Girls Of The Pac 10

We like to visit the campuses of the Pac 10. Nowhere else in America do you encounter such extreme examples of the dualism of mind and body. On one hand, you have the West Coast mania for physical fitness, the pride of body and grace that leads some women to pose for playboy. On the other hand, you have the full-tilt feminist sensibility of N.O.W. groups and the strangle-hold intensity of fundamentalist Christians, proclaiming that nudity is either a political crime or a sin. During our latest search for coed beauty, protesters picketed hotels where playboy photographers were interviewing prospective models. Some people tried to tie up hotel switchboards by phoning in for fake appointments. Others pushed computer-printed handbills under hotel doors to warn guests of what was going on down the hall. The most pompous circulated rhetoric-laden petitions: "We, the undersigned members of the Stanford community, would like to express our objections to playboy's visit to Stanford. While not the most heinous of pornographers, playboy reinforces sex stereotypes by portraying women as sexual objects and thus furthers inequality in our society." We would publish the signatories' names, but why bother? We suspect they're the same people who will be lining up to buy this issue, the same guys who walk a picket line with a sign that says that they are prosex, pronudity, pro-erotica, antiporn. Our point, give or take a little, but why split pubic hairs? playboy photographers David Mecey and David Chan braved picket lines to find women willing to celebrate unashamed, to defy peer-group pressure, to pose for the pure fun of it. Freedom of expression is easy to defend. Witness the results.