June 27, 2008
The return of the Employee of the Month
Tulsa strip club co-owner Lottie Selsor, June 2008 Employee of the Month
U.S. Army contractor Dana Marie, July 2008 Employee of the MonthLast year, I complained about contradictory or redundant “Coeds of the Month” for the magazine versus the Cyber Club. With gratitude, I notice that
Playboy online and
Playboy ondeadtree (the word is apparently
Jonah Goldberg’s coinage) are now coordinated properly in celebration of the Employee of the Month. Yay!
Labels: CC, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:22 AM
June 7, 2008
Whence justice for misnamed Playboy models?
On the night of the Hollywood premiere of the first movie with you in the starring role, would you resent it if your name were misspelled on the marquee? I think it’s only natural. In case you missed the errata in the January “Dear Playboy” about the October “Girls of the SEC” pictorial, I reprint it below. We attention-seekers need to help each other!
We switched the names under two photos: The Florida student on the upper left on page 112 is Neenah Dreslin, while the Florida student on the upper right on page 116 is Natasha Combs. Also, the photo in the middle of page 117 shows not Brittney Brookwood but Alyssa Tyler.
In my personal life, it’s a time of crisis, risk, and opportunity. Situations like this tend to put the value of my friendships into focus. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Terri Lynn Farrow, a representative of LSU in that pictorial and also a friend of mine, deserves to be a Playmate of the Month.Labels: ArtPic, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:49 PM
January 7, 2008
Guest essay: It’s me, Heidi Ellis
As a consequence of her own choices at the time, Heidi Ellis almost made it to Playboy’s April 1991 “Women of the Women’s Colleges” pictorial, but not quite. The unsolicited email I got from her last month was so articulate and so relevant to what I’m up to at this site that, with only minor editing, I’m proud to present it here as a guest essay.
Hi Brian,
I just found your blog. It’s interesting that people are still debating the issues surrounding this event; it seems to have happened another lifetime ago.
My actions and the events of 1991 must seem completely absurd when re-framed in the context of present day social politics. At that time, the older feminist school of thought—as outlined by my professors at Mills and the authors from our course readings—were largely condemning and repressive when it came to physical representation of women. It was as if we were selling out just to wear lipstick, have long, “girly” hair, or shave our legs. This may sound petty in present-day politics, but believe me, it was a venomous issue. I’m not trivializing the battle before my time; the women before me worked very, very hard to make gains for women, paving the path for future generations of women today. But the context of the struggle evolved. Today we afford the trivial flexibility of individual expression that goes with the hard-won, concrete gains in the workplace. Wearing lipstick, long hair, and high heels are no longer viewed as symbols of the shackles of our oppression. My playful and defiant reaction was to agree to pose for Playboy when asked shortly after graduation.
While additional revelations led me to change my mind after two weeks on the road with Playboy serving as a spokesperson for the pictorial, the greatest force at work was this: I felt shamed and guilt-tripped into changing my mind. I was blasted all day long on CNN and in the press by self-declared feminist men and women who protested my perpetuation of “dangerous images of women” which led to “abuse” and even “the dismemberment of women.” Talk show hosts and audience members, both male and female, scorned my stupidity for playing into the hands of evil, evil Playboy men—both from the context of feminism and from fundamentalist prudery. Meanwhile, my Alma Mater declared that I was sullying an entire women’s educational system. Hello??? That’s a bit of pressure to put on a girl who wanted a little approval. I simply didn’t want all that negative attention, so I asked Playboy not to publish my photos. I went on to speak publicly on TV and at universities in a dialogue that evolved into the well-accepted Beauty Myth. I met Naomi Wolf and we began to scratch at the surface of an issue which today is widely accepted; I’m thrilled that young women today are aware of the illusion of perfection in the media. Hopefully, this awareness releases every woman from the pressure to measure up to an unrealistic ideal. But the rash of plastic surgery makes me think not.
In 1991, I was thrilled to measure up to the approval of such strict societal standards of beauty. As for Playboy, they were eating up the free publicity resulting from dogmatic feminist disapproval. Playboy would have been disappointed if feminists didn’t protest; but I knew better than anyone else that Playboy would get the old-school feminist knee-jerk response they wanted. Today Playboy might want to consider having a pictorial on born-again Christians and they’ll get the same guaranteed publicity from fundamentalists. Or picture Playboy announcing auditions for a pictorial on African-American women from Howard University and then you might understand the ensuing dialogue and fury that surrounded the events of 1991.
A related earlier post:
$50 for your guest essayLabels: Femi, MorPa, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 9:04 AM
January 4, 2008
The year before I was born, in a city thousands of miles away: the Jedi Bunny of my dreams
I was 16 when the 35th-anniversary issue of Playboy (January 1989) came out. Thanks to the Playboy Cyber Club retrospective on the 35-anniversary Playmate hunt that appeared the other day, I felt that age again. However, I want to be sure not to overlook an accidental juxtaposition of two mythic pop-cultural elements that I noticed in the other “magazine classic” that has just been released: “Bunnies of New York” (May 1971).
Emily Brown, at the Club’s Living Room buffet above, is a stay-at-home who writes fairy tales.
Photography by Pompeo Posar
At least once on That ’70s Show, Donna scolds Eric about his habit of making gratuitous Star Wars analogies. I refuse to take the hint. Sorry. Those analogies are too useful and too much fun. The photography team, the model, and the caption writer generate a mood of such noble, tranquil, dreamy solitude that, despite the anachronism, it’s easier for me to believe that the shiny cylinder at the Bunny’s hip is a lightsaber than a coin dispenser. As enticingly beautiful as Emily Brown is, a man who disturbed her fairy-tale reverie by making a crude pass would be as doomed as Actaeon after his transgression against Artemis.
Artemis and Aphrodite save me from Playboy Enterprises’ copyright lawyers in 2008!Labels: CC, Cintv, Lit, RI, RS, TaoGlam, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:01 AM
November 8, 2007
Will the real “Coed of the Month” please stand up, please stand up, please stand up, please stand up?
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?Labels: ArtPic, CC, Lit, NaBr, PM, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:27 PM
October 25, 2007
The return of the Bunny (and, in all likelihood, the Playmate Bunny)
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!Labels: Mil, PM, RI, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:55 PM
September 12, 2007
Make Terri Lynn Farrow a Playmate!
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
October 22, 2005
Mutual respect between ogler and ogled
Another oldie-but-goodie in my collection is the November 1985 issue, featuring a “Women of Mensa” pictorial. Elizabeth Rogers, then a 23-year-old graduate student at North Carolina State University, appears there [not work-safe] in revealing lingerie and a wide-brimmed, 1930s-style women’s hat, the fingers of her right hand elegantly supporting a cigarette holder. In a smaller photo on the same page, the fair-skinned, short-haired brunette is dressed more modestly in a white robe and an orange belt, her fist outstretched in a tae kwon do pose. The accompanying text indicates, in large, bold type, that her I.Q. is 135. She is quoted as saying this about her choice to pose:
People view sexuality so intensely, almost painfully. People should discover sensuality. The beauty of sensuality is that it doesn’t necessarily involve physical sex. Half of the fun in life is innuendo. I like the idea that intelligent men will be looking at me here, but that doesn’t mean I want to sleep with them.
These words are relatively unremarkable for Playboy’s regular readers, who have frequently seen such articulate self-confidence in its models. But they may come as a surprise to those people (cough! academics cough!) who would deal in sanctimonious clichés about the “exploitation” and “objectification” of Elizabeth Rogers.
Playboy has been known to fib occasionally in the text of its pictorials. But I’m reasonably certain that the quotation is authentic. If Playboy had aimed to sex things up by putting words in Rogers’ mouth, it would presumably have depicted her as willing to sleep with any man, intelligent or not, without hesitation.
I devoted a blog post to this quotation because I’m deeply flattered by the high esteem this lovely woman holds me in as a Playboy reader. I’m ridiculously hypersensitive and insecure; I need constant reassurance that I’m not a sleazeball.Labels: ArtPic, Femi, Theme, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:55 PM
October 20, 2005
“All women deserve to wear white”
Sifting through my Playboy collection, I see a pictorial in the May 1992 issue that reminds me of what makes Playboy so special. “A Pride of Brides” [not work-safe] shows women provocatively half-dressed in bride and bridesmaid outfits. The most philosophically interesting part of this pictorial is the subtitle on its first page: “All women deserve to wear white.” What an eloquent affirmation of the essential innocence of the women in Playboy—and of the magazine’s male readers, who, by implication, are worthy of tuxedos.
At this point, I anticipate objections from some of my readers. Maxim, Penthouse, and Hustler would never bother to send this superfluous message. They give their readers credit for knowing that sex is healthy, normal, and natural. The younger, hipper men’s magazines don’t insult our intelligence by rehashing the virgin-whore complex. At this stage of the sexual revolution, the only people with this complex are the relatively unsophisticated products of a repressive society that taught them to believe that sex is dirty. At best, Playboy is fighting an old battle that has already been largely won. At worst, it’s cynically exploiting the remnants of this puritanical belief system in order to sell magazines.
My answer to these objections is inspired by the work of Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, one of my intellectual heroes. In his revolutionary 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker debunks the widespread notion of twentieth-century social science that sexual attitudes are purely the result of social conditioning. For complex evolutionary reasons, humans are generally inclined to regard sex with much ambivalence and anxiety: “In all societies, sex is at least somewhat ‘dirty.’ It is conducted in private, pondered obsessively, regulated by custom and taboo, the subject of gossip and teasing, and a trigger for jealous rage.” (p. 253) If some degree of prudery is an eternal, tragicomic element of the human condition, then Playboy deserves our gratitude as an institution that continually reminds us of the counterintuitive principle that, under appropriate circumstances, sex is beautiful and good.
Let’s not kid ourselves. We do not already know that all women deserve to wear white. We need to be told this over and over again.
This post was modified on November 21, 2005, at 12:15 a.m. I replaced the word fact with the word principle.Labels: ArtPic, BlaSla, Sc, Theme, VW
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:13 PM
U.S. Army contractor Dana Marie, July 2008 Employee of the Month
On the night of the Hollywood premiere of the first movie with you in the starring role, would you resent it if your name were misspelled on the marquee? I think it’s only natural. In case you missed the errata in the January “Dear Playboy” about the October “Girls of the SEC” pictorial, I reprint it below. We attention-seekers need to help each other!
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.