Playboy is Porn.
Posted by candyposes on 19 Feb 2007 at 08:57 am | Tagged as: Uncategorized
I make submissions of models to US Playboy — but do NOT make submissions to Hustler and Penthouse. I choose to create images that show the glory, beauty, and glamour of female models — NOT their birth canal.
Recently a photographer posted this on a modeling messageboard that I frequent.
Playboy is many things, but one thing is for sure- it does not intend to show the glory, beauty, and glamour of female models; not in the way that that photographer means, in any case. It’s porn.
Playboy is porn that you can feel not quite as guilty about buying, because you can pretend that it’s not. Just like the website Suicide Girls is porn- not “empowered punk-rock pin-up.” Porn.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Under this category, a lot of what I’ve done is actually porn, and that’s okay with me; I’m unsure whether or not I would pose for Playboy or Penthouse, but that has nothing to do with actual content and everything to do with the magazines themselves.
I think that the Happy Feminist summed it up much better than I could regarding exactly why I’d be hesitant to pose for Playboy, or a similar publication:
Playboy, while preaching a philosophy of sexual liberation for both sexes, is all about infantilizing women. Posing naked is not inherently degrading. But walking around with a cotton-tail on your ass and bunny ears, while gushing about how doing so is the greatest honor of your life, is a bit degrading. Having the nude picture of you posted with a little cutesie yearbook entry about your likes and dislikes written in bubbly handwriting is all about portraying you as unthreatening and powerless as possible. Being one of three girlfriends fawning over 80-year old “Hef” while begging him to put naked pictures of you in his magazine and struggling to abide by the curfew he sets for you — also degrading.
I’d rather do erotic work, er…porn, that involves me wearing a strap-on in a basement in Toledo, not a bunny costume in a mansion.
Melvin Moten Jr., February 2007.
Melvin is my new Hero!
Quite naughty, quite erotic.
Hetero men hide your anus’s !
I like your sumnation about about Playboy. There will be tons of people arguing that playboy is tame but give me Hustler’s Taboo, if I am looking to Jerk my doodle.
Then again, you might be able to make the same arguement there too.
The better is something shot by Mr. Melvin Moten Jr.
Real Erotica.
Playboy, along with many other things out there (including some of your pics), certainly are porn. However, I see a difference between what I consider “tasteful” and not “tasteful” as far as the images go. Playboy, in my mind, is tasteful, as are the pics you post. I do think that things like your pictures and playboy, do show women in a much better light than do things like hustler which just seem to want to show as much pink as possible.
Chip- Are you drunk? (teasing….mostly).
Sarah- It’s not the pictures in and of themselves in Playboy that I object to.
Chip - You are too kind, sir.
Sarah - I resent my work being compared in any way to Playboy. In my work “tasteful” is a nice way of saying “boring”.
besides…Hugh Hefner would never let a strapon in his magazine…I’m busy shopping for a CRAZIER looking strapon as I write this!
Melvin- You rock. By the way, did you see how that thread on Model Mayhem progressed? Someone tolde me that I’m “just mad they haven’t asked you to pose.”
Note to self: wear fewer strap-ons while being photographed- Hef won’t like it.
Speaking of porn, the internet filter program at work won’t let me click on the comments pages of innocent, humdrum blogs, and instead gives me a big gray screen with the word “pornography” in big red letters.
But this pornulating post, no problem. Porn-sniffing-bot’s Turing test score: F-.
Forgive me if you’ve answered this question before elsewhere. I’ve just arrived. Purely out of curiousity, how, exactly, does the admittedly inane format of a Playboy spread make a woman any less powerful or threatening than the same woman bound, gagged, and/or otherwise restrained- as I’ve seen around these parts(e.g. the pic accompanying your Show Me the Money post)?
It seems to me that photos of women in bondage might be considered as tasteless as, say, one of a black man in manacles facing an overseer’s whip. Okay, that’s a bit extreme but I’ve always viewed an interest in S&M as more the telltale signs of a scarred psyche than a lifestyle choice, something to titillate. Your thoughts?
rdz- Hmm…good question. I was talking about this with my boyfriend yesterday.
I think the reason bondage photography/modeling doesn’t bother me, but playboy does, is because there’s a level of pretend that goes on- it takes a suspension of disbelief to think that the person in the photo is tied up against their will, knowing the context the photo is presented in.
Playboy tries to convince us that, yes, those women really are that stupid.
I think that perhaps an accurate comparison is the “barely legal” phenomenon vs. an adult woman in a schoolgirl uniform. The former makes me uncomfortable, the latter does not.
I haven’t found Playboy stimulating- except in the most superficial sense, since I was blundering through adolescence and didn’t know any better. Silicon, soft filters, and airbrushing do absolutely nothing for me. In fact, breast augmentation makes me ill- with the obvious exception of reconstructive, post-mastectomy work.
I happened upon a site the other day called the Vagina Institute and, being something of a connoisseur of that particular part of a woman’s body, was thrilled until I realized that almost all their informative topics led straight to invitations for vaginal/labial enhancement- aimed, I suspect, at making women feel inadequate should some of their naughty bits have the audacity to protrude beyond some arbitrary, Barbie doll-smooth version of crotch topography. I can’t tell you how irate I was until I found that Ann at Feministing had taken them to task.
This brings me to your pink prohibition.
I believe that each woman’s individual nooks and crannies are breathtaking in their own right. At one point, I considered mounting an art project consisting of a series of tissue prints- in lipstick, of the, er, nether lips but gave up due to logistical problems and subject scarcity. I digress. I just think that pink- in it’s natural state and decidedly not the Hustler, gynecologist visit splays, is wonderful. I do like your full bush, though- not to mention your natural breasts. Do you ever grow a crop under your arms? I find it helps to hold scent
rdz-
I do show pink.
I didn’t shave for all of my senior year of high school- I do now partly because of my career.
I’d have to disagree that playboy is trying to convince anyone that the women are stupid. Simply posing in the magazine doesn’t make them stupid, and as someone who has been reading and looking at playboy for several years, and is a woman, I don’t find that they way they are portrayed makes them look anymore stupid then they would simply walking down the street.
Oh, and I have done some nude modeling, and bondage modeling. I agree that there is a fun sense of imagination required for the bondage modeling.
to rdz - I think your idea that an interest in S&M is a sign of a scarred psyche is offensive to anyone who is involved in is BDSM.
Sarah- Did you read the quote from the other blog?
You are confusing the Playboy philosophy with the Playboy fantasy. Playboy (including the clubs and mansion pictorials), Hustler, your pictures, and my pictures are all (at least attempting) to create a fantasy of some sort for the viewer. In most cases, these viewers are male, these fantasies involve “glamorous” (read at least partially nude) women. Playboy was attempting to appeal to the mass male audience. Clearly this was to make money, but it also let the magazine get it’s messages on the Vietnam war, sex, women’s rights, and racial equality to a large audience.
During the 60’s and the 70’s, men controlled most of the power in this country. The magazine had a significant influence on many of these men. Many of the women who worked to create this fantasy have had positive things to say about the experience (see “The Bunny Years”, by K.L. Scott ), although some (such as Gloria Steinem) did not. The “gushing” you refer to it is part of the fantasy, and since it is still in the magazine, it must help sell them.
I believe the bunnies are all gone now, so you are really judging them in a context (today) where they no longer exist. Clearly, it is not your kind of job, but it does not infantalize or degrade women in my view any more than your photographs or my photographs. Your viewers have their fantasy, why do you object to the Playboy readers’ having theirs? Are you advocating censorship?