“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.)
Charlie Brown of the overrated comic strip Peanuts is a pussy, not an antihero. Every time Lucy Van Pelt moves the football out of the way before he can kick it, I want to say to her what Palpatine says to nine-year-old Anakin at the end of The Phantom Menace: “We will watch your career with great interest.” In the spirit of admiration, not resentment, of female strength, let’s watch some giantess videos.
YouTuber Jesper611 admits he didn’t make this video, but we can all thank him for uploading “Annah Grows”:
Dude, Where’s My Car? ends with Miss October 1999–turned–2000 Playmate of the Year Jodi Ann Paterson as a giantess. Unfortunately, the music video of this scene to “I Feel the Earth Move” by Carole King has disappeared from YouTube, so I’ll make do with the scene straight from the movie (thanks, Megagrey):
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.
Playmate of the Month articles are usually written by magazine staffers. But once in a great while, a foldout model with a knack for writing pens it herself. Juliette Fretté writes very well—although the phrase “dying my hair” should have been “dyeing my hair.” Am I a hopeless nerd for being distracted even for a moment from a beautiful woman by a misspelling?
Then again, maybe I’m not a nerd but a bully. Even my Lord and Savior can’t get a break from me. Jesus cracks me up with a goofy verb* in A Course in Miracles: “Your bridge is builded stronger than you think, and your foot is planted firmly on it.” He never sinned, but He got a B in English (and Aramaic, presumably).
Fretté’s essay ends thus:
Now more than ever, I can explain why a feminist would appear in Playboy: because it’s fun. It’s creative. And I feel like it. And that adds to my joy and empowers me as a human being.
What’s more, it freshens my perspective on my book. Ah, yes, my book—the climax to this entire journey!
Yeah, I had to end with a bang. I hope it was as good for you as it was for me.
But the biggest cultural watershed in a very watershed Playmate spread has to be an item in her list of turnoffs: “being a pussy.” This is not contempt for the female anatomy but a qualified appreciation of, um, cockiness as an androgynous virtue. Camille Paglia has fairly criticized the feminist movement for its grim obsession with words. But in Fretté, womankind shows itself to be the co-creator of language rather than its victim.
And praise Jesus, she’s well builded, too.
*Update, June 7, 2008, 3:42 p.m.:Yeesh! Jack T. Chick had better not have the right idea about Jesus after all.
As a consequence of her own choices at the time, Heidi Ellis almost made it to Playboy’s April 1991 “Women of the Women’s Colleges” pictorial, but not quite. The unsolicited email I got from her last month was so articulate and so relevant to what I’m up to at this site that, with only minor editing, I’m proud to present it here as a guest essay.
Hi Brian,
I just found your blog. It’s interesting that people are still debating the issues surrounding this event; it seems to have happened another lifetime ago.
My actions and the events of 1991 must seem completely absurd when re-framed in the context of present day social politics. At that time, the older feminist school of thought—as outlined by my professors at Mills and the authors from our course readings—were largely condemning and repressive when it came to physical representation of women. It was as if we were selling out just to wear lipstick, have long, “girly” hair, or shave our legs. This may sound petty in present-day politics, but believe me, it was a venomous issue. I’m not trivializing the battle before my time; the women before me worked very, very hard to make gains for women, paving the path for future generations of women today. But the context of the struggle evolved. Today we afford the trivial flexibility of individual expression that goes with the hard-won, concrete gains in the workplace. Wearing lipstick, long hair, and high heels are no longer viewed as symbols of the shackles of our oppression. My playful and defiant reaction was to agree to pose for Playboy when asked shortly after graduation.
While additional revelations led me to change my mind after two weeks on the road with Playboy serving as a spokesperson for the pictorial, the greatest force at work was this: I felt shamed and guilt-tripped into changing my mind. I was blasted all day long on CNN and in the press by self-declared feminist men and women who protested my perpetuation of “dangerous images of women” which led to “abuse” and even “the dismemberment of women.” Talk show hosts and audience members, both male and female, scorned my stupidity for playing into the hands of evil, evil Playboy men—both from the context of feminism and from fundamentalist prudery. Meanwhile, my Alma Mater declared that I was sullying an entire women’s educational system. Hello??? That’s a bit of pressure to put on a girl who wanted a little approval. I simply didn’t want all that negative attention, so I asked Playboy not to publish my photos. I went on to speak publicly on TV and at universities in a dialogue that evolved into the well-accepted Beauty Myth. I met Naomi Wolf and we began to scratch at the surface of an issue which today is widely accepted; I’m thrilled that young women today are aware of the illusion of perfection in the media. Hopefully, this awareness releases every woman from the pressure to measure up to an unrealistic ideal. But the rash of plastic surgery makes me think not.
In 1991, I was thrilled to measure up to the approval of such strict societal standards of beauty. As for Playboy, they were eating up the free publicity resulting from dogmatic feminist disapproval. Playboy would have been disappointed if feminists didn’t protest; but I knew better than anyone else that Playboy would get the old-school feminist knee-jerk response they wanted. Today Playboy might want to consider having a pictorial on born-again Christians and they’ll get the same guaranteed publicity from fundamentalists. Or picture Playboy announcing auditions for a pictorial on African-American women from Howard University and then you might understand the ensuing dialogue and fury that surrounded the events of 1991.
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
Does Thanksgiving force you to endure the company of a bunch of bozo relatives? I can feel your anger. It makes you stronger. Everyone who wastes your time during this extended weekend is now an enemy of the Republic. Do what must be done, Lord/Lady (SINISTER WORD). Ignore your next of kin without mercy. Watch these online videos instead of talking to them.
Pink Five is not to be underestimated. Like the illegal Mexican immigrants who become a feature film crew in Bowfinger, she appears politically incorrect at first but turns out rather elegantly empowered.
Update, October 2, 2008, 1:13 p.m.: The new video embeds of Pink Five’s host, Atom Films, start automatically when you load the web page. Since visitors to my blog deserve better than the noise pollution of all four of her films playing at once, I replaced the embeds with a poster JPG link.
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.
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.
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.”
...[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.
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.
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 Newsreports:
“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.
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?
Sure, ’tis nothing at all like the morn in spring. (Finish the song parody yourself.) “Pornography may lead to masturbation much as a novel or film may lead to tears or laughter,” says the Feminists for Free Expression website. Of course, FFE intends this analogy as part of a political defense of pornography. But I’ve found another, ahem, use for it: to help understand the economics (and aesthetics) of pornography.
I don’t have the background in economics to answer the question of journalist Brian Doherty and economist Tyler Cowen, “Why is there (still) a market for porn?,” in the language of that discipline. But I’ll point out that porn doesn’t fuel masturbation in the exact sense that gasoline fuels a car. Comedies, tearjerkers, romantic narratives, and dirty pictures earn fans by having socially complex but agreeable effects on consumers’ nervous systems. (Remember that all solitary behavior has social implications, because all secrets are fragile.)
If economists still can’t rid their heads of the admittedly hilarious image of millions of Glenn Quagmires beating off surreptitiously in their bachelor pads, I invite them to replace that image with the implied, off-screen female masturbation scene about 35 minutes into I Wanna Hold Your Hand, an underappreciated 1978 farce that does for the psychology of fandom what Dr. Strangelove does for the psychology of war. In a moment of solitude and moral weakness, Nancy Allen’s character falls under the spell of the Beatles’ early romantic narratives.
There now, isn’t that image more fascinating economically?
What do The Atlantic’s Jon Zobenica and National Review’s John Derbyshire have in common? Probably without knowing it, both of them invoke George Orwell’s essay “The Art of Donald McGill” to justify their moralistic views on sexuality. If he knew I existed, Zobenica might think I appreciate his use of that reference to describe Playboy as essentially the lightsaber to Maxim’s blaster. (Star Wars analogies can go surprisingly far here. I recently told an attractive female friend that she has Jedi powers over the weak-minded, i.e. most of us guys.) But on the contrary, I take his essay as an unintended lesson in humility for all us Playboy freaks.
Zobenica wants us to know that he regards his youthful Playboy-ish days with embarrassment:
Looking back, I realize it’s not only the clothes that make me laugh. The restaurants we went to were “classy” at best. And none of us particularly enjoyed those New Orleans strippers (one looked like a rheumy sharecropper’s daughter). But there was, in all of it, a deliberate effort at contemporary maturity, an effort that was encouraged by Playboy magazine. Maturity was the key to that great Playboy Club of life—your all-access pass to the jumping realm of adult pleasures and preoccupations. We may have come of age clumsily, but no one doubted that it was the thing to do.
Where did those days go?
One need not be clairvoyant or trained in counseling to suspect him of misremembering those days. If the clothes, restaurants, and strippers were really as unimpressive then as he now says they were, why didn’t he ditch that scene immediately? Zobenica’s boomer exceptionalism makes Playboy a lonely voice for the inherent moral superiority of “commitment” in a lad-mag wilderness of Peter Pan complexes. He scolds an article in FHM for urging its readers to stay single, naïvely thinking that this message distinguishes the magazine from Playboy. I’m no fan of Barbara Ehrenreich’s crypto-Marxist feminism, but I give her credit for documenting Playboy’s original concept as the Maxim of the 1950s in her book The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Although I’ve found more aesthetic value in Playboy than in Maxim or FHM, I cannot honestly claim moral superiority for it as a consequence. Oscar Wilde warned against conflating aesthetics with ethics. To paraphrase that brilliant aesthetician, there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral men’s magazine. Men’s magazines are well published, or badly published. That is all. However sincere and deeply felt, my wish for Playboy to outsell the competition has no more ethical weight than my support for any given sports team.
Besides, what’s so bad about the pro-bachelorhood message? It may be simply rational for a heterosexual man to put little of his energy into romance these days. In 2007, many American women still see their relationships with men as fixer-upper projects. And isn’t it interesting that both conservatives and establishment feminists find ways to justify this condescension? The preferences of the male of the species are widely presumed wrong whenever they conflict with a female agenda. Thus, for example, are paternity suits not recognized as a hypocritical restriction of male reproductive choice in a society that is slowly learning to tolerate abortion. Women protest to liberate themselves; men whine to avoid responsibility—even though the U.S. hasn’t been functionally patriarchal since 1920.
(Hat tip to Playboy assistant managing editor Matt DeMazza, who made me aware of Zobenica’s article by email.)
Update, 3:23 p.m.: A subsequent email:
Well, you took away from it something a little different than we did (we see it as a nod to our more-mature approach to being a man vs. the frat boys of Maxim/FHM/Stuff, etc.), but hey, any way to get more people to read it is fine with us!
In other words, this blog is proudly the Muslim equivalent of kosher. I have recently traded links with a Muslim woman in Minneapolis. While she chooses to wear a head scarf in public, she agrees with me that a woman has the prerogative to either conceal or display her body. I like to think that our friendship follows the example set by Playboy in the 1960s, when it engaged organized religion in a surprising amount of dialogue. Sadly, the magazine appears to have lost much of that open-mindedness. These days, it publishes essays by fanatical atheist Sam Harris, who essentially says about all religious people what drunken Mel Gibson said about Jews. But after all, how can I not believe in a Higher Power after seeing Playboy?
If I date infrequently, am I a wimp? At least one of the manly men at The New York Times would say so. Thanks to Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, I’ve discovered an NYTreview of a new anthology of fiction and essays from <
Playmate of the Month articles are usually written by magazine staffers. But once in a great while, a foldout model with a knack for writing pens it herself. Juliette Fretté writes very well—although the phrase “dying my hair” should have been “dyeing my hair.” Am I a hopeless nerd for being distracted even for a moment from a beautiful woman by a misspelling?
If you like Shakespeare in Love, you’ll appreciate this variant on it.
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.
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.
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.
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.