“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 1:10 in this video of a Playboy Mansion party, the March 2008 Playmate shows her good judgment and good taste.
I was there for that party. Click here for the embarrassing details of my encounter with Miss March.
The hot brunette in the video embed freeze frame is mistress of ceremonies and Playboy model Adrianne Curry (February 2006 and January 2008)—technically not a Playmate, though not for lack of beauty, as you can see.
Do you wonder what I look like? Wonder no more. On June 12, I made it to the third annual benefit party for the Marijuana Policy Project at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. From left to right, the Playmates in this photo are Katie Lohmann (April 2001), Marketa Janska (July 2003), Amanda Paige (October 2005), and Janine Habeck (September 2006).
That time of year, the sun hadn’t gone down at eight o’clock, when the party began.
As it got dark, guests came in by the chartered busload.
These female guests were justifiably proud to be seen inside the grotto.
The Playboy Mansion loves animals! This picture shows only part of its pet cemetery.
There were speeches about the marijuana law reform movement. Then DJ Native Wayne Jobson spun tunes while sexy dancers entertained the crowd.
Miss May 1998, Deanna Brooks, is an acquaintance from my visits to the first and second Mansion benefits for MPP.
How embarrassing! I made Miss March 2008, Ida Ljungqvist, a little nervous with the creepy monotone in my voice, my stammer, and the case of Fashion Tourette’s that led me to believe I would look cool in cheap black gloves. Fortunately, she was persuaded that I meant no harm.
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):
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.
Without irony or hesitation, I respect the tattoo of the word respect a few inches below the navel of Miss January 2007. It asserts itself gracefully enough to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I wouldn’t dare disrespect it.
I’m no fan of affirmative action, but I’ll make an exception for brunette Playmates of the Year.
This is the perfect segue to Mr. “Respect” himself, Ali G, leading a panel discussion on pornography:
Off-site spoiler alert:this* blog post by another Playboy fan reveals the identity of the new Playmate of the Year. You won’t read it at my blog in advance, though.
At 36, I’m just old enough to remember the slower travel of information before the Internet. Naturally, being a blogger, I wouldn’t go back to those days. But spoilers were somewhat easier to avoid then. The “Next Month” page at the end of the May Playboy brought a smile to my face by avoiding the mistake of showing a spoiler photograph of the new Playmate of the Year. I want to honor the spirit of that choice by imitating it here.
*Point of style: I happen to agree with The Chicago Manual of Style that the first word after a colon is not necessarily capitalized. Hmm. Is Chicago known for any other publications that one could describe as manuals of style?
The Playboy Cyber Club has posted test shots of Cynthia Gwyn Brown, the shots that made her Miss May 1995. This time around, my prose has to be really good. Uh-oh!
Cindy Brown demonstrates how well blue eyes and brown hair can go together. In images I wouldn’t dare post here for fear of Playboy Enterprises’ lawyers, the wonderfully idiosyncratic shape of her medium-sized breasts defies the balloon cliché in too many centerfolds since the mid-1990s. Variety is indeed the spice of life. (With regret, I acknowledge a kernel of truth in the criticism that Playmates look too much alike these days.) Her centerfold, with her back to the camera and her front to a full-length mirror, reminded me of the joy of stumbling on the word callipygian in the dictionary so many years before.
Men’s magazines are notorious for fibbing about the women in the pictures. But just in case some of Cindy Brown’s Playmate story is true, I copy it here:
Rhapsody in Brown
miss may makes her move from popcorn peddler to playmate
Cindy Brown is in the middle of a spirited discussion about the environment and destructive human appetites when temptation turns her pretty head. Six Hell’s Angels roar up on Rose Avenue, rattling the open windows of the café where we sit, just off the beach in Venice, California. “Oh my God,” Cindy exclaims, her eyes suddenly gleaming. “I want a Harley real bad!” What? A gas-guzzling vestige of our unenlightened past? “Oh man!” she says, immediately launching into a new story. “I was sitting at Johnny Rockets on Melrose Avenue one night, and this woman drove up solo on a Harley. That’s supposed to be a man thing. Everybody gave her respect right away. I’m constantly looking for a way to do things that women aren’t supposed to do.”
In another day and age, this extraordinary girl next door might have been an outlaw or a revolutionary. Raised on a small farm in the desert town of Boron, California, two hours north of Los Angeles, she threw a broccoli stalk into the family works when, at 15, she became a vegetarian. The folks at home had to adjust. “We raised animals—horses, sheep, goats, pigs, cows, chickens. My dad is a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, and he was raising most of these animals for our food. I grew up accepting that, but when I got older I realized that I like feeding the animals more than I like eating them.”
Cindy is certain that her Cherokee ancestry, mostly ignored by her parents, guides her environmental consciousness. “I would love to work for the Environmental Protection Agency someday,” she says. “I’d like to straighten it out because it’s as crooked as it gets. I could help companies clean up their acts.” (Note to Al Gore: she couldn’t hurt.)
Life is always a little bumpy for a maverick, but Cindy says her mom—with whom she lives now, along with her stepfather and two stepbrothers—is her inspiration. “I can’t believe how much I’ve become like her,” she muses, smiling. “I’m a very strong and independent person because of her. She’s always telling me, ‘Sooner or later you’re going to be on your own. You’re going to have to make your own choices then, so you might as well start doing it now.’” One of those choices was to pose for Playboy. Cindy and her mom are proud of the decision, and we applaud it too. After all, what use is a natural wonder if no one can see it? —Clint Gila
Technology is good. Nevertheless, the Playboy Cyber Club is inferior to the printed magazine. For one thing, the little paragraphs surrounding the main text of Playmate articles never get transcribed online—not even when they’re this delightful:
“I used to wear baggy clothes all the time,” says Cindy, “but I don’t anymore. I’m proud of my body. It’s fun to be sexy. It spills over into the rest of my life. When the photographer was shooting and he said, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s good,’ I was thinking, All right! I’m good! That feels very sexy.” [May 1995, p. 97]
To the best I’ve been able to research, Brown is a “lost Playmate.” The world of Playboy fandom doesn’t know where she is now or what she’s been up to since 1995. If she chooses to avoid the limelight now, I can appreciate that choice. After all, her insistence on doing as she pleases is so much of her charm.
The Playboy Philosophy is essentially a call to joie de vivre. So why do I have to be such a grouch when somebody misidentifies a non-Playmate as a Playmate? The Canadian edition of AskMen.com sings the praises of ten Playmates from Canada—but I can’t let go of the fact that number 7 on their list, Tracy Tweed, never appeared on the centerfold proper and is therefore not a true Playmate (even though she has modeled nude for the magazine). Do I have a legitimate complaint, or am I just being a dork?
A comment on the article points out that Cara Wakelin (November 1999), for example, deserves a spot on the list. She could have had it if she hadn’t been displaced by an impostor. Another comment mentions Kimberley Conrad as a neglected choice, but she was actually born in Alabama, not Canada. There I go again with my cranky nitpicking. Deal with it, folks.
For the third time, I thank Johnny Testa for emailing me about something interesting and Playboy-related at AskMen.
Miss December 2007, Sasckya Porto, already has very devoted fans, and rightfully so. But she’s not my favorite this year.
Miss February, Heather Rene Smith, is local, which is always cool. When I lived in Ventura County, California, then-homegirl Lisa Matthews made the front page of the approving Ventura County Star-Free Press by becoming the 1991 Playmate of the Year.
I genuinely respect the tattoo of that very word in front of Jayde Nicole’s ovaries (January). It suggests to me a gracefully self-confident sexuality, a deep respect for beauty without a need to conform.
Playboy shows good taste in not airbrushing away the beautiful birthmarks of Miss April, Giuliana Marino. Wabi-sabi!
My favorite word for attractive large breasts is voluptuous. For attractive small ones, like those of Miss August, Tamara Sky, it’s dainty.
Howard Stern is a true pioneer in the medium of radio. After Jillian Grace (March 2005), Miss May, Shannon James, is the second woman to become Playmate with Stern as an important booster, if I recall correctly—something of a pioneer in her own right.
Miss July, Tiffany Selby, looks great in cowgirl style. What guy doesn’t appreciate a cowgirl?
Only 18 as I write, October’s Spencer Scott is the youngest new Playmate of 2007. Women do not necessarily lose their charm as they age. Tippi Hedren was remarkably easy on the eye as a guest on a TV talk show the other day. Still, men generally agree that youthfulness in women has a distinct sparkle—except, of course, for those men preoccupied by youthfulness in men.
Patrice Hollis, Miss September, reminds me that African-American beauty has been well represented on the centerfold over the years. Haitian-Italian Daphnee Duplaix (July 1997) did a commercial for Long John Silver’s a few years ago. She was dressed modestly, and she had grown her hair out to hang freely in sweet little black curls. All she did was gaze into the camera and talk about temptation. It’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen on family-friendly broadcast television.
But Miss June, Brittany Binger, is my personal favorite this year. Her face and body are so elegantly proportioned that, when she stands on a California beach, holding shells over her bare breasts in mock modesty, the curves on the shells and the curves on the woman seem to harmonize, like consonant notes on a musical scale. Connoisseurs will avoid crude puns on “the music of the spheres” to describe this: the breasts in question are refreshingly unspherical.
Botticelli got it wrong. Venus is a born brunette.
Twice in two days, I have to report on a kind of intellectual laziness from the editors of the magazine’s “Playboy After Hours” section that shows contempt for the history of the publication they work for. In the first Playboy, Hugh Hefner defined the magazine as something for the sort of single man who might invite a single woman over “for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” (Despite his good record as an impresario of literature, Hefner is seldom particularly quotable. But his use of the word sex in that sentence is virtuoso wordplay. Is it the object of the preposition on or the preposition for?) There is a legacy to uphold, folks. What the fuck?
What the fuck, I mean to say, is the deal with the stupidly redundant “Coed of the Month” of the November and December “After Hours”? Who is responsible for failing to notice the well-established Coeds of the Month at the Playboy Cyber Club—who aren’t the corresponding women for either of those months? To make things as confusing as possible, Sarah Porchetta is the Cyber Club Coed for November and the magazine Coed for December. Nude modeling for any branch of Playboy Enterprises is enough of a hindrance on other career options to merit clear, undisputed, unambiguous titles for various venues. I think it’s only fair. Besides, “After Hours” had already had a good thing going with its Employee of the Month. When it started just a few years ago as an opportunity for female Playboy employees to pose, I saw it as a delightful sort of tribute to the groundbreaking July 1955 centerfold of Janet Pilgrim:
We suppose it’s natural to think of the pulchritudinous Playmates as existing in a world apart. Actually, potential Playmates are all around you: the new secretary at your office, the doe-eyed beauty who sat opposite you at lunch yesterday, the girl who sells you shirts and ties at your favorite store. We found Miss July in our own circulation department, processing subscriptions, renewals and back copy orders. Her name is Janet Pilgrim and she’s as efficient as she is good looking. Janet has never modeled professionally before, but we think she holds her own with the best of the Playmates of the past.
Quickly, the concept behind the Employee of the Month expanded to include women of other workplaces besides Playboy. But at least that change fit logically with what had come before. What the fuck?
As a retrospective on an institution, the 50th-anniversary issue of Playboy (January 2004) was something of a dud. It’s common knowledge among serious Playboy fans that it was established in 1953. So how the hell did “Class of ’54,” that idiotic blurb from the January 2004 “Playboy After Hours,” ever make the final edit? When I think about it, I still get mad. What an insult to our intelligence!
Point of clarification: It’s easy to be misled on this point by what one sees on, for example, the December 2007 table of contents. The issue identifies itself there as volume 54, number 12. If you don’t know that Playboy never published a March 1955 issue, you’ll count wrong and think the whole thing started with a January 1954 issue.
But that’s simply false. The issue marked January 1954 has Margie Harrison instead of Marilyn Monroe in it. Fortunately, an incredibly cool reprint of the original December 1953 Playboy is on sale at the official online store. And now that I’ve made my purchase of this limited-edition item, it’s safe to tell you guys, heehee.
Update, June 11, 2008, 8:07 p.m.: Sadly, I’ve had to move out of my apartment in such a hurry that I’ve probably lost the copy I ordered online. The complete digital archive of Playboy in the 1950s that I bought in a bookstore happens to include another reprint of the first issue. But I’m greedy enough to smart that I don’t have two of them anymore. Ouch!
The December 2007 Playboy hit newsstands today. But at least one fan site dedicated to the December Playmate, Brazilian-born Sasckya Porto, has already been on the Net for more than two weeks. I discovered it through SiteMeter, which told me that I owe some of my traffic to a link on that site.
Now more than ever, popular culture is made with the audience’s participation. Isn’t it great? The customer is king.
Let’s all admit it: one of the greatest joys of every hobby and every profession is the chance to intimidate the squares with pedantic distinctions in language. Strictly speaking, a Playmate is one of the monthly foldout models, while a Bunny is a waitress or croupier in a distinct costume. (To avoid another common misunderstanding, the Playmate of any given month is almost never that month’s cover girl.)
One upshot of this distinction is that some women have earned two feathers in their caps as Playmate Bunnies. Las Vegas now has the first Playboy Club in the United States since the mid-1980s. From the pictures that Playboy Enterprises’ lawyers will allow me to copy here, I think we can all see some Playmate potential:
Update, 4:11 p.m.: This happens to be the 200th post at Reflections on Playboy. Hooray!
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.
No major “Bollywood” production from India’s feature film industry will be freeze-framed in Playboy’s annual “Sex in Cinema” pictorial for some time yet. Only a few years ago have the gorgeous male and female leads in these elaborate song-and-dance melodramas been allowed to kiss on screen for the first time since the nation’s independence (60 years ago tomorrow). But I still think that the 2001 blockbuster Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India could be a hit at one of Hugh Hefner’s movie parties.
Bollywood style is sometimes said to parallel the musical extravaganzas of American cinema of the 1930s, part of the cultural environment of Hefner’s childhood. The music itself sounds vastly different, but anyone who can learn to enjoy the Beatles’ tribute to Indian music from Sgt. Pepper’s can love the crowd-pleasing tunes of the best of Bollywood. Lagaan takes place in a remote district of British-occupied India in 1893. Indian farmers are threatened with hunger because of drought and the lagaan (Hindi for land tax) they have to pay every year: a portion of their harvest to the British government. Naturally, Indian audiences love to hate the smug, vicious colonial racism of the tax-collecting villain, Captain Russell. Audiences from every country on earth will cheerfully boo and hiss along. The farmers notice that the game the Englishmen call cricket looks like a “boys’ game” native to India. Out of desperation, they goad Russell into betting the lagaan on the outcome of a cricket match between the Indians and the Englishmen. If the Indians lose, they pay triple. If they win, they pay nothing for three years.
This is not only an engaging sports movie but also a romance with remarkable sex appeal. Pay attention to the subtitles in the video clip below. Surely, the song’s Hindi lyrics describe part of the eternal game of human mating all over the world. Only a little grounding in Hinduism is needed: The occasion is the religious festival of the god Krishna’s birthday. In his reckless youth, Krishna is said to have had many pretty young cowherdesses, Gopis, as playmates. But the main goddess in his life is his consort, Radha. The rest will sound all too familiar.
2001 Playmate of the Year Brande Roderick is the leading lady in the recent Bollywood production Out of Control. But I can’t lie. Lagaan is a much better movie.
Extra-credit question: How much would you pay to see a Mel Brooks tribute to Bollywood?
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.
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.”
Thanks to SiteMeter, I know that a woman in Belgium recently stumbled on a guest essay here by Googling insecure when my husband looks at other women (in English, without quotation marks). She might take heart from the miracle of May 14, when a troupe of fire dancers invaded a benefit party for the Marijuana Policy Project at the Playboy Mansion and upstaged the Playmates on their home turf. It can be done!
The number of millihelens a beautiful woman radiates is measurable by my dorkiness and spazziness in her presence.* I stood bravely in the front row of the audience with no regard for what could happen if they lost control of their flaming toys, thinking only of my duty as a scholar of the seductive power of the human female. Nor did I consider the dangers of looking like a desperate horn dog at an inopportune time. It was totally worth the risk to get close enough to notice the sexy bruise on one dancer’s thigh.
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?
Without irony or hesitation, I respect the tattoo of the word respect a few inches below the navel of Miss January 2007. It asserts itself gracefully enough to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I wouldn’t dare disrespect it.
As a retrospective on an institution, the 50th-anniversary issue of Playboy (January 2004) was something of a dud. It’s common knowledge among serious Playboy fans that it was established in 1953. So how the hell did “Class of ’54,” that idiotic blurb from the January 2004 “Playboy After Hours,” ever make the final edit? When I think about it, I still get mad. What an insult to our intelligence!
Let’s all admit it: one of the greatest joys of every hobby and every profession is the chance to intimidate the squares with pedantic distinctions in language. Strictly speaking, a Playmate is one of the monthly foldout models, while a Bunny is a waitress or croupier in a distinct costume. (To avoid another common misunderstanding, the Playmate of any given month is almost never that month’s cover girl.)
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.
