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.
Mortal beauty often makes me ache, and mortal grandeur can fill me with that longing...but Paris, Paris drew me close to her heart, so I forgot myself entirely. Forgot the damned and questing preternatural thing that doted on mortal skin and mortal clothing. Paris overwhelmed, and lightened and rewarded more richly than any promise.
According to the Stoics, all vice was resolvable into folly: according to the Christian principle, it is all the effect of weakness.
We will never be cleansed until we confess we are dirty. And we will never be able to wash the feet of those who have hurt us until we allow Jesus, the one we have hurt, to wash ours.
I am satisfied that when the Almighty wants me to do or not do any particular thing, He finds a way of letting me know it
"Civilization" has been thrust upon me since the days of the reservations, and it has not added one whit to my sense of justice, to my reverence for the rights of life, to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity, or to my faith in Wakan Tanka, God of the Lakotas.
As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
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