhile, I’m also getting kicked out of my apartment just when I’m preparing to go to the Playboy Mansion for the third time. But God’s grace has provided an elegant solution in the division of labor according to comparative advantage. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
After the party, I’ll need a cheap place to live while I plan necessary changes in my life. It might as well be your guest bedroom, so you should expect me there in mid-June. Because of my criminal record for ill-advised scuffles with cops just a few years ago, I warn you against “teaching me a lesson” with another arrest. California’s “three strikes” law could mean disaster after that. If you have to worry about something, worry about that. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
Don’t try to make me go to rehab; I won’t go, go, go. Although I know that I can’t afford to deny the consequences of my behavior, I categorically refuse to medicalize my behavior in any way. I acknowledge no “disease” of any kind for which I need to take twelve steps or any variation thereof. Besides, I’m already doing superbly with the do-it-yourself spiritual program I’m on. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
You don’t have to believe in Rousseau’s doctrine of the Noble Savage to recognize the tyranny of America’s public schools. When I remember the slavery of homework that you helped bind me to—the unnecessary anxiety, guilt, shame, boredom, and sense of impending failure all the way—I feel no compunction whatsoever farming out my worries to you. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
Nobody’s guilt trip about my “growing up slowly” can discourage me. All I can say in reply is that I’ve been doing the best I know how all along. By logical necessity, this ends the argument. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
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.
“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.
In this particular instance, the dilemma is the very real one of age of majority, specifically in relation to the death penalty. But for anyone who wants subtle wisdom in the complicated relationship between the new discoveries about the brain and political science, I recommend either How the Mind Works or The Blank Slate, both by Steven Pinker. (I haven’t had a close look at The Stuff of Thought yet, I admit.)
By the way, both of those books tend generally to strengthen the libertarian point of view. Just saying.
My point about age of majority, specifically, is that it’s like a highway speed limit. Science alone can never give us the “right” answer to the question, since it will always be a collective pragmatic trade-off between public safety and the comfort and convenience of speedy travel (or whatever the dilemma in human values that happens to rankle everybody). Sorry, utopians, but there you go.
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.
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?
While researching my previous post, I browsed left-wing feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte’s recent work. It reminded me of why I get so angry at people who seem to think they own the patent on compassion while they support policies that unintentionally hurt the less fortunate.
Update: August Pollak alerted me to an article in Campus Progress about the [Independent Women’s Forum] conference [on campus sex and dating], an article that seems a bit more honest about the ugly sexism on display. Contrary to my theory that men act like dicks a lot of the time because they’re living under some pretty ugly pressures, the ladies at IWF seem to think that men were born dogs. But you know, having an empathetic attitude towards male feelings [serves as] evidence that one is a man-hater. You only love men if you see them as no better than leg-humping dogs.
I can’t say why exactly Allison Kasic of the IWF fascinates me so much. I think it’s because she’s smart enough to have clued into the fact that there’s [something] disillusioning and miserable about the attitudes of so many young men towards young women, but she comes to the exact wrong conclusion about how to handle the issue, arguing that instead of combating the misogyny that’s handed down to young men as a birthright, we reinforce the sexist notion that female sexuality is more of a commodity than a set of autonomous female desires. She’s got a write-up of [the] IWF sex conference that the evil sleeper cell [right-]winger Dr. Drew [Pinsky] spoke at, and it’s just a train wreck of false assumptions and pie-in-the-sky hopes about how to coerce a less contemptuous attitude towards women from the frateratti.
[Personally, I don’t see Dr. Drew as belonging to the cultural right. Instead, he’s one of our too many vaguely left-leaning public-health busybodies. But as I explained in an earlier post, one shouldn’t expect Dr. Drew to have very consistent political convictions on anything. Now I’ll let Marcotte speak for herself some more.]
By the way, to calm the nerves that a paragraph like the before invariably ruffles, I’m not saying all college age men are pigs. But it’s been my experience that there’s a lot of pressure on men when they’re younger to demonstrate a certain level of contempt for young women in order to satisfy their male peers that they’re all man. As they get older, their priorities shift and some of the compulsive misogyny falls away for a lot of guys that were only into it half-heartedly. But when you’re actually in college, sometimes the amount of pressure on men to be disdainful towards women can be stifling. In fact, my heart goes out on a level to a lot of young men who find themselves in a situation where respect for women is simply incompatible with having camaraderie with men in college. It’s this tension that I think is driving a lot of the unhappiness with men coming from the college women at this conference that Kasic talks about.
Ah, but does Marcotte really know what empathy is? In opposing school choice, she effectively favors a public-school monopoly for America’s poor and middle-income families, who have much less discretionary income for private schooling than wealthier families. Let them eat cake, indeed. Besides the direct name-calling I’ve already mentioned, I believe I have good reasons to take her stance on school as a lack of true empathy for me, thank you very much:
1.) As time goes on, every wise and honest person will eventually recognize Judith Rich Harris as the Copernicus of child development. To the degree that misogyny among American men is the problem Marcotte says it is, it must be because of the way American boys children* socialize each other—and not a direct consequence of the way American parents treat their boys.
2.) Jokes about schoolyard bullying, even as presented in entertainments like The Simpsons and A Christmas Story, may become even more ambiguously funny after a study of Harris. After all, jokes about prison rape aren’t necessarily funny, either. It’s obviously not the moral equivalent, but the difference is only a matter of degree.
3.) In light of Harris’ scholarship, my seemingly endless guilt over my failure to stand up to my father when he was alive is certainly the effect, not the cause, of having such a horrible time with the brutal machismo of the public junior high school locker room. The only way I knew to preserve my self-respect in the face of the assault on it was to feel superior by being the biggest goody two-shoes in the room. Unfortunately, the ruse corrupted me until I was too sheepish in the face of authority, and too lacking in personal ambition, to grow up gracefully and become an unbitter adult. In principle, Marcotte surely hates that locker-room culture as much as I did. But since public-school gym class is too stupid and cruel to survive the rigors of a free market in education—especially if I had my way and teenagers weren’t the new niggers—she aids in the oppression of millions of young people of both sexes.
4.) Alarmingly, Marcotte doesn’t seem to worry about the creep-up in legal age of majority that has taken place for the last few generations of Americans. Compulsory high school is an historical aberration (like marijuana prohibition, cough). It shouldn’t be such a sacred cow across the political spectrum. Andrew Sullivan has made the mistake of supporting it, but somehow I wouldn’t expect him to play the more-empathic-than-thou game in debate about it that Marcotte does about feminism. (For the record, I supportPlayboy’s good-faith effort to ensure a minimum employee age of 18.) Five days out of every week are a needless sorority initiation for millions of girls during the difficult early years of puberty. Meanwhile, the heart of the teacher’s pet bleeds for 18-year-olds who get drunk and expose their breasts for Girls Gone Wild. The child is father to the man—and to the woman, too. (Sorry, ghost of Emily Dickinson, but you were right about long dashes being so much fun.)
5.) My credibility gap between Marcotte and Sullivan lies in the respective presence and absence of the Blank Slate doctrine in the mind of each. Between the two, Sullivan shows more respect for the influence of evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics on our policy debates. Nineteenth-century racists and sexists thought those sciences were on their side; twentieth-century racists and other dangerous idealists (Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Woodrow Wilson) are exposed as fools by them. (And yes, the sexual revolution which Playboy heralded has sometimes had Blank Slate conceits of its own, although I still don’t think that that revolution has always been wrong.)
Marcotte’s compassion for me as a man is at best the compassion of the elephant for the merchandise in a china shop. Her intellectual clumsiness makes the analogy fair. I already know that I can’t trust her to see my fascination with Playboy as something other than a kind of brainwashing. I don’t need her “empathetic” missionary work to save my tribe from devil worship. If that’s her agenda, can anyone blame me for resenting it?
Baker is 39 now, and probably still smokin’ hot. Marcotte is pretty cute, in case that’s at all germane. But since she seems so militant about its possible effect on her credibility (“God knows someone like me could never just, oh, put up some erotic pictures of myself without losing all credibility forever amen”), I won’t post her photo here.
As a kind of disciple of a kind of rabbit totem, I’m especially delighted to share this satire with you:
I reported on Jessica Alba back in ye olden days of March 2006. Before that, I had explained why a relatively small market for male nudity is not prima facie evidence of patriarchal oppression. Hugh Hefner has since formally apologized to Alba. I don’t believe he was morally obligated to do that. But it may have shown class, nonetheless.
Researching this post today, I’ve rediscovered leftist feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte’s complicated relationship to reality. But that’s a subject for a future post.
Update, July 23, 2007, 9:38 a.m.: Better late than never, I credit Rabbit Bites with creating the video and Salon.com’s Video Dog for making me aware of it.
Hugh Hefner will reportedly marry Holly Madison, one of the “girls next door” on the reality television show of that name, before the end of the year. Researching the story at Technorati, I stumbled on another blogger who relies on evolutionary psychology to understand the Playboy phenomenon. In her blog for The Sydney Morning Herald, Sam and the City, Samantha Brett suggests that Hefner may be motivated by a male biological clock:
Now before you snort on your cornflakes at the thought of a men’s version of the internal timebomb (which forces single gals way into their 30s and 40s to become a little more desperate than their younger counterparts), let’s take a moment to look at the male side of the commitment coin...
Scientifically speaking, research has proven that men do in fact suffer from a ticking clock. According to Dr. Harry Fisch, director of the Male Reproductive Center at Columbia University in New York City and author of The Male Biological Clock, after men turn thirty, their testosterone levels decline at a rate of around 1 per cent per year. Fisch also reckons that men older than 35 are twice as likely to be infertile as men 25 and younger!
While other experts surmise that a more accurate age is around 40-50 years old, either way, confirmed bachelors with birthdays around the corner should start scouting around.
Yet despite the warnings, many men still prefer to continue on with a lifestyle of barhopping, bedhopping and boozing over leaving it all behind for a life of potty training and nappy changing. (Who wouldn’t?)
So what makes men change?
I still wasn’t sure. Yet I was almost knocked off my seat when my phone snorted the arrival of a text message the other day from a girlfriend telling me that her 30-something ex-commitment-phobic-boyfriend had finally gotten engaged. [ellipsis in the original]
The Playboy Blog has recently implied some other questions for EP. The magazine’s staffers in Santa Monica, just down the hall from studios where Playmates and celebrities pose naked, spend most of their free time gathered around a high-tech ant farm. Is the sort of man who reads Playboy usually a dork posing as a smooth operator? Or will female beauty always tend to scare men a little, like a bigger-than-expected bong hit? Maybe it’s a question for economics instead: did the same Hayekian spontaneous order that created Playboy also build a firewall around the hotties? Enquiring minds like mine want to know.
The eleventh-season premiere of South Park pertains to a dirty word I’ve used occasionally on this blog (with adequate sensitivity to context, I sincerely hope). (Hattips.) I’ll remind everyone that the satire isn’t as broad as you might think. But I’m more optimistic than Trey Parker and Matt Stone that whites and blacks can understand each other’s emotions. Regardless of skin color, all humans have pretty much the same circuitry in their brains. Individual genetic variation and unique life experiences create different emotional reactions to things, but only within certain parameters. In the cartoon, Token arguably—but not necessarily—lays a guilt trip on Stan.
“I’m always suspicious of men who want to meet Bunnies.” The January “Playmate News” section attributes these words to Playmate Cara Zavaleta without context (p. 171). I may be leaping to conclusions, but I’m offended if she means what I think she means. I assume she’s describing a higher level of caution than women appropriately have towards strange men in general. If I met her, would my heroine addiction creep her out?
Zavaleta’s attitude has me wondering about the effects of the progressive ideal of egalitarianism on the self-esteem of the gifted. I’m arrogantly guessing that she has had to spend most of her life pretending she’s nothing special to keep her beauty from alienating others. But her high midi-chlorianmillihelen count, her rare willingness to flash the entire world, and some non-genetic good luck have made her something quite special indeed.
My geeky Star Wars reference allows me to segue to my problem with David Brin’s hyperegalitarian screed against the “elitist, anti-democratic” saga. In a different context, Andrew Sullivan acknowledges inequality as a fact of life:
Of course, discussion of human natural inequality will always be sensitive. It’s a hard fact to absorb that some people will never be as intelligent as some others, or as musically gifted, or as mathematically skilled. Americans in particular hate the notion that there is some natural limit on what people can and cannot achieve.
But there is a distinction between moral and political equality for all—the bedrock of a liberal society—and unavoidable natural inequalities between human beings and, in a few narrow areas, between social groups. This cannot and should not mean that any individual should be prejudged or denied opportunity. But it does mean that some imbalances in certain professions may not be entirely a function of prejudice or bigotry.
Since Brin prefers “true science fiction” to space opera or superhero comics, I’ll say that my experience as a “gifted child” in the government school system—perhaps one of the “institutions” Brin would have us serve—reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” which begins with this paragraph:
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Who can predict the outcome when two logically challenged, self-righteous bigots go to war? Thanks to the intrepid correspondence of Hit & Run, this epic struggle has been thoroughly documented.
Orthodox feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte, who hates Catholicism and men, was fired from John Edwards’ presidential campaign, thanks in some significant part to Catholic League president William A. Donohue, who hates Judaism and gays. In hindsight, I think I see why Donohue was more likely to win. His Catholic education, complete with the seven deadly sins, probably gave him an edge in worldly wisdom over Marcotte and her doctrine of the noble savage. Not enough of an edge to actually know what he’s talking about, of course. Just enough to win between the two of them. (To be fair, Andrew M. Greeley has been rather well served by his Catholic upbringing.)
As I’ve said recently, American conservatives have a problem with sex while American liberals have a problem with money. Just as sex scandals encourage people who otherwise wouldn’t to talk about sex, any corporate malfeasance (no matter how small the consequences in comparison to government malfeasance) encourages some of us in the free, developed world to make a big show of feeling guilty about the relative misfortune of other parts of the world. As a libertarian, I strongly support the right to self-flagellate. (I should; I’ve done it.) But I resent the implication—as in this elaborate guilt trip from one of Marcotte’s colleagues at Pandagon—that libertarians simply don’t know or don’t care about the children who work in factories to make our clothes. We’re just pure evil, aren’t we?
Having politely declined the offer for years, Internet pinup queen Cindy Margolis said yes to a Playboy pictorial on her 40th birthday. All the dime-store social critics who accuse American culture or Western culture of uniquely associating female beauty with youthfulness should reconsider their view of our civilization as a raw deal for women. “If anything, contemporary America is less youth-oriented” than most other cultures, says Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. “The age of Playboy models has increased over the decades, and in most times and places women in their twenties have been considered over the hill.” (How the Mind Works, 1997, emphasis in the original, p. 485) “Yanomamö men [of the Amazon rainforest], for example, say that the most desirable women are moko dudei, an expression that when applied to fruit means perfectly ripe and when applied to women means between fifteen and seventeen years old. When shown slides, Western observers of both sexes agree with the Yanomamö men that the moko dudei women are the most attractive.” (p. 482)
Although the West has not undone the evolutionary psychology that makes aging women lose their sex appeal faster than aging men, its prosperity and technology have done the next best thing for women by making it easier to look young. Margolis has described her choice to give women half her age a run for their money as “a ‘you go, girl’ moment.” Indeed, only in the “you go, girl” West could Mamie Van Doren[not work-safe] remain a celebrated cheesecake model at 75. (Hat tip: The Playboy Blog.)
In the “Forum” sections of the October and November issues, Playboy endeavors to find its distinct place on the American political stage in 2006. “Playboy represents a silent purple majority unswayed by the news media’s reductionist red-state-vs.-blue-state story line.” (October, p. 45) But according to a Hindu proverb, it takes a thorn to remove a thorn: a reductionist story line can only be cured by a new story line. I’m discouraged to see so many pages filled with nothing but boring public-opinion stats. To have a distinct political voice, Playboy would have to spend some paragraphs making sweeping generalizations about human nature and the human condition. All political thought begins with this brazen step—although Playboy’s collegiate audience may have difficulty with it, since the Blank Slate and Noble Savage doctrines predominant in most universities discourage frank dialogue about it.
The problem is not merely academic, either. For lack of its own story to challenge the red-vs.-blue story, Playboy makes the embarrassing, easily avoided mistake of praising its “liberal” detractors:
The don’t-give-a-fuck spirit of blogging is alive and well at Pandagon, where three fierce, funny, pro-sex feminists disguise their almost frightening intellect with thick layers of attitude. Their favorite targets are blowhard moralists. (November, p. 60)
I can at least take pride in having scooped a national magazine’s in-house blog readers. I could have told them that the sort of man who reads Playboy is unworthy of Pandagon’s golden pussies. I, for example, am “not smart enough to really grasp that there is nothing that screams ‘Loser’ like a man who is obsessed with Playboy.” Ouch, snubbed by the prom queen. Presumably, a pro-sex feminist should be OK with every domestic arrangement among consenting adults. But contributor Amanda Marcotte admits to “a vendetta against Hef and his weird, creepy harem thing.” Who are the blowhard moralists here?
For my money, Virginia Postrel’s dichotomy between “stasists” and “dynamists” is the best alternative to the red-blue split. If Playboy adopted the dynamist view, putting special emphasis on its implications for sexuality, the magazine could more easily tell its friends from its enemies.
Update, November 26, 2006, 1:21 p.m.: In an email yesterday, Playboy assistant managing editor Matt DeMazza forwarded a message from one of his colleagues:
yes, we knew pandagon’s politics before we wrote about them. we even got a semi-gracious, somewhat confused acknowledgement from them after the list appeared.
we never even thought about featuring only friendly blogs in the list. what’s the fun in that? we wanted friends and foes so we’d be covering the political spectrum. (some of the right wingers weren’t as gracious as pandagon about being included). besides, how can we ever expect our enemies to give us a fair shake if we don’t give them one?
A fair shake in the form of an honorable mention is one thing. But why should Playboy, of all sources, call Pandagon a pro-sex nemesis of blowhard moralists? That praise is so undeserved, it’s obsequious.
brian423: we’re bored with you. Simple as that. Obviously, we’re not going to follow your link, nor are we going to visit your website.
You get your info from tainted, biased-against-reality, regressive/repressive sources.
As your religious institutions atrophy and crumble from lack of relevance in the 21st century, you’ll be left with nothing.
Unless you renounce your addiction, you’ll be on your own. But we do have a nice 12-step recovery program for you, if you’re interested.
Now, go back to your bibble-study. Your heaven is waiting for you...
Naomi
What did the author of Reflections on Playboy do to deserve this unlikely abuse? The post is about a 17–year-old woman who was easily persuaded to get into the parked car of a 38–year-old male stranger impersonating a police officer. She safely left the car a few minutes later, but not before giving him her address, phone number, and parents’ names. A comment penned by “reaper” called her a “dumbass.” Naomi more or less agreed, adding that only a Christian could be so stupid:
Fundie Alert: the next section will contain ideas that will cause extreme distress!
Blind, unquestioning obedience starts in church! Well, maybe in church-y families...
Twenty bucks say her parents were interviewed and stated, “God saved our daughter from that monster”, or something along those lines.
No, I didn’t google(tm) it, so that’s just a guess. But we all know how commonplace it is to thank him for “delivering from evil”; conversely, he never gets blamed for “delivering to evil”. Why is that?
Come on, xtians! This is right up your alley. Reminder: this is, for the most part, an atheist blog. So if we drag theism into the discussion of an Oklahoma mayor (whose wife posed “largely” nude on the Internets), why can’t we drag it into this topic? (The Rapid City SD mayor, arrested at the Iowa State Fair, did not meet our standards for blaming gaud...)
Naomi [italics and bold in the original]
I contributed this comment:
reaper, you’re blaming the victim.
Naomi, you’re placing blame on the wrong institution. Most likely, the young woman got in the car because compulsory schooling has led her to believe she is still a child. If you don’t believe me, please read my call for teenage liberation. (I thank TerraPraeta for making me aware of this post of yours.)
From that, Naomi jumped to the conclusion that I study the bibble, whatever that is. Despite its misleading title, she knew instantly that Reflections on Playboy is a “fundie” site. She already knows everything about all opposing points of view.
Where does self-righteousness come from? Religion per se doesn’t create it, or else atheists like Naomi wouldn’t show it. Some historians of philosophy blame Platonism, but I don’t buy that theory, either. The tragedy of Hippolytus, a polytheistic study of a self-righteous man, was first produced at about the time that Plato was born. To be so inspired, Euripides must have seen self-righteousness around him even then. “Indeed, the problem with Homo sapiens may not be that we have too little morality,” says cognitive scientist (and atheist) Steven Pinker. “The problem may be that we have too much.” My source for the quote—however tainted it may seem to Naomi—is “The Sanctimonious Animal,” chapter 15 of his book The Blank Slate. Whether or not they’ll admit it, atheists are just as capable of intolerant fanaticism as the rest of us.
Et tu, Reason magazine? At least one editor of America’s foremost watchdog journal against moral panics of all political stripes is in a moral panic himself over the intoxicating allure of organized religion. “Is the world mad or am I?” asks Tim Cavanaugh in response to a Tampa, Florida, woman’s conversion to Islam a few years after she lost eight relatives in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At least as far back as February, Cavanaugh has seen moderate religious faith as the gateway drug that leads to the harder stuff pushed by Al Qaeda. Doing so, he puts himself in the embarrassing company of evangelical atheist Sam Harris, who, according to a Reasonreview of one of his books, suggests with a straight face that we may have to nuke the religious fanatics before they nuke us. Playboy has published at least two essays by Harris, but that’s because Playboy has been an intellectually lazy refuge for several moral panics these days, printing rants against globalization, for example. I still have hope for my two favorite magazines.
“Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man,” said Thomas Paine. But Cavanaugh and other libertarians should think twice before nodding in agreement. Paine reverses the principled libertarian’s understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships between human behavior and the media. Blaming the violent passages of the Koran for terrorism is like blaming video games for violent crime, which Reason has had the good sense never to do. Perhaps, for all I know, Cavanaugh believes that religion deserves all or most of the blame for the world’s moral panics. But “The Sanctimonious Animal,” chapter 15 of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, has convinced me that they’re partly an unfortunate consequence of the wiring of the human brain. If that’s the case, then atheists aren’t immune.
One of the most regrettable aspects of a moral panic is the demonization of people associated with the thing feared. Scroll down from Cavanaugh’s post, and you’ll see an innocent woman smeared as a gold-digging opportunist by commenters who probably like to think of themselves as pro-choice on everything. But I think she deserves no blame at all for letting Islam trip the circuits for transcendent exaltation in her brain. She has that reaction in common with Osama bin Laden, but so what? Both of them breathe air and drink water, too.
(Thanks to your votes, this post finished in fourth place in Battle 4 of the Philosophy Blog War.)
“In all matters of opinion,” said Oscar Wilde, “our adversaries are insane.” Nevertheless, our adversaries are always driven by fundamentally understandable human emotions. Some empathy may be not only good karma but also good strategy in a political dispute. In that light, then–student journalist Sarah Ratcliff’s 1991 story on her encounter with the recruiters for Playboy’s “Women of the Women’s Colleges” pictorial bears careful study.
In an article Ratcliff wrote for the Mills Weekly at Mills College, reprinted in the San Francisco Examiner on April 7, 1991, but not available online, she credits the Playboy people with great seductive power. The Examiner titles her work “Bunny business: Playboy smoothies employ a complex support system to persuade women to take off their clothes.” Ratcliff is astonished to learn that Mills alumna Heidi Ellis has planned to pose for the pictorial—and to help publicize the recruitment effort, no less. Although Ratcliff has no intention of posing whatsoever, she needs to know how a woman from her very feminist campus could be talked into it. Her investigation takes her inside the belly of the beast, a photographer’s studio at Playboy Enterprises in Chicago, where she feels “violated and completely powerless” with her jacket removed, the top button of her blouse undone, and her slip and bra exposed while a man takes Polaroids. Of course, she refuses to take it any further. But before the fact—rather surprisingly—she fears being persuaded to go all the way. In a companion article by Joan Smith of the Examiner, she gratefully quotes her mother from a pep talk before the session: “Don’t let them get you naked. Remember who you are.”
There is a fascinating story here, and it’s not exactly what Ratcliff thinks it is. Why is she so worried that she’ll “forget who she is”? With all that she believes to be at stake for her integrity as a feminist, does she think she might momentarily forget to keep most of her clothes on? Why so little faith in her own free will? The Blank Slate curriculum at Mills College has taught her to blame her every trace of doubt or confusion about this matter on external “manipulation.” To be completely fair, Ratcliff describes some brusque, pushy behavior by male and female Playboy staffers trying to get her out of her clothes. Some other sources, like Leif Ueland’s book Accidental Playboy, corroborate this unfortunate side of Playboy’s corporate culture. The Playboy people give Ratcliff’s phone number to Heidi Ellis, whose desire to pose they reportedly hope will prove contagious. It backfires: Ratcliff not only holds firm but talks Ellis out of it. “I knew I was doing a big turnaround,” Ellis tells Smith. “I’d taken a lot of those courses at Mills, but it’s tough to maintain your ideals as a feminist when you go out into the patriarchal world and Sarah reminded me that there are people who care about those things.” But to call it manipulation is to stretch the term beyond its restricted meaning in a liberal democracy, where justice almost always presumes men and women to act out of free will. Otherwise, you’re condescending to save people from themselves.
Naturally, this means I have to acknowledge Ellis’ final choice as her own. Blaming her change of mind on feminist propaganda would be the same condescension in reverse. I must say I’m insulted, though, by the feminist assessment of men’s ability to put images of women in the context of common sense. “No man is going to seriously read text discussing the degrees of feminism next to my bare breast,” says the born-again feminist Ellis. I’ve noticed the fact that some women are Playmates and some are politicians or scientists, and the apparent contradiction hasn’t made my head explode. Maybe I’m a little smarter than those Mills courses imply. I can be momentarily distracted by a bare breast (or whatever), but this blog should show that I can’t stop thinking about the kind of stuff Ellis assumes I have no interest in.
Let’s let everybody be right. There’s no inherent cowardice in fearing literal or figurative seduction, which is always somewhat risky. There’s no inherent disgrace in being seduced or seducing, which is not the moral equivalent of rape and, if we’re patient with the phenomenon, can teach us a great deal about the human condition. There’s no inherent hypocrisy in ambivalence about seduction, as when Playboy’s female director of communications is shocked when Ratcliff asks whether she herself would pose. Despite some of the more utopian rhetoric of the sexual revolution, most of us will always be a little bit prudish. I know I am.
Most Americans are culturally deprived for never having seen the British sitcom Blackadder. In the show’s third season (its third “series,” as the Brits say), Rowan Atkinson plays Edmund Blackadder, butler to King George III’s eldest son, the Prince Regent (Hugh Laurie, who now plays the title character on the medical drama House). In one episode, Edmund loathes having to accompany his extremely gullible master to the theater. “The problem is, he doesn’t realize it’s made up,” explains the butler to his assistant. “Last year, when Brutus was about to kill Julius Caesar, the prince yelled out, ‘Look behind you, Mr. Caesar!’” Criticism of the mass media very frequently assumes your critical-thinking skills and mine to be scarcely better than the prince’s.
Pornography incites rape. Violence on television causes violence in reality. Song lyrics can drive teenagers to suicide. Advertising makes us buy things we don’t need. Our government is corrupted by unfettered funding of political campaigns by the wealthy (as opposed to, say, chronic bad judgment among the electorate). All of these notions implicitly take media consumers for mindless dupes. “Liberals and conservatives are as tight as Beavis and Butt-head in agreeing that consumers of popular culture—the very people who make it popular—are little more than tools of the trade,” observed libertarian journalist Nick Gillespie in 1996. “Joe Sixpack and Sally Baglunch—you and I—aren’t characters in this script. Just like TV sets or radios, we are dumb receivers that simply transmit whatever is broadcast to us. We do not look at movie screens; we are movie screens, and Hollywood merely projects morality—good, bad, or indifferent—onto us.”
The Journal of Popular Culture has recently published a fascinating study titled “Tough Women in the Unlikeliest of Places: The Unexpected Toughness of the Playboy Playmate” by University of Louisville sociology professor James K. Beggan and University of Richmond psychology professor Scott T. Allison (vol. 38, no. 5, 2005, p. 796-818). Unfortunately, the Prince Regent Hypothesis influences their analysis:
As counterintuitive as it might seem, Playboy magazine represents a unique means of socializing within the collective psyche of men, a new definition of femininity that includes, as a subtype, the tough woman. Playboy is an especially effective change agent because it appears embedded in an ideology consistent with dominant male patriarchy. As such, it is seen as representing the interests of men. Thus, when Playboy presents images of Playmates with tough elements, it encourages men to assimilate nontraditional images of women. In this fashion, then, Playboy acts as an effective means of altering stereotypes about women. (p. 814)
I don’t deny that I’m potentially capable of leaping to false conclusions about any given woman because of my assumptions about women in general, or that problems for justice can arise if millions of men do this. But Beggan and Allison go too far in describing my mind as a passive receptacle for images of gender in the media. I am not a bimbo! If I don’t believe I can survive a fall from a high cliff just because I’ve seen Wile E. Coyote do it, I should be able to figure out, through my own brainpower, that the Playboy centerfold doesn’t represent most women in physical appearance or temperament.
The remarkably androgynous quality in Playboy’s male and female ideals raises interesting questions for psychology, social history, and aesthetics. Beggan and Allison deserve much credit for describing the androgyny in detail for an academic journal. But their essay would have benefited from acknowledgement of a fact that Gillespie put in italics: “The audience has a mind of its own.”
This is “TV Turnoff Week 2006” according to the leftist crypto-puritans at Adbusters Ballbusters. The other night, Jimmy Kimmel rightly congratulated his viewers for ignoring it.
In my journey from liberalism (in the distinctly American sense of the term) to libertarianism, I’ve learned to my frustration that crypto-puritanism abounds on the left. While many on the right are prone to moral panics about issues like same-sex marriage, emergency contraception, and medical marijuana, various subgroups of the left are prone to moral panics about television, consumerism, fast food, tobacco, biotechnology, cosmetic surgery, alternatives to public school, ethnic humor, or sexual speech in the workplace. All these panics exhibit faulty scientific or political reasoning, and they’re all potentially dangerous. If you’re against genetically modified food, please explain why, on at least one occasion, activists on your side would have preferred to see victims of a natural disaster starve to death rather than receive emergency food shipments.
Since many, perhaps most, of these left-wing moralists aren’t traditionally religious, religion doesn’t deserve all the blame for the human tendency to let moral reasoning degenerate into crude moralism of one kind or another. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, in the chapter titled “The Sanctimonious Animal” in his book The Blank Slate, makes an eye-opening argument that humans have a natural tendency to moralize—and that they should make some effort to resist this tendency in themselves. I credit Playboy with encouraging this effort on some fronts, although its justification for the effort has sometimes been flawed by the influence of 1960s romanticism.
Baker is 39 now, and probably still smokin’ hot. Marcotte is pretty cute, in case that’s at all germane. But since she seems so militant about its possible effect on her credibility (“God knows someone like me could never just, oh, put up some erotic pictures of myself without losing all credibility forever amen”), I won’t post her photo here.