You didn't have to read 'Playboy,' visit the mansion, wear pajamas, or even be straight: The effects of its ideas about women on the American psyche were totalizing. Women were inferior to men because, for 'Playboy,' they were scenery - pretty, passive, usually white, often blonde, there.
Interpretation
This quote critiques how 'Playboy' shaped societal views on women, presenting them as mere objects for male pleasure.
Wesley Morris's quote highlights the profound impact that 'Playboy' magazine had on the American cultural perception of women, suggesting that it reinforced harmful stereotypes by depicting women as passive and secondary to men. The words 'pretty, passive, usually white, often blonde' serve to illustrate the narrow and objectifying portrayal of femininity that has far-reaching implications on gender dynamics and societal attitudes.
In practice
In a discussion on gender roles, one might use this quote to highlight media influence.
Nudity has never seemed to bother Grace Jones. Her art has thrived, in part, on a physical candor that both shocked people and redrew the boundaries of taste, beauty, and eroticism around her masculinity, ebony skin, and unrelenting intensity.
Movies and television have a way of using a soundtrack not just to create a mood but to literalize it. You could always count on a master class in splitting the difference between artistry and obviousness during the so-called Blaxploitation era.
One result of moviemaking - and a side effect of moviegoing - is familiarity. If an actor is particularly good, familiarity opens into something deeper: care, concern, identification, empathy. Yet even those concepts can feel inadequate for some actors.
There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
He that has learned to feel his sins, and to trust Christ as a Saviour, has learned the two hardest and greatest lessons in Christianity.
When it comes to religion, we're not two sides of the same coin, and you don't get to put your unreason up on the same shelf with my reason. Your stuff has to go over there, on the shelf with Zeus and Thor and the Kraken, with the stuff that is not evidence-based, stuff that religious people never change their mind about, no matter what happens.
The glory of the gospel is this: The one from whom we need to be saved is the one who has saved us.
Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.
We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.
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