This student at Louisiana State University is pictured much more candidly on page 112 of the October Playboy, for its “Girls of the Southeastern [Athletic] Conference” pictorial. In her shot for the current issue, I see self-confident good taste. It’s a cliché to call Playboy’s nudes “tasteful,” but I choose my written words with care.
Virtually every image Playboy has ever published is less shocking and disgusting than some other representation of the naked female form that most men and women could easily imagine (or even create and have displayed in an art gallery somewhere). Playboy Enterprises’ workshops of model recruitment, photography, and photo editing work so consistently well that tastefulness is embarrassingly consistent in the product. (Even so, the allegedly ruthless corporate machine frightens away women whose hearts aren’t really set on it.) Embarrassingly, I say, because some seem to think that Playboy must earn its status as art rather than mere entertainment by shocking the bourgeoisie. But my political tribe, libertarianism, begs to differ. We’ve been building a consensus that “art” and “entertainment” are interchangeable terms. Like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and to a lesser extent, professional sports, Playboy may be a victim of its own success in bringing sensual pleasures to the masses within reliable—but perhaps aging—perimeters of good taste. Since sports seems to be the least hated of the four institutions by those who would dismiss Playboy centerfolds as kitsch, I’ll try to explain Terri Lynn Farrow as something like a Joe DiMaggio or Muhammad Ali: one who can express beautiful individuality through a medium of mass entertainment with conventions and clichés already familiar to millions through decades of exposure. Whatever the medium under discussion, not everyone can do that!
To follow my argument completely, you’ll need a paid subscription to the Playboy Cyber Club. That link is not work-safe, of course, and neither are many that follow in this post. I first noticed her in the fall 2001 College Girls newsstand special. But later on, I was thrilled to find six minutes of video of her tryout for the New Orleans “Casting Call” (QuickTime, RealVideo). This woman is charming, quirky, polite, daring, and gritty. Unless you hold to the rigid formulas of some (not all) feminists for how a self-respecting woman behaves toward men, you’ll notice this combination of traits, remember it, and love it. She satisfies almost every possible definition of all-American by claiming Swedish, German, French, Jewish, and African-American blood. The headshot in this post comes from her January 27, 2003, Cyber Girl of the Week gig. But in light of the aesthetic choices she made in presenting her body again more recently, she deserves to go all the way to Playmate of the Month at least.
I don’t dislike breast implants for the sanctimonious reasons that some others do. If you can’t agree with me on this, please have the integrity to say “I hate saline!” instead of “I hate silicone!” The former compound deserves the blame for the balloon look of visual adult entertainment in the 1990s. The American silicone market was largely destroyed by pseudoscientific lawsuits that feminists, among others, widely supported out of moral panic. Those lawsuits arguably did more to restrict women’s individual choices than that Marxist demon of good intentions, Catharine MacKinnon, ever can.
But for purely aesthetic reasons, I want a greater variety of sizes and shapes of breasts on the centerfold proper. As it happens, Farrow impresses me by still not having implants of any kind—if the photo on newsstands now is a reliable indicator. The long hair that falls over her petite breasts is an obviously dyed, platinum shade of blond. The October 2007 Playboy won’t tell you this, but her modestly trimmed pubic hair is that darker shade of blond naturally, according to the video. Farrow must have figured that guys would notice the juxtaposition: hair dyed a nature-defying color over nature’s own breasts. In the twenty-first century, Farrow has something in common with the men who ogle her Playboy picture. She can have the complex, Rabelaisian pleasure of understanding the quirky nuances of her own sexual behavior in light of evolutionary psychology. Like the heliocentric astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo and the evolutionary biology of Darwin and Wallace, this paradigm shift frightens and disturbs even as it opens up new possibilities for dialogue on perennial human issues like entertainment and the arts.
If Farrow can be anybody’s muse in any such indirect manner (with all due modesty!), she deserves a centerfold.Labels: ArtEnt, CC, CosSur, Femi, Lib, Lit, MorPa, NSS, OnVi, OthBlo, PM, Sc, Sp, TaoGlam, Theme, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:39 PM
January 8, 2007
Why I buy Playboy at newsstands now
My subscription, which I chose not to renew, expired with the November 2006 issue. But either a clerical error or generosity on the part of someone in the organization has kept it coming to my mailbox anyway. Although I’m grateful for this happy accident or kindly gesture, I have my reasons for paying the extra money for the newsstand edition (and forgoing the free gifts that come with subscription renewal):
1.) Subscribers as well as newsstand buyers miss out on freebies. A recent newsstand copy came with a free bonus booklet of the women of Brazil. As a subscriber, I never would have known about it if I hadn’t noticed it on a newsstand.
2.) Postal workers tend to be rough on the magazine, not realizing how easy it is to mar the beautiful photographs with adhesion damage [not work-safe].
3.) According to the scuttlebutt among Playboy’s fans [not work-safe], advertisers are less impressed by subscription numbers (a strength for Playboy) than by newsstand sales (a weak area for Playboy). I don’t know enough about the ad business to confirm this, but I like making the switch just in case it helps the magazine financially.
4.) Even if reason 3 proves false, I’m putting more of my money into Playboy Enterprises. A fascinating series of lectures last year by professor Paul Cantor (written summary here; free audio and video here) explains that the ever-intimate relationship between art-slash-entertainment and commerce blurs the distinction between patronage of the arts and voting with one’s entertainment dollars. So why not pay more for what I like?Labels: ArtEnt, NSS, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:11 PM
December 20, 2006
Profiles in naked courage
Female boldness makes me swoon. The section [not work-safe] of the Playboy Cyber Club devoted to the August 2002 “Women of Enron” pictorial includes videos about the making of the pictorial. Playboy staffer Debbee May tells of one model’s moment of truth: “Well, when the girl gets naked for the first time, it’s a scary moment for them—although with Taria [Reed] we had a light situation and [the photography crew] had to go [out of the room briefly] and I just looked at her and I said, ‘Get naked!’ And she did.”
Reed tells her side of the story: “Is she kidding? That’s what I was going to ask her. I thought Debbee was being funny, but no one else laughed. So, why hesitate? You know, the more you hesitate, the worse it is.... It’s like jumping into a pool.... So, I just was like, O.K.....” At this point in the interview, she mimes a quick, unceremonious shedding of her clothes, then laughs. Later in the video, Reed says, “I have a lot of respect for the women who do choose to do Playboy, because it kind of shows a higher standard for yourself if you’re interested in showing yourself nude to the world. I have become a woman who’s very secure with herself. I spent a lot of time always wondering, what would people think about me? And I’m finally starting to realize as I get older, that, you know, it really doesn’t matter. So now I’m starting to become very secure with myself. And I’m happy with that, because it makes me want to do more instead of being scared to jump out and try new things.” In a similar vein, fellow model Janine Howard says in recollection of her own shoot that “I could have allowed myself to feel vulnerable. However, I just pictured everyone else in the room in their underwear. So I was fine with that.”
Thus does Playboy feed my heroine addiction.Labels: CC, NaBr, NSS, OnVi, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:36 PM
April 29, 2006
Artificiality can be sexy
In a review of The Playmate Book for The New Yorker, Joan Acocella finds Playboy pictures, especially more recent ones, too contrived to be sexy:Today—or, actually, by the eighties—one wonders whether sex, as it is experienced by human beings, is still the point. The current centerfolds, buck naked though they may be, communicate almost no suggestion of anything. In Playboy pinups, one is not looking for the note of the divine that one finds in the Venuses of ancient statuary, let alone for the pathos of Rembrandt’s nudes. Nor should one ask for naturalness—a real-looking girl. That is a sentimental preference, and one that many great nudes (Ingres’s, Degas’s) can refute. But what is so bewildering about the later Playboy centerfolds is their utter texturelessness: their lack of any question, any traction, any grain of sand from which the sexual imagination could make a pearl. Kenneth Clark, in his classic book The Nude (1956), repeatedly compares a period’s nudes to its architecture. The Playmates of the past few decades look to me like the “cereal box” buildings that went up on Sixth Avenue in the sixties, those cold, shiny structures, with no niches, no insets—no doors, it seemed. Likewise, the current Playmates seem to have no point of entry. And wasn’t entry the idea?
In reply, I quote François Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind: “It is an event sociological.” The remarkable fact that a woman has given her consent for millions of men to gaze at her admittedly stylized pinup image is enough sand to make a great pearl indeed. For a heterosexual male, real or symbolic female willingness is precious. Wow, she went for it! Many other women wouldn’t do it for any price (although this unwillingness can sometimes have its own distinct charm).
Taken together, all the things in a Playboy photo besides the nude woman serve a similar purpose to that of the video portion of a music video. They don’t need to make logical sense, but only to make a pleasantly memorable visual impression. Wondering out loud why a Playmate took her clothes off in a library is like refusing to pour lemon juice on a fish dinner on the grounds that lemon trees and fish live in separate natural environments.
Acocella’s failure to appreciate the ritualistic affectations of the pinup genre makes the Playmates’ facial expressions an unsolvable aesthetic problem:In a 2002 article in The New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm remarked on Irving Penn’s tendency to crop the heads of his nudes: “There does not seem to be any way that a naked person in front of a camera can fail to betray his or her sense of the...inherent silliness or pathos of the situation. Whether the object of the exercise is art photography or pornography, the model does not know what to do with her face.” If Penn’s subjects were stymied, so were the Playmates, but of course their heads weren’t cropped, and Hefner wanted them to look straight into the camera. The poor girls either smiled (“We’re going to have a good time”) or snarled (“Come and get me, big boy”). Both seem equally fake.
But “fake” images can express real human will as messages in an iconic language. In the video clip of her Playboy Cyber Club photo shoot [obviously not work-safe], University of Kansas sex columnist Meghan Bainum can be seen making the effort, sometimes a bit awkwardly, to speak this language. All by itself, her wish to be the subject of male fantasy is an endlessly fascinating part of reality.Labels: ArtEnt, Cintv, NaBr, NSS, PM, TaoGlam
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:49 AM
November 11, 2005
The erotic charm of arbitrary boundaries
In the 2001 edition of the Playmate Review newsstand special, Cara Michelle, the tall, svelte, brunette Playmate for December 2000, says, “I don’t think I could have done Playboy if I weren’t really comfortable with nudity and my body. But I wouldn’t do nudity for frivolous reasons—never, for example, to sell tickets to some guy flick.” Playboy’s critics will probably scoff at the notion that a nude scene in a guy flick is inappropriately frivolous while a nude layout in Playboy is not. Yes, she makes a highly subjective and arbitrary distinction here. But I see something splendidly erotic in it.
Choices that aren’t purely rational often have mythic significance. Cara Michelle’s willingness to appear nude in Playboy reminds me of the promiscuity of Aphrodite; her refusal to do so in a guy flick reminds me of the chastity of Artemis. The latter goddess was said to kill any mortal man who, even inadvertently, saw her naked. The two deities complement each other like yin and yang. Wow.Labels: ArtPic, Lit, NSS, PM, TaoGlam
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:32 PM
This student at Louisiana State University is pictured much more candidly on page 112 of the October Playboy, for its “Girls of the Southeastern [Athletic] Conference” pictorial. In her shot for the current issue, I see self-confident good taste. It’s a cliché to call Playboy’s nudes “tasteful,” but I choose my written words with care.