“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.

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).

Labels: CC, Femi, Lib, MorPa, NaBr, OnVi, Ptv

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:16 AM

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

September 26, 2006

Probably the only weepy chick flick that glamorizes Playboy

The Los Angeles Times reviewer was astonished that the script for the 1991 made-for-TV movie Posing: Inspired by Three Real Stories “is credited to two women, Cathleen Young and Ann Donahue, so go figure and go hoot.” It tells the separate stories of three women—a wife and mother in a small Bible Belt town, a successful stockbroker with lingering insecurity from her days as an overweight teen, and a repressed Yale student who secretly envies her twin sister’s freedom—who make the improbable but understandable choice to pose nude for Playboy. Unlike the Times reviewer, I find the writing credits and subtitle of this bittersweet, mostly realistic drama easy to believe. The VHS version, titled I Posed for Playboy, includes footage of a topless photo shoot of Miss October 1990, Brittany York, but don’t expect any Playboy-type erotica besides that. A sensitive male who hasn’t been whipped by politically correct bourgeois feminism, however, may find subtle eroticism in the courage and integrity the women show before, during, and especially after their photo sessions. “All three do face unforeseen negative consequences in the wake of their respective issues hitting the stands,” says the review, “but only in the form of flak from self-righteous hypocrites at work and home.” In context, the sarcastic “but only” reveals the same twisted logic as in the drug-war propaganda reminding us that marijuana is not “harmless” because it can get us arrested. Well, whose fault is that, assholes?

I don’t know much about the video business, but the videocassette seems to be priced only for sale to video rental firms. I wish it weren’t so, because this movie, besides Amadeus, is the one that I wish every one of my readers would see. By the way, the dark-haired photographer in it, David Mecey, was an actual Playboy photographer at the time of filming.

Labels: Cintv, Femi, NaBr, NPH, PM, Rom

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:24 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

March 3, 2006

Goddesses inspire three actresses at a Vanity Fair cover shoot

Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson agreed to appear naked on the cover [not work-safe] of the March Vanity Fair; Rachel McAdams refused. Some have used this incident as a mere political football, but I wish to praise the divine inspiration behind all three women’s choices.

Aphrodite is famously eager to show off her body, while Artemis champions modesty. Like yin and yang, their opposite qualities define, complement, and power each other. That McAdams said no reminds me that Knightley and Johansson could also have said no, making the fact that they said yes all the more erotic. At the same time, I find the Artemis-like fierceness with which women often guard their modesty endearing.

In an interview for the Nightline program of February 21, Terry Moran asked Knightley why she posed nude. “For pure mischief,” she said, baring her teeth and wrinkling her nose in a benignly mischievous manner, “and because it made me giggle....You know what? I’m 20. It’s Vanity Fair. It’s [photographer] Annie Leibovitz. It’s something to show my grandchildren. They’ll think I had a wild youth....Why not?” Her reasons echo those given by countless Playboy models. Aphrodite seems to whisper the same words in numerous women’s ears.

If the story is understood (at least metaphorically) as a conflict between equally honorable deities, then everyone gets to be right.

Update, November 7, 2007, 3:10 p.m.: Better late than never, I’m posting the Vanity Fair cover on this page:

Labels: Cintv, Lit, NaBr, NPH, OnVi, RS, TaoGlam

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:32 AM

October 27, 2005

Teri Polo’s charming ambivalence

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

The actress Teri Polo appeared in a celebrity pictorial in the February 2005 Playboy. Shortly before the issue reached newsstands, she was a guest on Ellen DeGeneres’ daytime TV talk show.

DeGeneres: Was that weird, to be naked, standing there? I mean, if you’ve never done it before, it would be weird to just be standing there getting your picture taken.

Polo: I had, um, a surprisingly easy time of it. [chuckles awkwardly and winces, then has a half-affected look of worry] I don’t know what that says, but—it was fun....

I’m fascinated and charmed by the complex interaction between exhibitionism and modesty that this bit of dialogue reveals. Not only have I been privileged to see Polo’s beautiful body, but I’ve caught a glimpse of an internal drama that gives the privilege an extra layer of meaning. What a lucky man I am.

Labels: Celeb, Lit, NaBr, TaoGlam

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:55 PM