My Life in Playboy

I wrote about how my life path has intersected with Playboy, and how I feel about the fact that the magazine will no longer be publishing nudes. I guess I'm disappointed, for some reason.

Growing up, I never expected to work for Playboy. I grew up in Berkeley, California, where feminism is what’s for breakfast, Columbus Day has been replaced with Indigenous Peoples Day, and I was an undergrad at the University of California at Berkeley at the same time as the Naked Guy. According to my feminist film studies class, the patriarchy was something to wage a war against, women’s bodies were a battleground, and sexual objectification was the tool of the enemy. To posit oneself as an object of sexual desire, to relish scopophilia, was an act of political betrayal.

At least in theory, Playboy was the opposite of all that.