Lara Stone | Playboy France June/July 2010 | Explicit

Just days after Hugh Hefner’s Playboy USA opened a huge disappointment of a website called TheSmokingJacket.com, photos of Lara Stone in Playboy France June/July 2010 hit the Internet.

The two visions give us a dramatic contrast between sensuality in America and in France. This subject is declaring itself daily as a massive fault line between the two cultures, and one that has critical impact on women’s self-image.

If Playboy America lacks sophistication and sensuality of any kind, Playboy France delivers the fusion between fashion and eroticism that has been my focus for the last decade. As a professional, these Lara Stone photos in Playboy cement the fusion of our go-foward sensual mentality.

America will struggle and fight hard not to embrace this comprehensive vision of female sensuality, one that marries female sexuality and respectability. In doing so, Playboy France opens the new media door widely, because of its brand name Playboy and because Lara Stone, one of the top models in the world today under exclusive contract with Calvin Klein is the model.

From a business career standpoint, the implications of these photos are a final confirmation of a huge progression, one that opens as many new questions as it answers old ones. This is fertile photographic territory for both men and women, and Anne of Carversville’s Group Sensuality will gradually take a lead position in executing this concept from a female-centric point of view.

To long-time readers who know us well, including my problems with Google Images, the explicit photos are not in circulation. I could post them all at Sensuality News in a filtered category. As an American woman who has repeatedly cut herself into pieces over what we all agree is an obviously-expressed, deeply-seated sensuality, I refuse to cut myself into little pieces here at Anne of Carversville.

The book to your right and even the short piece I wrote yesterday about my past, Even Small Town Kissing Brands Women Slut Girls, reveal my own determination to shine the light on a repression of female sexuality in America that doesn’t exist today in France, Italy, Sweden or even Brazil.

I believe that the obesity problem for American women is anchored in our self-loathing and ambivalence over our sexuality and respectability. As a 10-year-key executive with Victoria’s Secret in the early years (87-96) — the brand-building years — my mission was to fuse this schism in American women. The arrival of the Angels derailed this Victoria’s Secret relationship between American women.

It’s an exciting day for me personally to post the Lara Stone in Playboy photos. Thank you Lara — and thank you France (and Italy) for making me the woman I am today. My endless months and experiences in your countries helped me triumph over the self-loathing I experienced over being a sexy, smart American woman. 

I should add that there is a great deal of expressed interest in America’s cultural intelligentsia (and there is one) to confront this issue once and for all. If the boomers don’t, it will be decades before we have another opportunity. Anne

More reading:

20 Very Sexy Lara Stone Editorials | Seductive to Scorching

Update on Thu, October 28, 2010 by Anne

Lara Stone in Fall 2009/10 Eres lingerie campaignPrivate Studio| Supermodel Lara Stone has won ‘significant’ damages from the French edition of Playboy magazine for printing her unauthorized images. Stone filed the case in July 2010 against photographer Greg Lotus in a Paris court under French image rights legislation, saying then that she did not consent for the pictures to appear in the magazine. Read on in Daily Musings

What’s Behind Lara Stone Suing French Playboy and Greg Lotus?



Comments

[SwitchMe]

"The two visions give us a dramatic contrast between sensuality in America and in France. This subject is declaring itself daily as a massive fault line between the two cultures, and one that has critical impact on women’s self-image."

Well spoken.

It leaves open the very difficult question - and problem - of how to better incorporate some aspect of sensuality and sexuality at a point in young peoples' lives when it might actually make a difference.

I continue to believe that one of the fundmental problems in the US around youth and sex is a total lack of good education that leads to a vacuum around knowledge about what constitutes a good relationship. Lacking this, it's no surprise to get the often gruesome headlines we do get. And even less surprising that the media continues to fuel these warped images and ideas about what "sex" is.

Thanks.

[Anne]

Thank you back for your insights. Anne

[Anne]

Readers may know by now that Lara Stone won the case she filed against Playboy France over their printing the images without her permission. Because Lara is so self-expressive with her body -- often being photographed nude -- it never occurred to me that the photos were published without her permission.

Of course we support Lara Stone's right to control her own image. In America, Madonna lost a case involving Playboy many years ago. Apparently French courts have different rules than American ones.

My original comments about Lara's body love and ambivalence here in America about sensuality and morality stand.