A Playboy photographer's Ivy League education
David Chan finds that publicity makes his job easier. Chan, 41, recruits and photographs women in various stages of undress for Playboy. He pays his models a one-time fee according to degree of deshabille: $100 clothed, $200 seminude ("topless, see-through blouse and so forth") and $400 nude ("something you wouldn't see on the beach or the street"). Organized according to categorical imperative, Chan's past work has included "Girls of the Big Ten" and "Girls of Washington." Fourteen years' experience has led him to expect his arrival in a new town to be treated as a news event, but his latest reconnaissance mission produced an even more satisfying furor than usual.
Playboy, now celebrating its 25th anniversary and straining to elevate itself from a swamp of newer and raunchier skin magazines, dispatched Chan to perpetrate a photo spread on "Girls of the Ivy League." Chan admitted that the Southwest Conference was Playboy's first choice, but the magazine decided that the Ivies have an irresistible mystique. "Especially now that women have entered the men's domain, everybody's mystified," said Chan. "There's a sexual fascination. What are these women like?" Touchy, it turns out. Chan's visit provoked feminist protests on six campuses and touched off debate on sexism and censorship among student editors from Hanover to West Philadelphia.
Chan's Ivy League education began Nov. 29, when he approached the Harvard Crimson with an advertisement featuring his magazine's familiar symbol and an invitation to audition for the project. The next day's edition featured a news story headlined PLAYBOY SEEKS WOMEN HERE TO POSE NUDE. That evening a majority of the 30 staff members at a Crimson editorial meeting voted to reject the ad. That decision prompted some staffers, male and female, to write lengthy editorial explications and dissenting opinions. The majority endorsed the paper's editorial, declaring that Playboy "has played a major role in America's degradation of women," but beyond that the arguments grew tortuous: on whether the Crimson would be contributing to such degradation by running Chan's ad, whether refusing the ad was a paternalistic insult to Radcliffe women's ability to choose intelligently and whether the precepts of free speech vs. censorship apply differently to editorial content and paid advertisement.
Radcliffe, the now almost completely integrated female adjunct of Harvard, is celebrating its centennial this year. For most of its history it has been much maligned as the frowsiest of the Seven Sisters, and some Radcliffe women were bemused at being chosen over the sunshine girls of the Southwest. Others resented being chosen at all. Jennifer R. Levin, president of the Radcliffe Union of Students, denounced Playboy's efforts as "degrading and exploitative of women."