Playboy Marks All Women As Not Good Enough - NSFW
Note| major nudity| By now most of you know that I am a really modern woman with an open mind on most sexual matters. In my 10-year career at Victoria’s Secret, I was exposed to plenty of model images and marketing decisions around photography for windows and national ad campaigns.
My beat was product, design, and merchandising — not marketing, but I attended key meetings involving raw, unretouched Victoria’s Secret model images.
In my consulting career since leaving Victoria’s Secret, I have been part of retouching lingerie photography conversations with clients like Vasarette and Vanity Fair, where we actually said “no leave that, this is natural for women.”
I’ve been part of conversations with clients where we handed back the photos, saying “too perfect; you made them fake. Why did you carve out her waist like that? No woman looks like that.”
Did we retouch images? Yes. If the model had a zit on her face that day, did we get rid of it? Yes. Did we remove some lumps and wayward bumps and an ounce of cellulite or two? Yes. I am guilty as charged.
‘The Year Of The Rabbit’ Playboy Auction
In my career, I have never seen a group of images like these from ‘The Year Of The Rabbit’ auction of Playboy images by Christies.
Jezebel delivers a set of photos that every American woman should stare at long and hard.
For every day that I kick women in the butt telling us to get a grip, get going and stop whining, today I have tears in my eyes for us.
There may be no better example of why American women believe we’re washed up at 28 when Italian, French and Brazilian women say 35-45, with 45 winning as many votes.
Under the direction of a woman, Christie Hefner, who became president of Playboy Enterprises in 1982 and chairman of the board and CEO in 1988 until she stepped down in 2009, these images from the 1990s and early 2000s were marked up by editors and the art department, then subjected to a panel that graded them with a composite score.
Jezebel sums up the reality of these images perfectly:
… the message is clear: even after a genetic bounty, all-but-certain plastic surgery and dieting, good lighting, a pro-photographer, and dozens of shots, even the fantasy woman is not fantastic enough. Ironically, it’s that mentality, and its cookie-cutter sexual sensibility, that’s helped make Playboy irrelevant in the years since.
As a woman who embraces erotica and expressed sensuality and who believes that humans can never have too much good sex; as a professional who is willing to risk my profesional reputation to promote erotic and nude fashion art; as a person who puts myself at physical risk to challenge politican fundamentalism and religious orthodoxy in its claims to control the female body, let me say that these images make me sick, absolutely ill.
The Playboy photographs also make me very sad because I know what women go through trying to live up to this ideal in American culture.
These scribbled, marked up and graded photographs sum up the reality that every American woman lives with from the time she is a young girl. She will NEVER be good enough, never celebrate her uniqueness, never allow herself to find beauty in even her small flaws.
If you want to understand why American women can’t bear to look at themselves in the mirror, laying claim to our own beauty and uniqueness, stare for awhile on these annotated images, and you’ll never wonder why again.
For every woman in America, the numbers will never add up to anything close to a perfect 10. From pornography to fashion and beauty, our flaws and the impossible pursuit of perfect are the focus of our national psyche.
I only wish that these images could go to a museum about American women, because they are part of the story of just how not liberated American women are, compared to women in many other countries.
My issue is not erotica or these Playboy images showing naked women. I detest how truly beautiful women that supposedly represent what every man wants, are carved up into little pieces like graffiti.
My nausea is the judging, defacing and reconstruction, from top to bottom, of every inch of female flesh on in these photographs.
What a sobering and sad statement about the value of living, breathing, real women in America and around the world, when the audience is the Playboy brand. It may be irrelevant these days, but iconic nevertheless as a statement about feminism and American sexual culture and its attitudes about women. Anne
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Reader Comments (1)
Thank you, Anne, for criticizing the Playboy style repackaging of feminine beauty without automatically lumping in the fact that the models are posing nude as equally appalling. I have been photographing nudes for 33 years, since my best friend in high school agree to pose for me when I was 18. Since those first photos of her, a very athletic and yet sensuous young woman, I have pursued the goal of photographing "real" women in their natural beauty.
Of the hundreds of women who have posed for me over the years, 90% or more have been amateur models from everyday lives. They have appreciated being seen as the natural, sexy and wonderful beauties that they are, in lots of different ages, races, heights, weights, proportions.
For the last 9 years my web gallery has managed to survive online, just barely, while competing with thousands of sites that, like Playboy, pigeon hole "beauty" into a very unrealistically limited range. It breaks my heart to see how little respect and appreciation there is for the sort of natural, and down to earth beauty that the women I work with portray.
Sensuous, erotic artistic photography is not what objectifies women. It is the corporate dissection of bodies in order to program the viewers with their version of beauty. I truly thank you again for recognizing the difference!
Sincerely,
Jay GreenMan
www.GraceAndBeauty.com