Playboy Magazine Research Articles

Robert Olby, Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets (New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2009), pp. xix + 538, $45.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-87969-798-3.

Robert Olby, Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets (New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2009), pp. xix + 538, $45.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-87969-798-3.

Serious Play

Serious Play Katharine Capshaw Smith Cultural historian Robin Bernstein recently gave a talk at my university on the Kenneth and Mamie Clark doll experiments of the 1940s. These experiments, now famous, asked African American children to select between black and white dolls. The record of children's preference for white dolls, as well as the young people's despair at being presented with such a choice, became potent evidence for efforts at school integration, particularly during the Brown v. Board of Education hearings. Bernstein's fascinating presentation focused not on the uses of the experiments within the civil rights campaign, however, but on the way in which children's facility with cultural expectations for doll play helped influence the choice between a black and a white doll. In short, black dolls had historically been used in play associated with violence, and children's reluctance to select the black doll revealed their resistance to the American cultural practice of defiling black bodies. One of Bernstein's observations allowed me to reflect on unspoken assumptions about children's culture within the field of literary criticism: "In my research on doll-play, I constantly found the phrase 'supposed to': children reported that they knew how they were 'supposed to' play with different dolls. Sometimes they did what they were 'supposed to' do, other times they refused, but they consistently understood the play scenarios that dolls prompted, the traditions of performance that dolls referred to." Stepping back from the particular example of the Clarks' experiments, I wondered then about the expectations for critical play with children's books within the field of literary studies. How are we able to challenge cultural "givens" about the place and purposes of children's texts? What are we "supposed to do" with children's literature, and how do we engage and often resist such expectations? The essays in this issue of the Quarterly all reveal an awareness of cultural expectations for children's texts and then spotlight moments of resistance to such expectations; our essays analyze re-imaginings of texts and of authorial identity or themselves demonstrate resistant critical practices. In other words, they do not play the way they are "supposed to" play, and for [End Page 1] that I am grateful. Adrienne Kertzer's essay, "Fidelity, Felicity, and Playing Around in Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox," discusses expectations for film adaptations of children's books, arguing that Anderson cannily understands the cultural demand for fidelity to the source text, but he instead offers "a tribute" to Dahl influenced largely by Anderson's own childhood experiences rather than by textual accuracy. In one section of the essay, Kertzer looks at the figure of a more critical and ironic Mrs. Fox in the adaptation, finding that "The film thereby functions as both a tribute and a critique, differing significantly from previous filmic adaptations that never consider challenging Dahl's depiction of adult women." Adaptations play with children's texts, even as they pledge to be faithful to the original, and Kertzer's essay asks us to reconsider attraction to the idea of a stable text. Joseph T. Thomas Jr. studies a persona of one of the most popular children's poets of the twentieth century, Shel Silverstein. To say that this persona has been overlooked or ignored is an understatement; the "Uncle Shelby" version of Silverstein is bawdy, earthy, irreverent, and iconoclastic, qualities not typically embraced by the children's book–buying public. Thomas discusses the larger purposes of re-imagining our popular authors: "Shel Silverstein and his persona, Uncle Shelby, provide us with a more robust way to think about children's literature, reminding us that the line between texts for adults and those for children is far more blurry than we generally like to believe, as is the line between child culture and adult culture, even though we like to police that line with ever-growing determination." According to Thomas, ignoring Silverstein's publications within the pages of Playboy magazine has restricted our awareness of the scope of his attention, as well as limited our appreciation of the ambition of his authorial presentations. If Thomas bucks our expectations for reading Shel Silverstein, Lydia Kokkola takes...

Evulvalution: The Portrayal of Women's External Genitalia and Physique across Time and the Current Barbie Doll Ideals

Media images of the female body commonly represent reigning appearance ideals of the era in which they are published. To date, limited documentation of the genital appearance ideals in mainstream media exists. Analysis 1 sought to describe genital appearance ideals (i.e., mons pubis and labia majora visibility, labia minora size and color, and pubic hair style) and general physique ideals (i.e., hip, waist, and bust size, height, weight, and body mass index [BMI]) across time based on 647 Playboy Magazine centerfolds published between 1953 and 2007. Analysis 2 focused exclusively on the genital appearance ideals embodied by models in 185 Playboy photographs published between 2007 and 2008. Taken together, results suggest the perpetuation of a “Barbie Doll” ideal characterized by a low BMI, narrow hips, a prominent bust, and hairless, undefined genitalia resembling those of a prepubescent female.

Reading Poetry for Critical Reflection on Consumer Behavior

Poems about Barbie dolls and Playboy magazine can help students become more critical of images of beauty.

The Big Book

Page 16 American Book Review Imperial William T. Vollmann Viking http://www.penguin.com 1,344 pages; cloth, $55.00 William T. Vollmann has been labeled a postmodernist , maximalist, metafictionist, contemporary and historical novelist, pornographer, journalist, cultural /social critic, travel writer, and autobiographer (also an accomplished photographer, engraver, water colorist, printer, bookbinder, poet, and manufacturer of his own bullets for his pistol). His latest tome, Imperial , is the result of ten years of obsessive research, riding on the coattails of success after the National Book Award-winning Europe Central (2005) and the 2008 Strauss Living Award (sharing the honor with Madison Smartt Bell). In 1997, Vollmann discovered the Anza-Borrego desert in California and the neighboring county of Imperial that encompasses thousands of acres of desolate desert, the contaminated Salton Sea, a curious mixture of Mexican, Chinese, and Indian culture, as well as the volatile and controversial issues of the US/Mexican border and the “illegal migrant worker” conditions and human rights. Similar to Vollmann’s career, Imperial cannot be framed into any compact genre: part journalism , part ethnography, part memoir, part cultural study, part political manifesto, part prose poem, it is a logical extension of his previous two books: Poor People (2007), where some of the migrant workers in Imperial County make an appearance, and Riding Toward Everywhere (2008), where Vollmann hops trains in, or rides on trains that pass through, Imperial County. Vollmann searches for what may or may not exist during his decade-long jaunts into a region whose name (much like another county, Inland Empire , not far north of Imperial) ironically conjures up images of majestic colonialism. For migrant workers in Latin America, Imperial represents the American Dream, a path out of poverty, a promised land of blue skies and green hills; crossing over, they find a harsh land with little work, and sometimes return home or are caught by la migra and forced back to Mexico. Vollmann also searches for the Chinese tunnels under the two border towns Calexico (US side) and Mexicali. The Chinese communities on the border and the outskirts of the Salton Sea are descendants of the Chinese railroad workers of nineteenth-century expansion. No one talks about the tunnels, many treat them as urban legends, yet Vollmann uncovers evidence that the Chinese folk on the border did indeed use tunnels to smuggle in goods, drugs, people, and engage in illegal gambling (and possibly still do). Casting himself as a “private investigator,” Vollmann outfits a spy camera in the shape of a shirt button (paid for by Playboy magazine) and infiltrates a “sweat shop” to uncover the true conditions of those seeking theAmerican Dream: Mexican women forced into backbreaking labor for little pay. Vollmann also searches for himself: inevitably, over a decade, the events in Vollmann’s life, and his experiences while in Imperial, change his outlook. He finds the invisible county, state, and country lines of the region “delineations and subdelineations” in the lives of the people he meets, and his own life, so that this book forms itself as it goes. Fields, cemeteries, newspapers and death certificates beguile and delay me; I don’t care that I’ll never finish anything; Imperial will scour them away with its dry winds and the brooms of its fivedollars -an-hour laborers…. Imperial is what I want it to be….. The desert is real…but there is no such place as Imperial; and I, who don’t belong there, was never anything but a word-haunted ghost. Claiming that “books are whatever we want them to be,” and that this book has multiple labels and layers, Vollmann imagines an Imperial in his mind, an ideal place, in contrast to the physical Imperial County. It is a place where Vollmann gets away from his domestic life in Sacramento, his image as a major American writer, his role as the danger-seeking journalist , a place where “I know that I’ll sleep happily and well.” “Imperial is the father and son who sit high and gently swinging in one car of the otherwise unoccupied ferris wheel which reigns over a sandy night carnival,” he muses. Imperial is also a space where he finds and loses...

A Thoughtful Call for Higher Moral Standards, Courtesy of Playboy Magazine

The author points to the wisdom of Jimmy Carter in recognizing that thoughts lead to action and his courage in saying so.

The Answer to Suburbia: Playboy's Urban Lifestyle

This article examines images of urban and domestic space that appeared in Playboy magazine in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that in crafting the bachelor's ideal habitat, Playboy engaged in a popular discourse on changing roles for men and women, transformations in the urban landscape, and a consolidating ethos of consumption. Readers encountered a vision of urban life and domesticity that served as a gendered response to the perceived “feminization” of society and widespread suburbanization while also countering images of urban decline. Playboy's representations of the bachelor pad and the city provide insight into the meanings attached to the evolution of the metropolitan landscape in the postwar period and reveal the cultural foundations for the construction of a masculine identity based on leisure and consumption.

The Parodic Sensibility and the Sophisticated Gaze

The dramatic success of Playboy magazine in the 1950s paralleled the meteoric rise of television as both an industry and cultural form, but the magazine's relationship with the new electronic medium was an uneasy one. Television's status as a domestic, even feminine, medium posed particular challenges, even more so than the “masscult” critique. Rather than recommending specific programs for consumption as it did with books, albums, and movies, the magazine promoted parody as a “sophisticated” way to engage television. Parody was adopted as a form of interpretation that produced alternative pleasures and meaning, thereby making visual consumption practices a marker of cultural capital. The tensions between Playboy and television were especially apparent in Playboy's own syndicated program, Playboy's Penthouse (1959—1961). The urbane and varied performances of the program, and its distinctive televisual style, offered a version of sophisticated television production that supplemented the magazine's model of sophisticated television watching.

Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005)

With the death of Vine Deloria Jr. on November 13, 2005, in Golden, Colorado, American anthropology has lost its most persistent, outspoken, and effective Native American critic. His spectacular first book, Custer Died for Your Sins (1969b), raised public awareness of the continued presence of American Indians in contemporary society, and the chapter Anthropologists and Other Friends, preprinted in Playboy Magazine (1969a), did as much to call attention to anthropology as to the problems faced by American Indians. He was the unquestioned leader among American Indian academicians and the most respected national Indian spokesman of his generation. Vine Deloria was born in Martin, South Dakota, on March 26, 1933, the first of three children of Vine V. Deloria Sr. and Barbara S. Eastburn Deloria. His father was a

Cultural representations of thinness in women, redux: Playboy magazine's depiction of beauty from 1979 to 1999

Playboy' s portrayal of the male ideal of feminine beauty, in terms of overall body size, percent normative weight, and waist-to-hip ratios (WHRs), was analyzed for the years 1979–1999. Trends were examined through body measurements obtained from Playboy centerfolds. Results reveal a continuation of the low body mass index (BMI) found in the Playmates by earlier studies; however, for the 21 years examined, the trend towards increasing thinness seems to have stabilized and may have begun to actually reverse. There was also an increase in the centerfolds’ WHRs over the 21-year time period. Overall, the results support the continued valuing in American society of a thin ideal for women; while the images of beauty have become somewhat heavier over the 21-year period reviewed, the Playmates remain markedly below weights normative for their age group.

Corporate Bodies of Desire: An investigation into the ‘Women of Enron’

This article explores how the corporate body and its desire for capital scripts workers' bodies through heterosexual desire. I draw on the case of Enron, the Texas-based energy company currently embroiled in legal action for fraudulent accounting practices. These practices are tied to a corporate culture that, in the desire for revenue accumulation, hid debt and misinformed employees and stockholders. Drawing from mainstream media accounts of the Enron scandal, I examine the role of gender in the exposure of Enron. First, I look at how media narratives frame the exposure of Enron by a female journalist and a female whistleblower. Then, following the uncovering of Enron's fraudulent financial strategies, the August 2002 issue of Playboy Magazine featured the ‘Women of Enron’ revealing their own ‘assets’. My second task is to analyse this Playboy spread in the context of the Enron fall. Through an investigation of the exposure of Enron by these two sets of women, the ‘good’ girls and the ‘bad’ girls, I draw out the parallels between Enron's desire for capital with a desire for the female body. Further, I make note and comment on the conspicuous absence of the male body in these narratives. Cuerpos Corporativo de Deseo: Una investigación de «las mujeres de Enron» Éste artículo explora como el cuerpo corporativo y su deseo para capital, le escribe al cuerpo de trabajadores a través del deseo heterosexual. Utilizo el caso de Enron, la compañía de energía ubicado en Texas que está envuelto en acción legal para sus practicas fraudulentos de contabilidad. Éstas practicas están entrelazado con una cultura corporativa que, en el deseo para más acumulación de ingresos, escondió deudas y engañó a sus empleos y accionistas. Haciendo use de interpretaciones de los medios de comunicación dominantes sobre el escándalo de Enron, examino el papel de género en revelarlo. Primero examino como las narrativas de los medios de comunicación sitúa la revelación del escándalo de Enron por una periodista femenina y una trabajadora—whistleblower—de Enron. Luego, siguiendo el descubrimiento de la contabilidad fraudulento de Enron, la edición de agosot 2002 de la revista Playboy tenia como artículo de fondo «Las Mujeres de Enron» mostrando sus propios ‘bienes’. Mi segundo tarea es analizar ésta edición de Playboy en el contexto del fracaso de Enron. A través de una investigación de la revelación de Enron por los dos diferentes clases mujeres—la buena y la mala—señalo los paralelos entre el deseo de Enron para capital con el deseo para el cuerpo femenino. Además, indico y comento en la ausencia evidente del cuerpo masculino en éstas narrativas.

Temporal Changes in Anthropometric Measurements of Idealized Females and Young Women in General

ABSTRACT This study examined the temporal anthropometric changes in idealized female body images in the media (i.e., Playboy magazine Playmates of the Year, Miss America Pageant Winners, and Fashion Models) and Young Women in general across eight decades. Overall, all anthropometric measures differed significantly over time. Body mass index (BMI) for all women in the idealized groups tended to decline significantly over time, while the BMI for Young Women increased significantly. Models tended to have the smallest bust and hips, Playmates the largest bust, and Young Women in general the largest waist and hips. The general trend for all groups was to move from a less curvaceous body shape in the early part of the twentieth century to a more curvaceous shape at mid-century and returning to a less curvaceous shape at the end of the century. Idealized women have a body size unlike that of Young Women and the chasm between the media-defined ideal and reality is continuing to diverge.

“What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?” the Self-Reported Influence of Playboy on the Construction of Masculinity

Virtually no research has explored men's phenomenological experiences with sexually explicit material. The present research examined men's self-reports regarding how they felt reading Playboy magazine had affected them and influenced their conceptualization of and interactions with women. Qualitative analysis of 22 Playboy readers' self-reports indicated that first exposure to Playboy is a very memorable event, that Playboy served as a source of sex-related information, and that Playboy contributed to the development of a sexual self-concept. Playboy readers' attitudes toward Playmates lacked a misogynistic component. The possible influence of Playboy as a means of socializing boys into men is noted.

Feminism, Disability, and Embodiment

A recent exhibit on Feminism and Art at the National Museum of Women in the Arts included Barbara Bloom's 1995 work, Playboy in Braille. 1 For reasons that remain unknown to me, the museum chose to exhibit Bloom's work closed, leaving visitors to wonder about the relationship between a copy of a braille Playboy magazine and an exhibit on Feminism and Art. After all, Barbara Bloom did not create the braille edition of the magazine, so why would it be exhibited in an enclosed glass case crediting Barbara Bloom? After further investigation, I learned that Bloom's artistic addition to the magazine was the centerfold, a copy of Eve Arnold's 1954 photograph of Marilyn Monroe, fully clothed and reading James Joyce's Ulysses ([1922] 1992). 2 While perhaps not a conscious interrogation of the complex connections between feminism and disability studies, Barbara Bloom's Playboy in Braille nonetheless provides rich interpretive ground for considering how feminist disability studies draws upon and challenges analyses of bodily norms, identity, accommodation, representation, and oppression in both feminism and disability studies, themes addressed by the essays included in this volume.

X-Rated X-Ray Invades Privacy Rights

X-rated X-ray machines utilizing backscatter technology are strip-searching unsuspecting travelers as they pass through our nation's border and airport checkpoints. These machines not only check for explosives, drugs, or other contraband, but also are capable of counting hairs on a man's chest or measuring the depth of a woman's navel. At the same time the machines are checking for contraband, they can produce an X-rated image comparable in quality to those found in Playboy magazine. This article focuses on the efficacy of the device, the need to protect society, and individual privacy rights in light of the boundaries provided by Fourth Amendment search and seizure laws. Supporting arguments advanced for use of backscatter technology include (a) the enhanced security to society, (b) reduced invasiveness of the search, and (c) the reduction in health risks associated with the use of the devices. Opposing arguments focus upon the slippery slope and unacceptable degree of intrusion upon the privacy rights of the individual. The article concludes by framing the legal arguments within an analysis of the opportunity costs associated with implementation of the X-rated X-ray devices.

What Do Playboy Playmates Want? Implications of Expressed Preferences in the Construction of the “Unfinished” Masculine Identity

Although the literature on mate preferences indicates that women prefer men with both stereotypic masculine traits, such as strength and assertiveness, and stereotypic feminine traits, such as nurturance and sensitivity, men are encouraged to adopt identities that include only stereotypic masculine traits. This discrepancy produces gender-based role strain for men caught between the desires of women and the demands of social convention. We suggest that the centerfold text published in Playboy magazine provides a useful social infrastructure to help men develop more broadly defined conceptualizations of masculinity. In our analysis of Playboy playmate centerfold texts, we found that playmates expressed a preference for men who included stereotypic feminine attributes in their identities. In the context of attempting to be more attractive to women such as Playboy playmates, the adoption of feminine attributes can be readily justified and help men experience less gender-based role strain.

Idealized female body images in print mediatargeted to men: A longitudinal analysis of playboy magazine centerfold models

Idealized female body images in print mediatargeted to men: A longitudinal analysis of playboy magazine centerfold models

The Playboy Rabbit is Soft, Furry, and Cute: Is This Really the Symbol of Masculine Dominance of Women?

Images presented in the mass media often contain subtexts that perpetuate gender stereotypes. We suggest that in some instances, underlying messages in mass media can operate to oppose, rather than reinforce, gender stereotypes. To examine this hypothesis, we used the first ten years of Playboy magazine as our data source. We provide evidence that the magazine attempted to broaden the conceptualization of masculinity by defining as the ideal an identity that incorporated a number of characteristics traditionally associated with women. We identify several processes by which Playboy accomplished this goal. These processes included co-opting the meaning of the word “playboy,” associating sexual success with the possession of traditionally feminine traits, and using a rabbit as Playboy‘s symbol.

Capitalistic Ideology as an 'Interpersonal Game'

Capitalistic Ideology as an 'Interpersonal Game'

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ADVERTISING INFORMATION IN A U.S. AND MEXICO EDITION OF A MEN'S MAGAZINE

This study examines the information content of Mexican and U.S. advertisements in a popular men's magazine to determine the relative levels of information content in the advertising. The research team examined a year's worth of the international and domestic editions of Playboy magazine, using a 14‐point information cue criteria. The study concluded that Mexican magazine advertisements are more informative than those in the U.S. editions. Additional conclusions indicated that information cues are markedly different with respect to frequency within the advertisements of the two countries.