“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.)
At Hit & Run, Radley Balko reports that the Federal CommunicationsCommunist Commission has fined ABC $1.43 million for showing an “indecent” episode of NYPD Blue five years ago.
Be sure to consult your physician before viewing this YouTube of the offending portion of the show, in which a woman’s bare buttocks are clearly visible:
FCC indecency investigations begin when the agency receives a viewer or listener complaint about a program and can drag on for months or years. The lightly staffed FCC enforcement bureau must go up against broadcasters, which have more legal and financial resources to battle the proposed fine and have a vested interest in dragging out the proceeding. After the enforcement bureau makes a finding, it must be voted on by the FCC’s five commissioners, who were occupied with cable television and wireless spectrum issues through much of 2007.
Never mind that the FCC is violating ABC’s First Amendment rights under a crypto-Marxist rationale of “public ownership of the airwaves.” Never mind that the government is acting on behalf of a tiny number of Church Ladies to punish a television network for placing adult content in a characteristically adult—and very popular—evening drama. Never mind that the authority of the FCC to impose the fine at all depends shamelessly on a time zone technicality (only ABC affiliates in the Central and Mountain zones are being fined, because that’s where the show ran at 9 p.m. instead of 10). In spite of all this, the public-morality bureaucrats are the underdogs in this fight.
Defenders of the FCC policy seem to fear that, some Saturday morning, TV networks might suddenly replace kids’ cartoons with pornography if they weren’t threatened with fines for indecency. On this particular issue, conservative culture warriors resemble the left-wing Adbusters crowd with their talk of amoral corporate greed. But networks have no more economic incentive to make stupid programming choices than a supermarket does to put wasabi in my milk.
If you’re as pissed tinkled off as I am about the FCC, don’t miss this unforgettable song from Family Guy. (I thank local friend Matt for encouraging me to link to the song here.)
Addendum, January 31, 2008, 9:32 a.m.: Since I’ve placed this post in the “Non-Playboy Hotties” category—and since the scene was obviously shot without a body double—I feel negligent if I don’t mention the name of the actress, Charlotte Ross.
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.
If principled, freedom-loving Californians act quickly, they can register as Republicans in this closed-primary state in time to help Paul become president. On the immigration question, he sinks to panicky pandering, and I disagree with him on the admittedly challenging ethical question of abortion. But he is certainly the best Republican candidate this year.
Unlike Andrew Sullivan, for instance, I’ve never liked John McCain. He has always creeped me out. But I’m certainly glad to see a conservative with Sullivan’s cachet choosing Paul over McCain. If conservatism as a distinct political movement isn’t completely overshadowed soon by Reason-style libertarianism, it will only be because intellectual giants like Sullivan come up with a convincing enough “yes, but” to keep the two philosophies separate in enough people’s minds.
With all due modesty, I’m not even sure he’ll do it, though. We’ll see.
I was relatively green as a writer back then, but in two years, I’ve seen the need for only two minor corrections to my post for Halloween 2005—and one of those was before Reflections on Playboy was a month old. I hope you find it very scary sexy, kids.
But whatever you might do to get scared this Halloween, kids, don’t frighten yourself into a moral panic. The best part of the intellectual dimension of Playboy’s legacy will surely be a tendency to resist moral panic. But at the time I write this, not one single post at the official Playboy Blog mentions moral panic at all. Through Google, I found precisely one comment on the subject—and that was me under a pseudonym. You’re welcome, salaried keepers of the Playboy legacy.
Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy”[not work-safe; online transcription not yet complete] of the 1960s predates the sociological term “moral panic” (coined by Stanley Cohen in 1972, the year I was born). But as a phenomenon, moral panic goes at least as far back as circa 428 B.C.: the date of the first production of the Greek tragedy Hippolytus (stress the second syllable, so that it almost rhymes with “hippopotamus”), by Euripides. Since Euripides must have seen self-righteousness around him to be inspired to write it, and since Plato was born around the same time as the first production, we know we can’t blame Platonism—for example—for self-righteousness in general. Since Euripides lived in a polytheistic society, we can’t honestly scapegoat monotheism, as the Sam Harris types do. Blaming either of them for a perennial human tendency is—guess what?—just another moral panic.
By the way, whether you leave a comment at the 2005 post or this one, I’ll read it promptly through my automated email notification and publish it. Note also that a Blogger.com account is completely optional—even if you want to leave a URL with your name. After all, there’s nothing scarier than giving up a little of your privacy forever, kids! Ah-ooo, or whatever a vampire is supposed to say, I guess.
I publish this post in the spirit of the unlikely but historically interesting dialogue between Playboy and mainline organized religion in the 1960s. Although I make no excuse for religion as the term is understood by, say, Osama bin Laden or Jack T. Chick, I believe I can defend a certain sophisticated kind of religiosity against the newly emboldened generation of militant atheists, like Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens.
The state of the art in this militancy is represented by this blog post at Jewcy.com (courtesy Reason.tv) inspired by a debate between atheist Hitchens and theist Dinesh D’Souza (unabridged video). First, Josh Strawn explains his problems with D’Souza’s arguments. Then he reveals (accurately) that atheism wasn’t fully spoken for in that debate:
But to Hitchens: why not school people in precisely how the human mind does work at this point in the argument? It certainly does obey laws—laws so material that the notions of subjectivity and consciousness on which the theist’s argument rest get blown to smithereens. If a human subject with a “mind” who makes ethical decisions that transfer to his or her immortal soul suffers a brain injury impairing his or her interpretive systems, ability to read human emotions (key to the brain response we know as ‘compassion’) then what’s happened to the soul? If I can remove the part of a person’s brain that enables ethical judgment, have I not surgically removed their moral soul? This connection between what the religious call the soul and what is known about material brain functionality severely undermines the theist’s notion of the “I” that makes choices that bear on “my” eternal soul. If I’m a neuroscientist, I can plug your immortal soul into a machine and map it’s [sic] electricity.
Descartes believed that somewhere in the brain there was a driver’s seat for the soul—the site where “you” make the decision to act, whether morally or immorally. But the “I” that so many take for granted is known to be nothing more than the brain’s interpretation of its own complex functioning. Multiple things occur in the brain that the “I” isn’t aware of and couldn’t control no matter how hard it tried. The notion of heaven, this place where all the “I”s will someday go because of things they did or didn’t do, is not commensurate with what is known about the brain. The human “I” in other words is little more than the transcendentalizing of an evolved brain phenomenon. If one accepts evolution, as D’Souza does, then one must also accept that these brains once had no ability to conceive of themselves in this way, much less to glorify it so. And so grows a new problem for the theist—not the atheist—to explain, one that isn’t unlike the ensoulment debate regarding abortion. Whence did the soul of the “I” come into being in terms of human evolution? And how can something be transcendent if it can be surgically removed?
Many have charged the new atheists of wearing out an old argument and passing off as if its [sic] new. But these questions are completely current. Francis Crick proclaimed the brain to be the great frontier of the 21st century and it has only been with the advent of computers in the last 20-30 years that the intensive acceleration in learning has taken place. Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, and Dawkins are not beating dead horses by the name of Russell or Nietzsche. They are pushing back the post-everything world’s increasing tendency to accept bullshit. And their rebuttals to this trend stand on foundations that aren’t hundreds or thousands but mere tens of years old. Hitchens could have been a bit more forward with some of this information. D’Souza could stand to be a bit more aware of it. But hey, the best bullshitters are the ones who believe their own bullshit.
Strawn foolishly tips his hand by mentioning René Descartes. Descartes’ framing of the mind-body problem has undeniable flaws. But this does not mean that the essential problem he faced is not a real problem for philosophy, even now. To prove it, I quote at length from How the Mind Works, by an especially smart atheist, Steven Pinker:
If we could ever duplicate the information processing in the human mind as an enormous computer program, would a computer running the program be conscious?
What if we took that program and trained a large number of people, say, the population of China, to hold in mind the data and act out the steps? Would there be one gigantic consciousness hovering over China, separate from the consciousnesses of the billion individuals? If they were implementing the brain state for agonizing pain, would there be some entity that really was in pain, even if every citizen was cheerful and light-hearted?
Suppose the visual receiving area at the back of your brain was surgically severed from the rest and remained alive in your skull, receiving input from the eyes. By every behavioral measure you are blind. Is there a mute but fully aware visual consciousness sealed off in the back of your head? What if it was removed and kept alive in a dish?
Might your experience of red be the same as my experience of green? Sure, you might label grass as “green” and tomatoes as “red,” just as I do, but perhaps you actually see the grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as red.
Could there be zombies? That is, could there be an android rigged up to act as intelligently and as emotionally as you and me, but in which there is “no one home” who is actually feeling or seeing anything? How do I know that you’re not a zombie?
If someone could download the state of my brain and duplicate it in another collection of molecules, would it have my consciousness? If someone destroyed the original, but the duplicate continued to live my life and think my thoughts and feel my feelings, would I have been murdered? Was Captain Kirk snuffed out and replaced by a twin every time he stepped into the transporter room?
What is it like to be a bat? Do beetles enjoy sex? Does a worm scream silently when a fisherman impales it on a hook?
Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some other conscious entity moving in with you?
Beats the heck out of me! I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight; neither does any finding in neuroscience, once you clear up the usual confusion of sentience with access [to information] and self-knowledge. [1997, p. 145-147]
With all the intellectual humility due a subject like this, I dare propose the beginnings of a solution. The philosophical problem of sentience almost literally stares us in the face from every mirror, no matter how hard some thinkers try to wish it away. If sentience is an undeniably real phenomenon that can never be identified as the direct consequence of any particular event at one place and time—not even the workings of a human brain—mustn’t it necessarily follow that sentience somehow characterizes the entire universe all at once?
D’Souza, to name only one, might have reasons to reject my question as a suitable defense of his sense of religion. For all I know, he might even call it an heretical argument leading to pantheism and animism. But as I said, my idea won’t satisfy every religious person’s sense of the value of religion. And, at the same time, if a philosophical debate drives me to the conclusion that the entire cosmos has a mysterious awareness of itself resembling mine, it seems a mild and forgivable anthropomorphism to call that consciousness God.
Of course, I don’t give myself credit for a brand new idea, either. From what little I understand of him, I wonder if Spinoza, for example, has already been there and done that. Anyway, my hat is in the ring, too, for what it’s worth.
Explaining the virtues of both personal and economic freedom to friends with high-speed Internet connections has never been easier. Reason.tv, the online video department of the renowned libertarian magazine, has opened up shop.
Their first editors’ pick is this YouTube video of ABC newsman John Stossel sharing his libertarian wisdom with an appreciative crowd at the Blue Velvet in Los Angeles:
Scott Imler, a United Methodist minister in West Hollywood, would rather regulate herbs in hell than serve liberated health care customers in heaven. He was willing to appreciate the logic of letting people use cannabis as a healing herb at their own discretion—until too many of his sacred cows were slaughtered by the alleged scandal of medicine’s commingling with capitalism at California’s medical marijuana dispensaries. Americans will stop worrying about health care soon after they learn to think calmly and rationally about it. Imler proves that point in the negative.
The Supreme Court has upheld the DEA’s right to go after dispensaries, no matter what state law might say. And even one of the key proponents of medical marijuana says things have gotten out of hand.
“It’s just ridiculous the amount of money that’s going through these cannabis clubs. It’s absolutely ridiculous,” says Scott Imler, a minister in the United Methodist Church who has long been active in promoting medical marijuana.
Eleven years ago, he was working to pass proposition 215, the [statewide] ballot measure that legalized it. Today, Imler has second thoughts.
“The purpose of proposition 215 was not to create a new industry. It was to protect legitimate patients from criminal prosecution,” Imler says.
The aim back then, reflected in television spots, was for a highly regulated system in which licensed pharmacies would dispense medical marijuana to the seriously ill. Proposition 215’s backers had people with AIDS, cancer, and glaucoma in mind.
“What happened when we were writing it was, as you can imagine, every patient group in the state and they all have their lobbies. You know, the kidney patients and the heart patient. Every patient group wanted to be included in the list,” Imler recalls. “And so we didn’t wanna get in the position of deciding what it could be used for and what it couldn’t be used for. We weren’t doctors. We weren’t scientists. We weren’t researchers. We were just patients with a problem.”
Imler says they were forced to make the proposition vague.
So the law voters passed mentioned not only cancer and AIDS but “...any other illness for which marijuana provides relief.” A decade later, if you’ve got a note from a doctor, you can buy medical pot for just about any imaginable condition.
“Let me just ask you plain and simple. Is there this proliferation because people are simply using, quote, unquote, medical marijuana, to get high?” Safer asks.
“I think there’s a lot of that. And I think you know, a lot of what we have now is basically pot dealers in storefronts,” Imler says.
Many businesses calling themselves dispensaries or cannabis clubs advertise in alternative papers, as do doctors around the state who will give you a quick once-over and, for a price, a permit to buy.
Regrettably, Safer doesn’t see through the phony scandal of adult citizens purchasing an amazingly safe herb for the difficult to explain but very real benefits of getting high. I credit Imler with intellectual humility when he says, “We weren’t doctors. We weren’t scientists.” I wish he would take that reasoning a little further. Why doesn’t Imler notice the alarming discrepancy between the scientific and political processes? Why doesn’t he then apply the same standard of intellectual humility to politicians (and the health care workers they have forcefully deputized) that he does to himself?
If I could, I would deny any doctor or pharmacist the prerogative of vetoing my request for any medicine. Generations of government growth have taught many Americans to think of health care (and education) as things that come down from the government like manna from heaven. But the laws of economics are nearly as dependable as the laws of physics. It always sucks to be relatively poor. It entails relative deprivation in every worldly good and service, including health care. Meanwhile, free markets regulated minimally to avoid coercion, fraud, and gross threats to public safety are the historically proven way to make all goods and services continually better and more available. California’s medically sound Proposition 215 is a model for taking health care in general away from slow-witted bureaucrats and back to the people.
In other words, I am the final authority on whether getting high is beneficial to my health. Rev. Imler prattles onward:
“Most of these cannabis centers are buying their marijuana off the black market. They’re dumping millions of dollars into the criminal black market,” Imler says.
“Marijuana—what? Coming in from Mexico or wherever?” Safer asks.
“Some of it is,” Imler says. “Some of these places sell hashish, which comes in from the Becca Valley in Lebanon.”
“What you’re suggesting is that the traditional black market or part of the traditional black market is now legal?” Safer asks.
And looking back on a decade of controversy, Rev. Scott Imler concedes that good Samaritans with good intentions weren’t enough. He argues it’s time for the federal government to step in and legalize and properly control medical marijuana.
“Until that happens, we’re gonna have what we have now, which is chaos,” he says.
Those are the last words of the 60 Minutes story. For some reason, what Imler calls chaos is supposed to be scary, like a movie presented by Count Floyd. Unless Imler can justify his fear of that kind of chaos without regurgitating hoaxes about marijuana, his newfound hypocrisy ought to diminish his reputation in the medical marijuana community.
Go fuck yourself, Reverend! You’re a Falwell in sheep’s clothing!
One seemingly trivial fact becomes increasingly significant to me the more I think about it and the more I compare these guys [in their thirties] with kids their age who didn't grow up in [utopian communes]: Not one of them owns an iPod.
—“The Ranch,” Playboy, October 2007, p. 136
In his article on hippie communes, their founders, and the people raised in them, David Black sees no need to finish his thought on what’s so bad about iPods, taking it for granted that his readers oppose “consumerism” as much as he does. I wonder what he thinks of the iPod sported by the October cover girl.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time I’ve seen Playboy contributors do the trendy but hypocritical Adbusters thing by laying a guilt trip on somebody else’s material pleasures. Like liars, sanctimonious people have difficulty keeping their stories straight. Watch Black congratulate his own generation for having no anxieties about becoming poor, and then, in the same paragraph, warn of global economic doom:
The baby boomers were the first generation to grow up out of the shadow of the Depression. Since they had no fear of going without, they embraced voluntary poverty. Today this concept has metamorphosed in our new overheated economy into “voluntary simplicity,” a trend bearing a hint of the you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit mentality: I’ll reduce my expectations before the bubble pops and we’re all left with enforced simplicity, which used to be called poverty.
A different world from the dream of the 1960s. [p. 133]
Although I wasn’t alive to see that decade, I know that Black’s memories of it are rather selective. Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling 1968 book The Population Bomb forecast inevitable global famine in the 1970s and 1980s that would kill hundreds of millions all over the world. This is fairly typical of the many Malthusian predictions that have failed to come true since then. Still, Black needs a reason to sneer at people who shop at Costco and admire Ronald Reagan. The proper term for his attitude may be “voluntary despair.”
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.
I don’t know what that means, but it’s part of the unsolicited advice I received late last night in an email from fellow blogger Kyle Foley:
think of pornography’s lies. the pornographer would have you believe that the come-hither smile of the naked model is real, that she truly values your mysteries and your minerals, that she will comfort you in times of agonizing club-defeat and will radiafy your health with devotion and sunshine care. in reality, since the pornographer and the stripper aim for silver, she employs her sparklo-smile solely your dollars to gain, your emotions nil, your dreams mute and will then move on to the next lust-sloth once your cash has been taken. another lie that the soft-core pornographer propagates is that the photograph of the naked femme stares only at you, that her bliss-treasures are only for you to enjoy, that she is your prize, your moon, your ocean and your lighthouse, that you have worked hard, purified yourself of metallic habits, have rendered yourself clean and fit for responsibility. is it healthy to engage any entertainment that builds its foundation on the lie? does it truly have your interests at heart? or is it much more likely that it wants only your capital, your finance and your silver?
You’re absolutely right, Kyle. We need a zero-tolerance policy towards illusion in entertainment. I’m suing a local movie theater because its “motion picture” was actually a rapid succession of still pictures. How did they get away with defrauding us for so long?
Seriously, Kyle, how dumb do you think I am as the sort of man who reads Playboy?
I would love to see President Bush apologize to India for the tasteless bigotry of the Christianists who disrupted this morning’s opening prayer in the U.S. Senate (video). For the first time in its history, the Senate had invited a Hindu chaplain to lead the prayer. Although Rajan Zed invoked “the transcendental glory of the Deity Supreme” to help the senators “strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world,” the hecklers knew the work of the devil when they saw it. Why waste time studying comparative religion when the Holy Spirit and the inerrant Bible tell you who the troublemakers are?
For Christianists, the main problem with Hinduism seems to be its alleged polytheism. Religious scholar Huston Smith would surprise them by pointing out that the multitude of gods and goddesses in Hindu iconography represent only one Supreme Being:
How is [devotion to God] to be engendered? Obviously, the task will not be easy. The things of this world clamor for our affection so incessantly that it may be marveled that a Being who can neither be seen nor heard can ever become their rival.
Enter Hinduism’s myths, her magnificent symbols, her several hundred images of God, her rituals that keep turning night and day like never-ending prayer wheels. Valued as ends in themselves these could, of course, usurp God’s place, but this is not their intent. They are matchmakers whose vocation is to introduce the human heart to what they represent but themselves are not. It is obtuse to confuse Hinduism’s images with idolatry, and their multiplicity with polytheism. They are runways from which the sense-laden human spirit can rise for its “flight of the alone to the Alone.” [The World’s Religions, 1991, p. 34]
Libertarians and psychonauts, take note: in another of his books, Smith argues in qualified favor of the religious use of psychedelics.
Fox News is unintentionally putting The Onion out of business. Try not to laugh, but roving gangs of armed lesbians are now America’s greatest threat to domestic tranquility:
At Hit & Run, Radley Balko explains what you’ve probably guessed by now about the accuracy of the story.
I wish that everyone smart enough to dismiss this particular panic would follow Balko’s sage advice on another web page and give up all their moral panics. For example, there is no “obesity epidemic,” you fools. Super Size Me is the new Reefer Madness (original title: Tell Your Children).
Obviously, I made up the second half of the post title. I only wish I could say the same for the first. The July issue’s “The Dark Side of the Summer of Love” by Frank Owen should have been called “The Journalistic Dark Side of Frank Owen.” His account of Dr. David E. Smith’s experiences founding and running the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic 40 years ago misses the real story with a pattern of thinking doomed to repeat drug-war history.
Neither Owen nor Smith takes any care in distinguishing behavioral cause and effect when describing the hustlers, thugs, and con men who destroyed that San Francisco utopia—and who also, for some reason, tended to like crystal meth a lot more than the general square or hippie population. If he won’t try meth, can Owen at least do math? Crunching his numbers from page 128—“Today 10.4 million people have used crystal meth at least once in their life. There are an estimated 257,000 addicts.”—reveals that more than 97% of those who dare to try the stuff don’t have the irresistible urge to try it again. Hmm. Could it be that the dangers of a substance associated with certain unsavory people (accurately or inaccurately, it shouldn’t matter in terms of good civic logic) have been overstated in a spirit of moral panic? Does that ever happen? Unless you’re seriously worried about the public threat of, say, chocolate addiction, you have to admit that addictive potential does not justify prohibition of any drug, anyway. If you don’t respect the difference between correlation and causation, you deserve to drown by leaving your mouth open in a rainstorm and you just might be dumb enough to do it.
Immediately after undermining his own point of view with those stats, Owen places the blame for meth’s “exploding labs, ...overdoses, [and] ...battles with law enforcement” on what happened way back in 1967. The fact that prohibition itself causes or exacerbates all those problems in 2007 is completely overlooked. The article can’t even keep its story straight on the kind of person that crystal meth turns you into. Dangerous sociopaths preying on the innocent during the Summer of Love aren’t the only meth lovers. It’s also “a substance we know today as the favorite high of hillbillies, right-wing preachers and suburban moms.” (p. 58) Fortunately for Owen, most citizens don’t notice when the official story about a drug suddenly changes—or when groups of other citizens presumably out of earshot are demonized.
The annual benefit parties for the Marijuana Policy Project that I’ve had the pleasure of attending are consistent with the best of Playboy’s socially libertarian legacy. The top-billed article of July, on the other hand, depresses me with its intellectual laziness. I need to light up my bong and sip some Peruvian coca tea.
Edward Sanchez of Dearborn, Michigan, probably feels naked after resigning his policeman’s uniform in disgrace. About 90 minutes after he and his wife ate brownies laced with marijuana he had confiscated from criminal suspects, he made a hilarious 911 call:
Sanchez: I think I’m having an overdose and so is my wife.
Operator: Overdose of what?
Sanchez: Marijuana. I don’t know if it had something in it. Can you please send rescue?
Operator: Do you guys have fever or anything?
Sanchez: No, I’m just, I think we’re dying.
Operator: How much did you guys have?
Sanchez: I don’t know. We made brownies. And I think we’re dead. Time is going by really, really, really, really slow.
(Hat tip: Pot TV.) The unabridged audio of the phone call is that good all the way through, starting with an audible “before I wake...my soul to take” while Sanchez waits for the operator to pick up. Towards the end, he asks her to verify the current score of the Red Wings game to make sure he’s not hallucinating. I wonder how he knows he’s not hallucinating her answer to his question at that point. This guy was really, really, really, really unqualified for his essential job as a gun-toting addiction counselor who makes surprise house calls.
Dirty Sanchez faces no criminal charges, except in the court of public opinion. Stand back when Adam-12 takes his first bite of the Fruit That’s So Good It’s Evil, for you don’t know how big his trip is going to get.
Update, July 11, 2007, 10:48 a.m.: Jacob Sullum, who served our public discourse very well by writing Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, has discovered a music video inspired by the 911 call.
Update, September 8, 2007, 7:05 p.m.: For an alternate Dirty Sanchez reference, see this music video from Carlos Mencia.
...[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.
Besides being female, the Grinchette is a clever variation on Mr. Grinch. Just as the Leader has a big brain to challenge the Incredible Hulk’s big muscles, the Grinchette has a tiny brain to rival her male counterpart’s tiny heart. You know her better as Connecticut lawmaker Toni Boucher, whom a friend of mine, budding journalist Jennifer Abel, has made a fool of by letting her go around in circles with her argument that people who use marijuana medically deserve prison. I wish the Savage She-Hulk would kick the Grinchette’s ass. Hubba hubba!
Update, 12:36 p.m.: Jenny McCarthy, whom the Wikipedia page on She-Hulk mentions as hulking out in a TV comedy sketch, is the 1994 Playmate of the Year. Six degrees of separation, huh? Watch it on YouTube.
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
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.