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
August 20, 2006
Understanding a feminist’s fear of seduction
(Thanks to your votes, this post finished in fourth place in Battle 4 of the Philosophy Blog War.)
“In all matters of opinion,” said Oscar Wilde, “our adversaries are insane.” Nevertheless, our adversaries are always driven by fundamentally understandable human emotions. Some empathy may be not only good karma but also good strategy in a political dispute. In that light, then–student journalist Sarah Ratcliff’s 1991 story on her encounter with the recruiters for Playboy’s “Women of the Women’s Colleges” pictorial bears careful study.
In an article Ratcliff wrote for the Mills Weekly at Mills College, reprinted in the San Francisco Examiner on April 7, 1991, but not available online, she credits the Playboy people with great seductive power. The Examiner titles her work “Bunny business: Playboy smoothies employ a complex support system to persuade women to take off their clothes.” Ratcliff is astonished to learn that Mills alumna Heidi Ellis has planned to pose for the pictorial—and to help publicize the recruitment effort, no less. Although Ratcliff has no intention of posing whatsoever, she needs to know how a woman from her very feminist campus could be talked into it. Her investigation takes her inside the belly of the beast, a photographer’s studio at Playboy Enterprises in Chicago, where she feels “violated and completely powerless” with her jacket removed, the top button of her blouse undone, and her slip and bra exposed while a man takes Polaroids. Of course, she refuses to take it any further. But before the fact—rather surprisingly—she fears being persuaded to go all the way. In a companion article by Joan Smith of the Examiner, she gratefully quotes her mother from a pep talk before the session: “Don’t let them get you naked. Remember who you are.”
There is a fascinating story here, and it’s not exactly what Ratcliff thinks it is. Why is she so worried that she’ll “forget who she is”? With all that she believes to be at stake for her integrity as a feminist, does she think she might momentarily forget to keep most of her clothes on? Why so little faith in her own free will? The Blank Slate curriculum at Mills College has taught her to blame her every trace of doubt or confusion about this matter on external “manipulation.” To be completely fair, Ratcliff describes some brusque, pushy behavior by male and female Playboy staffers trying to get her out of her clothes. Some other sources, like Leif Ueland’s book Accidental Playboy, corroborate this unfortunate side of Playboy’s corporate culture. The Playboy people give Ratcliff’s phone number to Heidi Ellis, whose desire to pose they reportedly hope will prove contagious. It backfires: Ratcliff not only holds firm but talks Ellis out of it. “I knew I was doing a big turnaround,” Ellis tells Smith. “I’d taken a lot of those courses at Mills, but it’s tough to maintain your ideals as a feminist when you go out into the patriarchal world and Sarah reminded me that there are people who care about those things.” But to call it manipulation is to stretch the term beyond its restricted meaning in a liberal democracy, where justice almost always presumes men and women to act out of free will. Otherwise, you’re condescending to save people from themselves.
Naturally, this means I have to acknowledge Ellis’ final choice as her own. Blaming her change of mind on feminist propaganda would be the same condescension in reverse. I must say I’m insulted, though, by the feminist assessment of men’s ability to put images of women in the context of common sense. “No man is going to seriously read text discussing the degrees of feminism next to my bare breast,” says the born-again feminist Ellis. I’ve noticed the fact that some women are Playmates and some are politicians or scientists, and the apparent contradiction hasn’t made my head explode. Maybe I’m a little smarter than those Mills courses imply. I can be momentarily distracted by a bare breast (or whatever), but this blog should show that I can’t stop thinking about the kind of stuff Ellis assumes I have no interest in.
Let’s let everybody be right. There’s no inherent cowardice in fearing literal or figurative seduction, which is always somewhat risky. There’s no inherent disgrace in being seduced or seducing, which is not the moral equivalent of rape and, if we’re patient with the phenomenon, can teach us a great deal about the human condition. There’s no inherent hypocrisy in ambivalence about seduction, as when Playboy’s female director of communications is shocked when Ratcliff asks whether she herself would pose. Despite some of the more utopian rhetoric of the sexual revolution, most of us will always be a little bit prudish. I know I am.
A related subsequent post:
Guest essay: It’s me, Heidi EllisLabels: BlaSla, Femi, Sc, TaoGlam, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 7:42 PM
July 17, 2006
I’m not shocked to see Hef shocked
For 90 solid minutes of gloriously filthy humor, see last year’s documentary film The Aristocrats. A hundred or so professional comedians tell numerous versions of a joke they’ve traditionally told only each other since the days of vaudeville. Told competently, it’s an improvisational tour de force of every disgusting abomination you can imagine. Three fourths into the film, Gilbert Gottfried is seen telling it at the New York Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner on September 29, 2001. Having alienated his audience with ill-timed jokes about 9/11, Gottfried redeems himself by choosing to offend in a different way. Some of his fellow comedians fall on the floor laughing. But not Hefner, according to Steven Winn’s review for the San Francisco Chronicle:As the camera flips back and forth from Gottfried at the Friars Club podium and an audience ecstatically unhinged by his delivery, it keeps catching a stony-faced Hefner on the dais. There he is, the man who rode the First Amendment to a fortune with his Playboy philosophy and anything-goes centerfolds, profoundly unamused. It’s a telling juxtaposition and a perfect coda for The Aristocrats. Free speech isn’t easy and it isn’t comfortable. It may not make you smile. It can certainly make you squirm. It’s dangerous and risky, and it sure doesn’t give a fig about bad taste. That’s what makes it matter and what makes it free.
Hefner doesn’t exactly do the Queen Victoria impression that Winn suggests—he’s a good sport, chuckling a bit in spite of himself—but he is visibly shocked. And why not? Thomas Moore’s 1998 book The Soul of Sex identifies the comically grotesque phallic god Priapus as the ruling spirit of dirty jokes:...Anyone who has ever heard a stand-up comic knows something about the way Priapic humor pokes fun at high-minded society: pratfalls, crotch grabbing, mooning, and jokes about the sex organs. Some people are entertained by such bawdy humor and some are offended, and both are proper responses to this divine freak....
The soul of sex reaches beyond the taste of any one of us, and so we have to enter what may be unfamiliar and uncomfortable ground if we are going to get a sense of it. The rigid moralist has to relax his habit of judging, and the libertine has to find it in himself to be offended. One gets the sense sometimes that sex educators would like to enlighten us so thoroughly that shame would disappear and we would become completely comfortable with every aspect of sex. Maybe sex should always be uncomfortable in some areas. Like religion, sex is tremendum et fascinans, incredibly alluring and yet at the same time overwhelming in its sheer vitality and emotional power. Sometimes it may offend our dignity because it is more than human, not less. (p. 118-120)
If you’ve seen the movie, I invite you to write your own version of the joke as a comment on this post. Let the filth fly.Labels: Cintv, He, MorPa, RS, TaoGlam
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:57 PM
May 25, 2006
Let’s do the Wilde thing
That is to say, let’s consider these words from the preface to Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” In Wilde’s day as well as in ours, glorification of evil in entertainment was often blamed for evil in real life. But in that preface, Wilde builds a wall of separation between ethics and aesthetics analogous to Thomas Jefferson’s wall between church and state, a wall that can serve as a similar bulwark against tyranny.
Liberty has its price, however: if art and entertainment can’t be forces for evil, then they can’t be forces for good, either. (If it’s not clear why this necessarily follows, please read this article by Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh.) Just as I reject the claim that Playboy pictures turn men into misogynists, I have to dismiss D. Bell’s “philosophy of female beauty” at Body in Mind [not work-safe], which regards the splendor of the female form as the source of literally all good in the world.
Bell has good taste in cheesecake. The “Grapevine” section in the back of the June Playboy rightly tips its hat to the sweet, sexy images on his site. But his ethics and politics are sheer demagoguery. As with most people who brag about how moral they are, his passionate intensity casts a shadow of hatred. For him, “those who belittle or outright attack female beauty mean to destroy beauty and all human values [emphasis in the original].” Worse yet, his insistence on the immaculate goodness of looking at naked women can upset the delicate ecological balance between respectability and naughtiness that makes Playboy so much fun.Labels: AesthEth, Lib, Lit, MorPa, NPH, OthBlo, TaoGlam
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:52 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
April 9, 2006
Hef turns 80 today
Hugh Marston Hefner was born 80 years ago today in Chicago, Illinois. During a recent television interview session, the cameraman asked him to remove a statue of Barbi Benton from the shot because of its bare breasts. From the AP story: “‘As much as things change, they stay the same,’ Hefner remarks, disappointment in his voice. ‘There is still controversy about, maybe even more than before, not just nudity—a nude statue.’”
With all due respect to the big man on his big day, maybe he doesn’t need to experience so much disappointment. Although I wish the Federal Communications Communist Commission didn’t have the power to force TV stations to act this way, I’m actually grateful that somebody somewhere wants the statue’s breasts to be concealed. Eroticism and shame are two sides of the same coin. In their mission statement, the editors of the online sexuality magazine Nerve.com identify their purpose as “less to celebrate the gymnastics of sex than to appreciate the way it humbles us, renders us blushing teenagers....[W]e think shame (in small doses) is to be cherished—it makes us honest and human and trims our paunchy egos.” I might humbly suggest that, if he accepted the fact that sexual shame may never die, Hef could have a deeper and more cheerful appreciation of his own legacy. All utopian dreams lead to disappointment, but a somewhat tragic view of the human condition can paradoxically lighten us up.
In any case, I wish Hugh Hefner and his magazine many more happy birthdays.Labels: BlaSla, Cintv, He, MorPa, RS, TaoGlam, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 9:21 AM
April 6, 2006
“They do move in herds.”
At about 8 p.m. on Thursday, March 30, I was in a chartered shuttle bus traveling from one of the parking lots at UCLA to the residence at 10236 Charing Cross Road. We twisted and turned through the narrow, dark, tree-lined roads of the exclusive neighborhood for a few minutes. Then there was a gap between the trees through which I saw the distinctly Tudor architecture of a certain rooftop. I gasped in amazement. It was the Playboy Mansion.
We, the guests of a benefit party for the Marijuana Policy Project, stepped off the bus and were led through a doorway in an open-air wall on the Mansion grounds. On the other side was the swimming pool area, where a bar and a small stage for music and comedy had been set up. On each side of a very short staircase descending towards the pool stood a row of three or four gorgeous young women in black dresses. As each of us passed, they would say, “Welcome to the Playboy Mansion.” I studied their faces for a few seconds and, sure enough, I recognized them from their centerfolds. Playmates!
Finally seeing these icons in person was something like getting to see the dinosaurs for the first time in Jurassic Park (the friendly herbivores, mind you, not the predators). As a paleontologist catching his first glimpse of living dinosaurs, Sam Neill says, “They’re moving in herds. They do move in herds.” The moment held something of that Spielbergian sense of wonder for me.
I was fortunate enough to spend several minutes in conversation with Miss May 1998, Deanna Brooks, and later on with Miss November 2002, Serria Tawan. Brooks and I discussed the philosophical underpinnings of the sexual revolution. A self-described feminist, she objected to the frequent claim that her posing for Playboy was in any way anti-feminist. I’ve said essentially the same thing here. But we politely disagreed on whether people’s anxiety and awkwardness about sexuality are learned through social conditioning or at least partly inborn. I argue the latter.
During my chat with Tawan, a tall, leggy, cute black woman, I was reminded of the mixed blessings of being a sex symbol. A male party guest pinched her backside as he walked by. (I wouldn’t have known it had happened if she hadn’t told me.) Some men behave that way towards Playmates, she explained, because “they think we’re whores.” Playboy shows respect for women, but some guys don’t get the message. Don’t feel too sorry for Tawan, however; she can reportedly kick ass [not work-safe] when she needs to.
Tawan and I were soon joined by Libertarian (yay!) political candidate Edward Teyssier. “Your mission,” he told me, “is to find a libertarian Playmate,” since an endorsement of libertarianism by a Playmate would help the movement. If, by chance, any actual or aspiring Playboy models are reading this, I invite them to take this very short political quiz. They may be libertarian without knowing it.
Playmates at the party included Cassandra Lynn (Miss February 2006), Christine Smith (December 2005), Julie Cialini (1995 Playmate of the Year), Scarlett Keegan (September 2004), Jillian Grace (March 2005), Athena Lundberg (January 2006), Tina Jordan (March 2002), and Marketa Janska (July 2003). I think I probably saw Pilar Lastra (August 2004) and Julie McCullough (February 1986). (Several of the female guests, I might add, looked good enough to be Playmates.) Adam Carolla showed up. My fellow stoners might have recognized cultivation expert Ed Rosenthal, who wore a wizard costume with images of cannabis leaves sewn on it. Tommy Chong dropped by for a while, but, regrettably, I didn’t see him there. Worse yet, I didn’t see Hugh Hefner, even though he’s in one of the photos on the MPP page on the event. So near and yet so far! When I think of it, this makes my memory of the event somewhat bittersweet.
Party guests were not allowed inside the Mansion itself, but we had access to most of the grounds, through which the Playmates led tours. We saw the pens housing many animals, including birds, monkeys, and rabbits. We could play billiards, pinball, and video games for free in the game room. At one point, I wandered into a guest bedroom with mirrors covering two walls and the ceiling (wink). For the wild party capital of the world, though, much of the property has a surprising air of tranquility. When I wanted a break from the party, I could easily find peace and quiet in a garden path. Playboy often impresses me with this kind of balance of yin and yang.
Four hours was too short a time to spend in such a delightful place. Ask for my snapshots through the email link on my Blogger profile page, and I’ll gladly send them to you.
A related earlier post:
I’m going to Disneyland the Playboy Mansion
A related subsequent post:
Want to go to the Playboy Mansion? Start saving your money.
The same event in 2007:
Hope for all women everywhere: Bunnies can be upstagedLabels: Cintv, DruPo, He, Lib, Mansi, Mil, Ph, PJ, PM, TaoGlam
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:16 PM
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
January 3, 2006
Awww, she’s shy
In her January pictorial, sports reporter Lisa Guerrero shows a little less skin than some of Playboy’s fans might have hoped. “What a let down for me to open my issue (just got it today) to find only B&B... boobs & butt! [ellipsis in the original]” grumbles one participant of the Playboy Mailing List at Yahoo! Groups. “If you are going to pose for OFM [Our Favorite Magazine], it should be above & below the waist, front & back!”
But for me, the glass is half full. Guerrero’s refusal to go full-frontal helps me remember what a privilege it is for us to see her in Playboy at all. Her daring and her modesty are two sides of the same coin.
Update, November 5, 2007, 1:30 p.m.: Better late than never, here’s Guerrero as the cover girl:
Labels: Celeb, TaoGlam
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:37 PM
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
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
October 18, 2005
Female exhibitionism is a humbling mystery
Those who criticize Playboy for showing women in “passive” or “submissive” poses have the wrong idea. Just as farmers depend utterly on good weather, Playboy’s photography department depends utterly on women’s willingness to show their bodies. Many beautiful women are bound to decline any offer to pose, and this fact humbles every thoughtful Playboy fan.
Despite the financial and (mixed) social rewards, there’s something self-evidently wild and crazy about the choice to pose, which, for me, only intensifies the gratitude and wonder at this choice. In the new book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy documents one such moment of choice. Waiting in front of a receptionist’s desk at Playboy’s corporate headquarters in Chicago for her interview with Playboy Enterprises CEO Christie Hefner, Levy found herself next to two women. One of these women had entered the building with the intention of trying to become the Fiftieth-Anniversary Playmate. The other, a friend of hers, had apparently tagged along just for moral support. While the first woman followed the receptionist into another part of the building, her friend “flipped through a copy of the magazine she’d picked up off the coffee table. A few moments passed and then she looked up from a spread on college girls, wild eyed. ‘I’m going too,’ she said. ‘What the hell!’ Then she went dashing in after them.” (p. 38) Levy worries that this woman may have been brainwashed by “raunch culture,” but I take it for granted that women have free will and am content to marvel at the mystery of exactly what happened inside her head at the moment she changed her mind. I don’t believe I’m just flattering myself when I say that I show more faith in women’s autonomy than the left-wing feminist Levy does.
However, I concede one important point of Levy’s book: Much of the rhetoric in support of what she calls raunch culture unfairly implies that anyone who is shocked or embarrassed by explicit sexuality must be an uptight prude. Christie Hefner told Levy that Playboy’s growing popularity among women proves that the “post–sexual revolution, post–women’s movement generation...has just a more grown-up, comfortable, natural attitude about sex and sexiness....” (emphasis in the original, p. 39) But sexiness is always at least mildly transgressive, and transgression constantly threatens to make us uncomfortable. Can the libertine and the square each find a way to be right without making the other wrong?Labels: Femi, He, TaoGlam, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 7:27 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.
