Did it matter that the Playboy CEO was a woman?
I like Playboy. It's got really good articles and fiction to lie about reading, and it is generally classy, as far as magazines whose main purpose and point of existing is to showcase pictures of naked women lounging around and waiting to be rodgered by someone as virile as you. The Playboy bunny appears to me to be as impossibly genetically blessed and idealized as any woman in the media is, except that unlike so many "celebrities"and models, they've got flesh on their bodies. I don't recall ever seeing a visible ribcage on a Playboy model, and they are the living embodiment of tits and ass, a testament to the idea that maybe men really don't actually want scary-scrawny size 0 women--maybe they're willing to go as high as a size 4 or 6! As long as you've got legs for miles and boobs like buoys.
New studies say that maybe hourglass figures aren't as sexy as everyone claims.
Like I said, still an irritatingly impossible ideal, but one that is slightly less insulting, and sometimes, in the face of things like that photo of terrifying Rachel Zoe, style arbiter of a big chunk of stars that little girls love and want to emulate, it is the smaller things that keep you going, and make you think that the world is--well, entirely screwed up, when it comes to women's bodies.
The CEO of Playboy for the past 20 years, which I did not know until I recently read that she had resigned, was a woman--Hugh Hefner's daughter, in fact. She is a very attractive woman, but not of the genetic mutant stock likely to be tapped to star in the magazine empire she ran. I wonder, now, how much of her influence accounts for the style of woman that Playboy tends to feature. There's always a measure of necessary catering to the demands of your audience--you can't get away from the endless acres of blondes, but sometimes, aDita von Teese will sneak in there, Gabrielle Reese, Charisma Carpenter or Anna Nicole Smith, Kim Kardashian. Gorgeous, curvy, athletic, notorious but still booty-licious.
Did Christie Hefner have anything to do with that? Did growing up immersed in her father's world, her father's empire based upon the fetishizing of the perfect naked woman affect her, her self-esteem, her self-image and self-worth? Did she, in some small way, try to dial back the the cultural madness, try to step in and mitigate where she could, in reaction to that life she must have had? This is entirely, completely and utterly imaginary conjecture, of course. But I wonder. When she steps down for good in January, I wonder how the magazine will change, and I wonder what we'll find out about those 20 years she spent with perfect, naked women.
Did you know that men also experience negative body issues after looking at sexy women in magazines?
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