This Space for Rent

A brief comment about Playmite magazine

When I was doing the June pictoral, I found myself in an interesting situation. I wanted the centerfold picture to look like a Playboy centerfold, but I hadn't the slightest idea what a playboy centerfold actually looked like (I read playboy occasionally in college when I was at a friends apartment playing D&D, but the operative word there was read. I knew that there was some description in a corner of the centerfold, but didn't know just what it was or how it was laid out), so I ended up doing an image search for "playboy centerfold" and finally found one -- the Lena centerfold from 1972, which is famous because it's one of the warhorse images that's been used for computer graphics since the beginning of (computer graphics) time. You'd recognise it, because it's a brown-haired woman, wearing a hat, looking over her naked shoulder (and naked everything else, because it is playboy, but the sample image is severely cropped so you can't see the interesting bits.)

There are a couple of interesting (and by interesting, I mean "appalling") things that I observed during this image search.

  1. Where's the pubic hair? My sample space isn't very large, and it dates from the early 1990s, but when I was sleeping around, the men and women who I had sex with were fully equipped with pubic hair. But if the results of the web search are any indication, the prepubescent look has swept everything before it.
  2. Airbrushes should be licensed, and one of the conditions of the license should be that if you're planning to do nude photography you can't use them. There's just something gross about vast expanses of semi-gloss monocolor, with none of the texture and color variations you'd find on real skin. I'd ask if people find this attractive, but if they didn't, the "airbrushed until it looks like you're wearing 25 pounds of pancake makeup" look would be off in the bizarre fetish ghetto instead of being what every picture that even looks slightly like a playboy centerfold is like. Note that I did not airbrush the june pictoral -- I do have my standards, and sometimes you may even find them.

I don't remember either of these, um, features when I was in college. Perhaps I was actually reading playboy for the articles.

Comments


Because I'm a degenerate liberal, I have to admit, I really enjoy "pornography". I know, I know--it's bizarre, it's creepy, it's weird--something traumatic must have happened to me as a child to warp my mind so badly--but, as disgusting and unexplainable as it is, I just really love to look at naked women!

I don't know what's wrong with me.

I never read the Meese Report. Maybe it's explained there.

Not only do I love to look at naked women, but I love to look at naked women having sex with people who aren't even me!

It's crazy.

So maybe I'm the wrong person to comment here.

But the pubic hair thing? I'm right there with you. I find all these shaved bodies, much as I enjoy "pornography", to be disturbing. I didn't start to find naked women fascinating until I had pubic hair and I didn't find them fascinating until they starting growing pubic hair.

There's a name for pubic hairless people--they're called CHILDREN. And it's creepy to be sexually attracted to them.

The airbrush thing? I'm right there, too. As much as I enjoy "pornography", I've always found the problem with "pornography" to be pornographers. Maybe they've spent entirely too much time around beautiful naked people and it's left them unable to remember what's so sexy about people in the first place. Maybe they're just idiots. I don't know.

But if you want to take an incredibly sexy photograph of a attractive person, it isn't hard to do. Just point and click. All the hard work's already been done for you.

I've always hated Playboy. In the same way I hate Madison Avenue. They take these remarkable beautiful, sexy people, and then, through airbrushing and makeup and hair styling, they do everything they can to make them as plain and as generic as if the models were drawn by unimaginative commercial artists.

They all look the same. And none of them look like real women. Which are pretty sexy.

The only pictures in Playboy I ever found mildly exciting were the candid photos of the centerfolds, where the Playboy photographers didn't fuck up their beautiful models.

I know this is a long comment, but I wanted to make sure that the next time you produce pornography, you do it properly.

ricky Sat Jun 11 17:27:02 2005

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