Site Meter Reflections on Playboy

October 3, 2008

“The Force” to be reckoned with is Bai Ling

If you’re a heterosexual man and you don’t know how to admire small breasts, you need to get a clue already, you ungrateful philistine. In aesthetic terms, those stacks of fatty tissue are essentially jewel cases for the nipples, anyway. Why not build a repertoire of variety of taste? Pretty adjectives like dainty, svelte, and lithe were made to describe beauty like Bai Ling’s as caught by photographer Stephen Wayda for the June 2005 Playboy.

Bai (no condescension here: surnames come first in Chinese) is known as an incorrigible pleasure-seeker, and her life story demonstrates the heroism that a pleasure-seeking disposition is capable of. Her past as a mental patient in the People’s Republic of China reveals intelligence, sensitivity, and self-respect. The Chinese have a great legacy of philosophy and literature, but only a worthless bore could tolerate the repression of that society now. Sometimes, people show valor by going mad. Americans who medicalize madness in all its forms—Dr. Drew Pinsky, anyone?—should look in the mirror and ask themselves how Maoist they are.

Arguably, the entire universe hums constantly with the sound of divine energy. Hinduism symbolizes this as the Sanskrit syllable “Om.” The drone of a didgeridoo has been said to symbolize it. When I’m stoned enough, I’m convinced that the hum of a lightsaber in Star Wars, the invention of sound designer Ben Burtt, serves equally well to symbolize it. Cartoon Network’s run of Star Wars–themed programming these days (the Family Guy tribute, the Robot Chicken tribute, The Clone Wars) encourages me to pay tribute to Bai, a Jedi knight for liberated sensuality.

Earlier Star Wars geekery on this blog:
!lavitsef mlif esrever–ni–sraW ratS a evah s‘teL .derob m‘I
The year before I was born, in a city thousands of miles away: the Jedi Bunny of my dreams
Escape from Thanksgiving—to the world of Star Wars fan films

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:53 PM

August 24, 2008

Ten-second (positive) movie review: The House Bunny

This is what I’ve just memoed to my Netflix friends:

[FOUR STARS]

Legally Blonde meets Revenge of the Nerds. Hugh Hefner gets a good deal of screen time—and he’s a totally decent actor. Anna Faris is superb!

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:59 PM

August 4, 2008

Reason.tv: Ida Ljungqvist knows what marijuana is for

At 1:10 in this video of a Playboy Mansion party, the March 2008 Playmate shows her good judgment and good taste.

I was there for that party. Click here for the embarrassing details of my encounter with Miss March.

The hot brunette in the video embed freeze frame is mistress of ceremonies and Playboy model Adrianne Curry (February 2006 and January 2008)—technically not a Playmate, though not for lack of beauty, as you can see.

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:55 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 world

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 8:43 PM

January 26, 2008

AskMen.com celebrates the women of Playboy France

I proudly present this unsolicited email I received the other day:
Hi,

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Johnny Testa, and I am writing to you on behalf of AskMen.com, a unit of FOX Interactive Media. As the world’s largest men’s web portal, AskMen.com is a free lifestyle content provider that attracts more than 5 million readers each month.

I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that AskMen.com recently published an article entitled ““Top 10: Playboy France Centerfolds”” that I think would be of particular interest to your readers.

Here’’s the linking URL:

http://www.askmen.com/fine_living/top_10_250/255_top_10.html

Please don’’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions as to how our two sites can work together in the future.

I look forward to hearing back from you.

Regards,

Johnny Testa
AskMen.com
Thank you, Johnny. Regrettably, the AskMen article has no nudity. But it’s agreeably mind-boggling to think that the rich, elaborate history of the American edition of Playboy is paralleled by the histories of the numerous foreign editions. Trippy! Countless galaxies of fashion, fiction, and gorgeous ladies!

Pedantic nerd that I am, I can’t resist the urge to say that most, maybe all, of the women who made the AskMen top-ten list were never on the centerfold proper, even though they’re described as “centerfolds” in the article title. Having browsed the French edition of Playboy on newsstands, I notice that it imitates the U.S. edition by reserving the Playmate du mois title (i.e. the monthly centerfold) for budding non-celebrities. I hope I don’t annoy my new friends at AskMen, but I just don’t know how to turn off the nerd switch. Oh, well. Sorry about that.

(And since I’ve already made a nuisance of myself, I’ll go ahead and point out that the current Playboy Mobile campaign has the 2007 and 2008 Playmates of the Year mixed up. Sara Jean Underwood became the 2007 PMOY last year. What is she, chopped liver?)

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 7:01 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 Fey

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 9:21 AM

December 1, 2007

Are you a Playmate at heart? This song is for you.

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 8:09 AM

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.

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:59 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:

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:36 PM

July 3, 2007

Is Sally Satel the Sophia Loren to Kerry Howley’s Jayne Mansfield?

If you already know who all four of those people are, come to Sacramento immediately. You and I will have a blast.

Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and right-wing pundit, is the woman on the right in this photograph from May 9 showing part of a panel debate on the subject of free markets in human organs:

Kerry Howley, a senior editor of Reason, the political magazine that’s almost always right about everything, speaks into the microphone. I give thanks for the picture to Reason’s blog, where libertarian gentlemen find themselves continually addled by Howley’s multilayered charms.

Judge for yourself the parallels between that picture and this one from April 1957:

Italian movie star Sophia Loren can’t help noticing the plunging neckline of February 1955 Playmate Jayne Mansfield. (June 29 was the 40th anniversary of Mansfield’s death in a car accident at 34. Contrary to the morbid rumor, she was not decapitated.) I admit it’s juvenile, and maybe a bit sexist, to wish to imagine Satel having an attitude towards Howley similar to Loren’s towards Mansfield. But at least it’s a good launching point for wondering out loud about Howley’s attitude towards her inevitable role, perhaps ambiguous in its rewards, as an intellectual sex symbol.

How does an ambitious and talented political journalist feel about having to go through life so dark Irish whatever*, with such a silky voice? (In this NPR audio clip, she speaks second.) Is she flattered, embarrassed, annoyed, or some combination of the three by the kind of attention those traits get? Sorry, folks, but I wouldn’t ask so nosily and creepily if I didn’t love women so much. I’m just doing my thing for this particular lifetime, like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. (If Hindu literature scares you, just rent The Legend of Bagger Vance. Matt Damon more or less plays Arjuna in it.)

*August 9, 2007, 3:05 p.m.: What can I say for my audacious guess except that everyone’s a little bit racist? (Everyone’s a little bit prudish, too, by the way.) In an excellent article for Reason, she volunteers only this on the subject: “I am ambiguously ethnic, in turns thought to be Asian or Italian.”

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:17 PM

May 4, 2007

Playboy refuses to apologize for admiring youthfulness

...[A]fter all of my complaining about recent playmates, 2006 has been an awesome year for them. Cassandra Lynn's perfect fakeness, Nicole Voss' old school beauty, Jordan Monroe's, Janine Habeck's & Sarah Elizabeth's 80's centerfold bodies (big real or realish boobs & hips!) Best year IMHO for a long time. One big "but" though, they kind of crossed the line with Sara Jean Underwood. Playboy isn't Barely Legal. Sara looks all of 13, if that. C'mon, she's posing with a teddy bear in one shot! Yes she's undeniably cute, but as my girlfriend said, she looks like a 12 year old Anna Kournikova.
—fellow blogger Robert Paulson, in a comment here

My friend is presumably disappointed by the news that Miss July 2006 has been crowned the 2007 Playmate of the Year. But if it’s not necessarily evil for me to admire 17-year-old Thora Birch’s breasts in American Beauty, then it’s not necessarily evil for me to admire the January 1958 Playboy centerfold of 16-year-old Elizabeth Ann Roberts (borderline work-safe: it’s not the centerfold itself). Underwood can’t help looking younger than 23 with her freckles, small stature, agreeably dainty physique, and fashionably hairless vulva. So what?

Having said that—and having suggested 14 as the legal age of majority—I think that Playboy Enterprises shows prudence, good taste, and compassion in setting 18 as the minimum age for its nude models. Adolescents of both sexes deserve some time to figure out their own sexuality before they make relatively irreversible decisions about it. But Underwood is now a wooomaaan, ba-bum-tshh, ba-bum-tshh.

By the way, the AP entertainment writer erroneously refers to some women as “former” Playmates. Would anyone call Muhammad Ali a former legend?

Update, 3:14 p.m.: Now is a good time to recommend Jacob Sullum’s review of Dian Hanson’s The History of Girly Magazines. It’s worth noting that a trouser-wearing hoochie mama of 1903 shocked and excited men by implying, in part, that “she was stepping outside her Heaven-ordained role as hand-maiden to man.” Every feminist wants women to have this prerogative, yet I would be surprised if I learned that the trouser models could count on more than lukewarm support from the bourgeois feminism of the day. Wouldn’t you?

Hanson mistakenly identifies “the very first pubic hair to appear on the American newsstand” as the work of Penthouse in 1970. Although Playboy’s centerfold proper showed it for the first time with Miss January 1971 (and 1972 PMOY) Liv Lindeland, a non-Playmate pictorial of Paula Kelly of Sweet Charity showed it in the August 1969 issue. But let’s not snicker at Sullum for not knowing that.

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:59 AM

March 13, 2007

An Australian blogger after my own heart

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.

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:12 PM

November 30, 2006

Playgirls of the Western world

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.)

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:00 PM

January 3, 2006

Awww, she’s shy

In her January pictorial, sports reporter Lisa Guerrero shows a little less skin than some of Playboy’s fans might have hoped. “What a let down for me to open my issue (just got it today) to find only B&B... boobs & butt! [ellipsis in the original]” grumbles one participant of the Playboy Mailing List at Yahoo! Groups. “If you are going to pose for OFM [Our Favorite Magazine], it should be above & below the waist, front & back!”

But for me, the glass is half full. Guerrero’s refusal to go full-frontal helps me remember what a privilege it is for us to see her in Playboy at all. Her daring and her modesty are two sides of the same coin.

Update, November 5, 2007, 1:30 p.m.: Better late than never, here’s Guerrero as the cover girl:

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:37 PM

October 27, 2005

Teri Polo’s charming ambivalence

“All women’s dresses are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.”—Lin Yutang

The actress Teri Polo appeared in a celebrity pictorial in the February 2005 Playboy. Shortly before the issue reached newsstands, she was a guest on Ellen DeGeneres’ daytime TV talk show.
DeGeneres: Was that weird, to be naked, standing there? I mean, if you’ve never done it before, it would be weird to just be standing there getting your picture taken.

Polo: I had, um, a surprisingly easy time of it. [chuckles awkwardly and winces, then has a half-affected look of worry] I don’t know what that says, but—it was fun....
I’m fascinated and charmed by the complex interaction between exhibitionism and modesty that this bit of dialogue reveals. Not only have I been privileged to see Polo’s beautiful body, but I’ve caught a glimpse of an internal drama that gives the privilege an extra layer of meaning. What a lucky man I am.

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:55 PM