Playboy pin-up defies sex objectification

When I first pick up a copy of Playboy each month, I skip around, reading the articles, Q’s and A’s and checking out the featured pictorials. In each set of photos, I see confident, smiling women who obviously have no qualms about appearing nude in a widely distributed magazine. And why should they?

Why, in our sex crazed culture, is sexually suggestive nudity so shocking? I have heard and read some cultural criticism of Playboy as obscene and objectifying, but as a woman who has bared it all for the magazine, I have to disagree with this interpretation.

While it is easy to blame Playboy for the objectification and sexualization of women in our culture, I feel that many of the women and men who are quick to label Playboy as offensive and objectifying are just trying to feel better about the support they lend to the repression of female sexual expression.

Our culture is currently on the edge. We teeter between allowing women to do as they wish without condemnation and the converse of limiting what is sexually acceptable. The supposed risk that nude modeling poses to one’s future aspirations characterizes the real problem with Playboy: us.

Posing naked for a magazine would not unravel a girl’s future if we lived in a truly liberated culture. As girls we were told that we could do anything - just like Barbie. But unfortunately that opportunity comes with a few qualifying conditions. Apparently, girls can do and be anything, but only if they do not ruin their reputations by acting in an unacceptably sexual manner. The truth is, Playboy is not the problem, it is the men and women around us who are so concerned with maintaining the moral status quo that they will stop at nothing to shame those of us who defy it. How else can our social obsession with identifying and condemning “sluts” be explained?

As a feminist, I feel obligated to call out those who wear the same label yet pretend to know the supposedly correct choices for women to make. In my understanding, the whole point of the feminist revolution was to ensure that women could decide for themselves what their lives should look like. I am sick of hypocritical women who identify as socially progressive feminists but speak derogatively about other women’s behaviors and choices. We can not stand united if we tear ourselves apart.

Some critics of the magazine assert that Playboy separates the woman and her intelligence from the body, but I completely disagree. First of all, as a magazine run by women, Playboy depends on both the beauty and brains of women from the ground up. Futhermore, the photographers who work for the magazine do a fantastic job of capturing the personality and emotions of the women they photograph. Playboy goes out of its way to genuinely emphasize the interests and intellectual pursuits of its Playmates and pictorial posers alike. If you need a truly disgusting cultural phenomenon to focus on, try Joe Francis, the sexual predator of Girls Gone Wild, who coerces drunk girls into stripping and performing sexual acts. And to those who insist that Rice women are too young to make the decision to pose nude: it is people like you who make posing for Playboy a liability; we are perfectly capable of making decisions for ourselves, thanks. Do you question whether you are truly mature enough to vote? I didn’t think so.

So while my behavior will still be looked down upon as deviant and irresponsible, know that I chose to pose naked with the intention of making people think twice about their own subconscious degradation and the repression of the women around them.

As a passionate feminist, who will leave no outdated social more unchallenged, I dare all of you to pick up an issue of Playboy and see it for what is: a magazine with well-written, intelligent articles and artistic pictures of women in various states of undress — two of whom happen to be talented and capable Rice students. Pictures of nude women are not objectifying unless you as the viewer look at a woman and see only a sexual object — and that’s on you, not Playboy.

Whitney Alsup is a Martel College freshman.

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