The reaction to NBC’s The Playboy Club has been largely negative, from critics to former bunnies talking about how soapy and inaccurate the show is. One Playboy Mansion insider, Jennifer Saginor, author of Playground and daughter of famous Dr. Feel Good, posted her worries about what the renaissance of Playboy culture means for America on her website. Here’s an excerpt:
After years of trying to reverse society’s image of women via the women’s movement, the push for the Equal Rights Amendment, and third-wave feminism, it seems we are back to perpetuating image of women as sex objects. When we study the society-imposed roles for women in past decades, we see them as victims subjected to a man’s world. Today, it’s quite the contrary. Women are accentuating their best features and selling them for a packaged price. Women are marketing and franchising themselves as superficial tokens who can be bought and sold as a high-concept commodity.
Tabloid stars such as Kim Kardashian, Kendra Wilkinson, Holly Madison, and Heidi Montag are building their own empires and franchises by marketing their bodies. They’re empowering themselves by downplaying their intellect, increasing their market value by reducing themselves to frozen silhouettes and caricatures — just like yesterday’s bunnies. Worse, is this fascination with beauty in exchange for money merely another form of high-class prostitution? These women didn’t have to work at a job to achieve their lifestyle. Even college students are looking for their piece of the supposedly strings-free prize they see every day in the media: Using websites like SeekingArrangement.com to find their own sugar daddies, young women are using what they’ve got to buy what they want, be it a college education or Louboutin pumps. But at what societal cost?
Read more of the essay here! And be sure to tell us in the comments what you think of The Playboy Club and how it relates to our culture today.
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The show was pretty bad. I prefer Mad Men (of course), and I do agree that our culture is on a downhill slide when it comes to how we value women.