I would like to express my appreciation to all of the women who had a little pride in their image, themselves and their power for applying to be in the Playboy layout. As a student in this extraordinarily protest-happy student body, wading through the picketers and speakers espousing ludicrous and often contradictory messages gets pretty old.
I would also like to offer my congratulations to the current feminists on campus for recognizing the prerogative of women to model their bodies however they choose.
In his guest commentary last week (“University activists fail to react to pornography,” ODE April 14) Mr. White argued that pornography
objectifies women and degrades them into objects of lust. That is inherently incorrect. Men (and more often than not, other women) objectify, label, and degrade women. It is not the nudity that does it. A huge nude statue stands in the window of Mother Kali’s Bookstore on Hilyard and East 13th Avenue; art books teem with nude paintings, breasts have frequently adorned the cover of National Geographic; characters in the fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are naked. No one is protesting them. Why? Because it’s intent, not content.
The difference between the ceiling of the Sistine and the pages of Playboy is the intent with which one
looks at them. What is degrading is the insistence that women should feel bad about choosing to take pride in their beauty. One of the great failures of the American feminist crusade is its failure to encourage women to recognize and revel in the great power they have by simply being female.
The great triumph of that crusade, however, is in the manipulation of American women into believing they are catering to men (which is apparently bad) should they choose to live their lives as wives, mothers or perhaps Playboy models. So thank you to all the women who applied to appear in the magazine, for redefining what it means to be a feminist.
—Allie Senger, junior