On this whole Playboy issue, I read Zobenica's essay last weekend at Politics and Prose where they also had the reviewed compendium of "Playboy Advisor" columns. Zobenica's essay, which is awesome, is also something of a misrepresentation. The Advisor column was like "Dear Penthouse." The first one I flipped open featured an angry ex-wife going to her former spouse's home, being greeted by his 26-year-old bride, finding herself desperately attracted to the woman, entering into a variety of BDSM-situations with her, and wondering if this was all okay. The next letter had a woman getting tied up by her girlfriend, assuming her husband would come home and free her, and instead getting discovered by her daughter's slumber party guests. Another woman found herself getting wildly turned on by bar fights. And so it went.
That's not to say there were no sincere, mature, enlightened bits of relationship advice, but it's wrong to paint the column as some sort of island of realism amidst Playboy's otherwise hypersexualized pages. Meanwhile, I like Matt, only read Playboy for the egomania. In this year's blog awards, three of the five liberal sites were ones I I've written for. I couldn't decide if that made me feel like more of a dork, or less.
