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
March 9, 2006
Hipsters can be square about breast implants
The Guide To Getting It On! is, without a doubt, the ultimate sex book. We’re not talking textbook-style, junior high health class, “Miracle of Life” stuff here. You won’t find sex continually referred to as “coitus” or “copulation.” You won’t find diagrams that resemble the charts and posters hanging in a gynecologist’s office. You won’t find a lecture on what is morally right or wrong.
—from a review posted on the publisher’s website
Oh, no? I found a lecture on page 537: “Here in America men with plastic brains are attracted to women with plastic chests. What a perfect combination. What a sad perception of womanhood. [fourth edition, 2004]” Whether or not author Paul Joannides would admit it, his tirade on the “sheer ridiculousness” of breast augmentation surgery is pure moralizing.
The book bills itself as a hip, progressive sex manual for generations X and Y. For those who seek tattoos or body piercings, it advises caution but politely refrains from calling them stupid. Joannides, like many left-leaning hipsters, is a body-modification hypocrite.
Moralism breeds intellectual laziness, which is why so many intelligent people believed the greedy lawyers and scientifically illiterate journalists who said that silicone breast implants pose an impermissible risk to women’s health. Joannides could have researched this topic a little better. For example, he could have read this article by Virginia Postrel on the real sociopolitics behind the breast-implant controversy.Labels: AesthEth, ArtPic, CosSur, Femi, Lib, MorPa, Sc, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:30 PM
February 20, 2006
What do Danish cartoons and apologias for cosmetic surgery have in common?
Dangerous fanatics will do anything to censor them.
Until today, my friend Keshia T. Smith kept a fascinating blog called Fixing Humpty Lumpty, an eloquent defense of her choice to undergo cosmetic surgery to correct the effects of her pregnancies. The other day, she used a search engine to learn what people were saying about her blog and found lots of self-righteous vitriol, like, “What do you think you’re teaching your children with this kind of behavior? Why did you have to reproduce? Couldn’t you have just removed yourself from the gene pool instead?” and, “I think the tackiest thing is how she lists the cost of each procedure. There are starving children in this world that could have had a year’s worth of meals for that. Nice.” Smith copied and pasted many such comments in a post for her blog. Using an alleged and trivial breach of netiquette on Smith’s part as a pretext, one of the sources of the hateful comments has blackmailed her into issuing a forced apology and deleting her blog. Her husband has received instant messages threatening to ruin his election campaign by spreading lies about him. An anonymous commenter at one web site has threatened to publish sexually explicit photos with her children’s faces pasted on. In an email, Smith told me that some of her fellow bloggers have been intimidated into silence, privately apologizing for their failure to stand up for her in public.
Be it known to all that Reflections on Playboy has a firm policy of remembering its friends and refusing to be cowed.
Beyond any doubt, all this thuggery was inspired by hatred of cosmetic surgery. The URL that formerly contained Smith’s blog now contains anti–cosmetic-surgery images and slogans. If there’s a political lesson here, it’s that left-wing puritanism can go just as batty as the right-wing variety.Labels: CosSur, MorPa, OthBlo, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:36 PM
This student at Louisiana State University is pictured much more candidly on page 112 of the October Playboy, for its “Girls of the Southeastern [Athletic] Conference” pictorial. In her shot for the current issue, I see self-confident good taste. It’s a cliché to call Playboy’s nudes “tasteful,” but I choose my written words with care.