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

“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]

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 4, 2008

The year before I was born, in a city thousands of miles away: the Jedi Bunny of my dreams

I was 16 when the 35th-anniversary issue of Playboy (January 1989) came out. Thanks to the Playboy Cyber Club retrospective on the 35-anniversary Playmate hunt that appeared the other day, I felt that age again. However, I want to be sure not to overlook an accidental juxtaposition of two mythic pop-cultural elements that I noticed in the other “magazine classic” that has just been released: “Bunnies of New York” (May 1971).

Emily Brown, at the Club’s Living Room buffet above, is a stay-at-home who writes fairy tales.
Photography by Pompeo Posar

At least once on That ’70s Show, Donna scolds Eric about his habit of making gratuitous Star Wars analogies. I refuse to take the hint. Sorry. Those analogies are too useful and too much fun. The photography team, the model, and the caption writer generate a mood of such noble, tranquil, dreamy solitude that, despite the anachronism, it’s easier for me to believe that the shiny cylinder at the Bunny’s hip is a lightsaber than a coin dispenser. As enticingly beautiful as Emily Brown is, a man who disturbed her fairy-tale reverie by making a crude pass would be as doomed as Actaeon after his transgression against Artemis.

Artemis and Aphrodite save me from Playboy Enterprises’ copyright lawyers in 2008!

Labels: CC, Cintv, Lit, RI, RS, TaoGlam, Theme

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:01 AM

December 3, 2007

Sacramento “Local Talent” at the Cyber Club: I’m glad I’m updating my wardrobe these days

Crystal Carmel (above) looks just as good as you expect in copyright-protected high resolution at the Playboy Cyber Club. Gradually through December, three of her sisters of the northern Central Valley of California will be presented. So far, so good.

Labels: CC

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:00 PM

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

September 12, 2007

Make Terri Lynn Farrow a Playmate!

This student at Louisiana State University is pictured much more candidly on page 112 of the October Playboy, for its “Girls of the Southeastern [Athletic] Conference” pictorial. In her shot for the current issue, I see self-confident good taste. It’s a cliché to call Playboy’s nudes “tasteful,” but I choose my written words with care.

Virtually every image Playboy has ever published is less shocking and disgusting than some other representation of the naked female form that most men and women could easily imagine (or even create and have displayed in an art gallery somewhere). Playboy Enterprises’ workshops of model recruitment, photography, and photo editing work so consistently well that tastefulness is embarrassingly consistent in the product. (Even so, the allegedly ruthless corporate machine frightens away women whose hearts aren’t really set on it.) Embarrassingly, I say, because some seem to think that Playboy must earn its status as art rather than mere entertainment by shocking the bourgeoisie. But my political tribe, libertarianism, begs to differ. We’ve been building a consensus that “art” and “entertainment” are interchangeable terms. Like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and to a lesser extent, professional sports, Playboy may be a victim of its own success in bringing sensual pleasures to the masses within reliable—but perhaps aging—perimeters of good taste. Since sports seems to be the least hated of the four institutions by those who would dismiss Playboy centerfolds as kitsch, I’ll try to explain Terri Lynn Farrow as something like a Joe DiMaggio or Muhammad Ali: one who can express beautiful individuality through a medium of mass entertainment with conventions and clichés already familiar to millions through decades of exposure. Whatever the medium under discussion, not everyone can do that!

To follow my argument completely, you’ll need a paid subscription to the Playboy Cyber Club. That link is not work-safe, of course, and neither are many that follow in this post. I first noticed her in the fall 2001 College Girls newsstand special. But later on, I was thrilled to find six minutes of video of her tryout for the New Orleans “Casting Call” (QuickTime, RealVideo). This woman is charming, quirky, polite, daring, and gritty. Unless you hold to the rigid formulas of some (not all) feminists for how a self-respecting woman behaves toward men, you’ll notice this combination of traits, remember it, and love it. She satisfies almost every possible definition of all-American by claiming Swedish, German, French, Jewish, and African-American blood. The headshot in this post comes from her January 27, 2003, Cyber Girl of the Week gig. But in light of the aesthetic choices she made in presenting her body again more recently, she deserves to go all the way to Playmate of the Month at least.

I don’t dislike breast implants for the sanctimonious reasons that some others do. If you can’t agree with me on this, please have the integrity to say “I hate saline!” instead of “I hate silicone!” The former compound deserves the blame for the balloon look of visual adult entertainment in the 1990s. The American silicone market was largely destroyed by pseudoscientific lawsuits that feminists, among others, widely supported out of moral panic. Those lawsuits arguably did more to restrict women’s individual choices than that Marxist demon of good intentions, Catharine MacKinnon, ever can.

But for purely aesthetic reasons, I want a greater variety of sizes and shapes of breasts on the centerfold proper. As it happens, Farrow impresses me by still not having implants of any kind—if the photo on newsstands now is a reliable indicator. The long hair that falls over her petite breasts is an obviously dyed, platinum shade of blond. The October 2007 Playboy won’t tell you this, but her modestly trimmed pubic hair is that darker shade of blond naturally, according to the video. Farrow must have figured that guys would notice the juxtaposition: hair dyed a nature-defying color over nature’s own breasts. In the twenty-first century, Farrow has something in common with the men who ogle her Playboy picture. She can have the complex, Rabelaisian pleasure of understanding the quirky nuances of her own sexual behavior in light of evolutionary psychology. Like the heliocentric astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo and the evolutionary biology of Darwin and Wallace, this paradigm shift frightens and disturbs even as it opens up new possibilities for dialogue on perennial human issues like entertainment and the arts.

If Farrow can be anybody’s muse in any such indirect manner (with all due modesty!), she deserves a centerfold.

Labels: ArtEnt, CC, CosSur, Femi, Lib, Lit, MorPa, NSS, OnVi, OthBlo, PM, Sc, Sp, TaoGlam, Theme, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:39 PM

July 18, 2007

Garcelle Beauvais pictorial: what can brown do to a guy?

The Haitian-born actress and August 2007 Playboy cover girl is a truly deserving candidate for a celebrity pictorial. Her youthful 40-year-old body holds a rare and devastating abundance of both womanly curves and Amazon muscle tone. In an alternate timeline, she could have been a widely celebrated exotic dancer. As it is in our version of history, she now confesses to an underage stint serving guests of the New York Playboy Club as Bunny Garcelle in the mid-1980s. Luckily for all, photographer Stephen Wayda knows how to chronicle by suggestion what might have been.

In most of the photos, Wayda complements the brown tones of the model’s skin, eyes, and hair with plenty of brown in her surroundings (on a ship, by the way, but that’s not so important). As is often said in aesthetic debates about color versus black and white in motion pictures, a scarcity of colors tends to accentuate line, shape, and form. The pinup genre has generally done well by using full color. But devices like this can help photography rival sculpture [not work-safe] as a loving expression of shape. (As the last link shows, we men never change. We’ll always love triplets.)

It’s not the only such trick this pictorial uses, either. By first visual impressions, a completely naked woman might just be a nudist on family vacation. But a mostly naked woman adorned in something very showy and elaborate is obviously out to drive the fellas a little crazy—and is therefore more likely to do so. In one pic, she stands with her back to the camera at a full-length (except for pelvic-level) mirror. Not only do the curves running symmetrically from her shoulders to her thighs identify Beauvais as the avatar of the muse of the Stradivari family. Not only does she tenderly rebuke our greedy eyeballs with an “oh, you dog” look through the mirror. She ensures total victory by wearing a tiny, elaborate, neo-Egyptian set of chains around her chest and midsection. In some photos, she has lost the chains and replaced them with rhinestones glued all over her body from the neck down. This is advanced weaponry, folks.

Erotica, though made just as historically necessary by the human nervous system as music, may always have more difficulty traveling across subcultures of sexual morality in a diverse society like the United States. A very sexual musical form like rock and roll can easily outpace erotica at its almost mildest. Still, in its own way, cheesecake photography may turn out to be as formally complex and precise as tonal harmony in Western classical and popular music. And if it’s such a joy to let Johann Sebastian Bach mess with our heads, why not let Hugh Hefner do it, too?

Since bootlegs of Beauvais’ exclusive Cyber Club shots are all over the internet already, I would feel like a nerd if I didn’t post one of them. I give you the one that Playboy Enterprises’ lawyers will least mind me stealing, of course:

Labels: AgeMaj, CC, Celeb, Mus, Sc

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:36 PM

May 8, 2007

Vote for Cyber Girl, guys’ girl, and homegirl Nikki Fiction

I’m embarrassed that I didn’t support Sacramento’s own Daniella Bae last month, when she could have used the extra publicity in the competition for Cyber Girl of the Month. If it ever came up in a conversation, it would be awkward. Damn.

Fortunately, it’s not too late for the mysteriously named Nikki Fiction, who could use your vote right now:

Cool tattoos aren’t Nikki’s only outstanding characteristics: “I have a high I.Q. and I think like a man,” she says adamantly. Intelligence is her number one criterion when it comes to dating guys. “Men, your biggest sex organ is your brain—not your penis,” says Nikki. “Use your brain; that’s all we women really want from guys.”

Message received. If Fiction can’t make it to the Playboy Mansion for the Marijuana Policy Project benefit on Monday, the day she turns 28, she can do the next best thing by taking a huge birthday bong hit and imagining an end to cannabis prohibition. More smart people need to do that.

As I write this post, the “coming soon” teaser photo on her personal web site is a bit too stylized for my taste, with its extreme highlights and shadows. But it’s the prettiest image I’ve yet seen of her.

Some day soon, I’ll evaluate Playboy’s Sacramento “Casting Call.”

Labels: CC

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 2:34 PM

April 13, 2007

Another Playboy model may be punished for her courage

24-year-old Adriana Dominguez, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School, took her clothes off for the Playboy TV series Naked Happy Girls. (The Playboy Cyber Club has extra video footage of its own, but a paid subscription is required.) The New York Daily News reports:

“I wanted to do something a little crazy before I graduate and do become a lawyer...do something kind of out of character,” Dominguez said with a grin as she posed for photographer Andrew Einhorn inside his friend’s DUMBO [“Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass”] apartment.

“Lawyers can be boring,” [she] later added.

But no one will ever call Dominguez buttoned-up.

....

When she made the erotic video, Dominguez, a California native, seemed unfazed by the idea that it could wreck her future.

“I’m not that shy, so it wouldn’t bother me if, say, the opposing counsel has seen these pictures of me. I wouldn’t care,” she told Einhorn after he asked her if she had any concerns.

“When we shot, she knew what might happen down the road if these pictures might get shown to people in her field,” Einhorn told The News.

“But she had this self-confidence to not let that bother her. I don’t think that she felt that this would be negative in any way to her career,” he said.

The sexy stunt could have dire consequences for the would-be lawyer.

If she applies for the New York State Bar this year, Dominguez could face tough questions from the Committee on Character and Fitness, which examines the personal character of future lawyers.

“It may have an effect. It’s a possibility in the worst-case scenario that the person does not get admitted,” a committee representative said.

And potential employers are sure to discover Dominguez’s striptease with a quick Internet search.

Except for her naughty past, Dominguez has plenty to recommend her: she had a fall internship with the domestic violence unit of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office and served as treasurer of her law school’s Legal Association of Activist Women.

This blog takes the admittedly romantic view that the sheer boldness of this woman’s Playboy gig is cause for celebration in itself. Fortunately, her career in law may still have a fighting chance, as libertarian blogger Eugene Volokh explains:

I would surely not advise would-be lawyers—or almost anyone who doesn’t really really need the money—to pose naked in Playboy TV series. Rightly or wrongly, such behavior may make employers and clients think the less of you.

This having been said, it seems to me that it would be a clear First Amendment violation for a state bar to consider this in the character and fitness evaluation. The government, even in its capacity as licensor, generally may not penalize you for exercise of your First Amendment rights; and making sexually themed videos is part of your First Amendment rights just as is making other videos (at least unless the videos are child pornography or are such hard-core porn that they fit within the category of obscenity).

As usual, the most disappointing angle of the story is some feminists’ sloppy cause-and-effect reasoning about pornography and violence against women, as when they question Dominguez’ integrity as a feminist. (Does that kind of feminist ever get embarrassed about being arguably more uptight than The Wall Street Journal?) The trick to preventing violence is consistently punishing it. Will the New York legal establishment punish Dominguez for her nonviolent peccadillo, or will it recognize her intelligence, ambition, and self-confidence as powerful weapons against violence?

Update, June 24, 2007, 4:25 p.m.: If you followed the former link to the free video clip very long after I published this post, you may have seen a woman other than Dominguez. Today, I discovered that the URL contained a video of somebody else and deleted the link.

Labels: CC, Femi, Lib, MorPa, NaBr, OnVi, Ptv

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:16 AM

December 20, 2006

Profiles in naked courage

Female boldness makes me swoon. The section [not work-safe] of the Playboy Cyber Club devoted to the August 2002 “Women of Enron” pictorial includes videos about the making of the pictorial. Playboy staffer Debbee May tells of one model’s moment of truth: “Well, when the girl gets naked for the first time, it’s a scary moment for them—although with Taria [Reed] we had a light situation and [the photography crew] had to go [out of the room briefly] and I just looked at her and I said, ‘Get naked!’ And she did.”

Reed tells her side of the story: “Is she kidding? That’s what I was going to ask her. I thought Debbee was being funny, but no one else laughed. So, why hesitate? You know, the more you hesitate, the worse it is.... It’s like jumping into a pool.... So, I just was like, O.K.....” At this point in the interview, she mimes a quick, unceremonious shedding of her clothes, then laughs. Later in the video, Reed says, “I have a lot of respect for the women who do choose to do Playboy, because it kind of shows a higher standard for yourself if you’re interested in showing yourself nude to the world. I have become a woman who’s very secure with herself. I spent a lot of time always wondering, what would people think about me? And I’m finally starting to realize as I get older, that, you know, it really doesn’t matter. So now I’m starting to become very secure with myself. And I’m happy with that, because it makes me want to do more instead of being scared to jump out and try new things.” In a similar vein, fellow model Janine Howard says in recollection of her own shoot that “I could have allowed myself to feel vulnerable. However, I just pictured everyone else in the room in their underwear. So I was fine with that.”

Thus does Playboy feed my heroine addiction.

Labels: CC, NaBr, NSS, OnVi, Theme

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:36 PM