I'm late to the party on Dowd's bizarre article on how feminists are responsible for her singledom, but I do think this piece on two academics who submitted all the text of Playboy pictorials analysis is an interesting accompaniment:
Beggan began in 1998 to assemble a database that contained all the photos and text from the 204 Playboy Playmate pictorials that appeared in the magazine between 1985 and 2001. Much of it was distilled from a cache of Playboys he found gathering dust in a Louisville bookstore. (And, of course, in the interest of scholarship, he just had to rescue them from oblivion.)
Beggan and Allison, writing in the latest issue of the Journal of Popular Culture, found a pattern to the way that Playboy's wordsmiths described the women who graced the magazine's centerfold. They were typically strong, career-oriented, aggressive and, in a surprising number of instances, downright "tough." Adjectives suggesting vulnerability, submissiveness or passivity appeared less frequently.
