I collect vintage PlayBoy magazines. 

I refer to them as “my ladies.” 

It started because I found a guy on ebay who was selling them, like thousands of them, and his profile picture made me really uncomfortable. He had like, a beard and glasses but like the way a very specific type of child molester has a beard and glasses, so I felt like I needed to save them. Kind of like how you think your stuffed animals can form opinions. That’s how I felt about this guys playboys, like they were playing into some sort of sick fantasy for him, and I thought, maybe if I had them it would be like we would have something in common. Like maybe I would be able to give them back their power, or they would remind me of my own. 

And then, I got really into tracking the progression of sorts of sexual trends. Like in the 70s the porn was sort of artistic, or generally more imaginative. The guys had to earn seeing a woman’s nipple for example because it was just shy of full frontal. And I say guys here very rigidly because what literally every Playboy has in common is its front page label “ENTERTAINMENT FOR MEN.” But I still think this is accurate - ish even in the hands of a woman because I don’t particularly find Playboys entertaining, and I think to say that I did would be misnaming it. But that said, I also think there is something much deeper to the idea of male entertainment as it is here, I don’t think that captures the full scope of what it is. I think Playboys could be labeled education for men. And I don’t necessarily mean in the ways that seem to be obvious, like, a guy seeing a skinny center fold model and thinking “oh women need to be skinny to be sexy” but more like the idea I imagine them having of seeing a woman, a stranger for all intents purposes, in a magazine and thinking it’s some sort of transference in energy, a bond, a connection, however you want to think of it. This is a plasticized sensation, it’s completely cut off from anything, or maybe most things, that are tangible and real, that is to say porn can’t be a replacement for something else. But these guys think that it is and it’s why they are so incredibly mean to women, because their model of which they are basing a relationship off of cannot respond or feel or imagine or create, the list goes on. 

But there was a point in time when the women in these images could feel. I think it’s important to honor that, because it’s really easy to forget that lives were lived before and after these singular photographs were taken.

This for example is Miss September. She is framed in my bedroom. Mostly because I like her pants. 

Okay.

Now we’re going to play a game. And for people who have never looked through a Playboy and don’t know their customs or traditions, your impulse may be to laugh. But don’t. This is serious. 

What do you think Miss September's favorite book is?  

No seriously. Really think about it. I’m genuinely asking. And for additional context she is in an issue from 1971. 

Cindy’s, that's her name, Cindy, her favorite book is Gone With the Wind. 

Every Playboy Magazine features a brief list of the centerfold girls “favorites.” So here are some other facts about Cindy according to her one page of information, in the order it’s written. 

She has a 23 inch waist. 

Her birthday is December 5th, 1951. In this photo she is 21 years old. Max. She’s a sagittarius- that’s not a fact they list, it’s just a fact I know. 

These are her ambitions, in the order “she” wrote them: (oh also these are all handwritten, I didn’t include an image of the page here but trust that Cindy has beautiful, loopy handwriting.) “to find a man who can take all the love I have to give in a world that is free and at peace.” 

I don’t know man. It’s always sort of devastated me that she says take instead of give. I imagine a man reading that right after looking at Cindy’s boobs and going like, “oh yea baby I can take it.” with his small flaccid dick in his hands. But, truthfully this is what I think actually happened. Okay, so like imagine Hugh Hefner calls Cindy up right and he’s all like, 

“Hey baby, I just got your playmate data sheet, the weight, the height, the age, you know it all looks good, very pleasing, but that ambition answer, I don’t know about it.” 

Okay, now this is Cindy talking: 

“Oh. What don’t you know about it?” 

“I just don’t think our audience will be able to connect with the desire to ‘live in a world that is free and at peace.’ Can we maybe refocus this goal to our demographic. These are just like really big ideas and I don’t think it’s our place to say what the world should or shouldn’t look like.” 

Then I imagine there was a really long pause, maybe she was taking a deep breath, a sigh, and she responds: “Okay just say like, To find a man to take all of my love while also living in a free and peaceful world.” 

And then just to take it even further Hugh says, “Well actually can you write that, like, in your own handwriting so the men feel like they know you better, so that they’re able to connect with you better.” 

And she complies. Of course she does. 

But there is a clear distinction I’d like to make that exists between who Miss September is and who Cindy is. Cindy is performing as Miss September. Miss September she’s not like Cindy Cindy. She’s not the version of Cindy that read Gone With the Wind and related to Scarlett Ohara because she’s different from all the other women around her who act like dainty, fragile little creatures who needed protection while Scarlett merely played the part of an empty headed male centered woman all while resenting the societal need to do so.  No, she’s not relating to Scarlett, she just is Scarlett, she’s performing. And a large part of what she’s performing is what she knows or thinks about herself, because she’s doing something for the purpose of pleasing someone else. She’s sort of removed from the situation, like none of this is about her at all, it’s all about the men, the men who “consume” her. 

This is pornogrophy, and it’s not pornogrphy because she’s naked necessarily because who’s to even say that the female body is inherently sexual or pornographic, blah blah, but that’s tangential, it’s porn because it’s the opposite of the erotic. Which, if I really try to make sense of it, means to me something like self knowledge, knowledge that is both known by the self and known for the self. 

But I do think that Cindy knows herself. I just don’t think we do, and that's okay. She still looks great up on my wall. Those are still great pants.