Women of the Pac Ten

The American West has not lost its anarchist soul. By that I mean a spirit of resistance to all kinds of control, a quest for genuine personal freedom. Just look at the women of the Pac Ten. Well, I know that you're looking at them. You should listen to them, too.

Here's what they told me they want more than anythingelse: to play all aspects of their personalities freely, without anyone--man or woman--getting in their faces. These women are bored by social mores and are on the defensive against coercion and groupthink, no matter how subtle. They've decided to take their brains, curves, tattoos, nipple (and other) rings, Amazonian-poison-toad studies and no-soapbox consciousness right into the professional world with you, me and everybody else, and damn the torpedoes.

Yeah, I know. They sound like a Virginia Slims ad. You're groaning, "I can't even talk to these women." Wrong. Three dozen or so interviews led me right to the bottom lines. To wit: Some college feminists love to be naked in front of people, and a lot of them love glamour. Most have been reading Dad's Playboys since they were kids and regard an appearance here as a validation, an arrival.

Notice that I'm counting most of the interviewees as feminists. It was usually the first thing they wanted to talk about. Bad conscience? Sometimes. But they offered this gentle, though firm, reminder to the women's movement: This is a liberation struggle, and one goal is personal freedom. A women has (text concluded on page 151) Women of the Pac Ten (continued from page 120) only one life to live, and if she really wants to bare the evidence of her workouts to the world, she has the right. After all, these women work for their bodies. While the rising cost of school has sunk activism to an all-time low, the gyms are packed.

One women put it this way: "I used to say that Playboy is a sexist magazine that objectifies women, and my boyfriend would say it is a celebration of beauty. Now I've decided we're both right."

At the University of California-Berkeley's Office of Student Research, stats man Tom Cesa told me through a blush, "I can tell you that in terms of GPAs and SAT scores, the women at Berkeley are smarter now than they have ever been." Smarter now than the men, too. Law is still the most popular postgraduate field at Berkeley, and--surprise, surprise--law-school women came out in droves for Playboy. The first woman who walked into Contributing Photographer David Chan's studio suite told me why: They're coached to keep their bodies and sensuality under wraps, as it makes them less competitive. "The law firms don't want somebody whose sexuality makes a problem in the office," She said, annoyance ringing in her voice. Appearing in Playboy is a chance to show them all what they're missing and, more important, to live out an anticareerist dream. That's what it means to be a whole person--you can be motivated by fantasy from time to time. Almost every law, medical or preprofessional student I talked with told me the same thing: If appearing on these pages is a bad career move, then it must not be the right career. No loss.

All right, these poses are about fantasy. This is about satisfaction. Lots of women fantasize about careers in modeling. But it was essential to an equal number of these women that this could be a one-shot deal. It's an amateur's dream. One woman, a filmmaker, wanted to create an erotic image, a "hussy image, an indelible, to refer to at any time. An alter ego to put down in stone and then let go of." These women felt sexy that day, that week, in general, and once you're sexy in Playboy, at least one part of you is sexy forever.

Don't forget, this is about sex, they assured me, not just modeling. Most of them didn't even know their measurements. Although the women I talked with found Playboy to be as much art as erotica, some feminists clearly love raw sexual images as well.

A razor-sharp student of human sexuality at the University of Washington told me it is vital that we all work to normalize fun, open, forgiving attitudes about sex. She lamented the fact that this society tends to crush sex as a way of dealing with other problems, such as violence against women or AIDS. "We're misinformed about the effects of censorship and oppression," she said. "If we equate shame with the body, it leads to miscommunication in science, politics, all human conduct. We have to open up."