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.
Searching outside of you is Samsara (the world). Searching within you leads to Nirvana.
the psyche has been burned and left us senseless, the world has been darker than lights-out in a closet full of hungry bats, and the whiskey and wine entered our veins when blood was too weak to carry on
As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.
The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members
When we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code, but a character.
Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.
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