as All-American as apple-pie and racism

Hugh Heffner's minions are on campus this week, holding auditions for Playboy Magazine's "Girls of the Big Ten" pictorial for their May 2008 issue. Here's the DI's report, which I find fascinating. (The bolds are all mine.)

The article opens, "In a well-lit room off campus, Monday morning, an anxious group of blonde college coeds auditioned for a coveted spot in what is arguably the most well-known men's magazine in the world, Playboy Magazine. The magazine is currently searching the Midwest for the 'All-American college girl'..."

Then we get, "[Woman's name], sophomore in ACES, was one of the blondes auditioning for the issue."

Further on there's, "a 2005 alumna of the University [who] had a lot of support from her friends and family when she posed nude for Playboy... The cute blonde's pictorial consisted of..."

And then a final note from the photographer, "'For this shoot, the ideal candidate is the girl next door, freshly scrubbed, cute college girl.'"

But she better be blonde, huh?

So what's the deal? (I'll leave aside the complex social connotations of pornography; because, I really don't feel informed enough to speak much on the issue.) If they're looking for the "All-American" model, though, is the assumption that "All-American" means blonde, and implicitly, White? The accompanying photos feature a model with a Latina-sounding name, but she's blonde, too. I'm pretty troubled by these implications.

And then there's the whole girl motif that runs throughout the story. Is there not a difference between girls and women? The reporter reassures us that a UIUC alum who's posed for Playboy in the past had her parents support, which reinforces the childlike descriptions of her and the other models the article references. These women are university students! Here they're reduced to "cute."

There's also some naturalization of heterosexuality going on in the article. Playboy gets introduced in the lead as a premier men's magazine; one model insists that she has her boyfriend's support; another gushes that "when people find out [she] was in Playboy, especially guys, the way they act around [her] completely changes." Defining Playboy's audience as male without qualifying that identifier with "heterosexual," the article seems to assume that Duh, of course men are straight. And if we didn't get it right away, the two models make sure that we know that they know that this whole thing is about heterosexual men's responses to "the girls."