“And before you ask: No, it’s not like I expected more of Playboy. I didn’t expect anything of Playboy. Playboy is what it always has been, entrenched in tradition but pretending to be subversive”

I’d say of superhero comics, they’re entrenched in tradition, but pretending to be relevant.
Although there’s one big difference between what’s going on here and what happens in actual comic books. In comic books characters don’t opt to be hypersexualized and deformed to the distorted will of artists and writers. They’re fiction.
Tiffany Fallon, on the other hand, is a person. She’s also a wealthy person who in no reasonable sense needs this job. Does Playboy shape the way growing boys and grown men view women? Yes, and in a very misguided way. But by the same token Ms. Fallon is playing the game and winning. She’s using what she’s got to achieve those things our screwed up society values most: celebrity.
Since we know celebrity isn’t really healthy, and that it actually causes more damage than good, why don’t we stop complaining about examples of the problem? I can take a five minute drive and see thirty example of the problem, and in a place like this you’re preaching to two choirs, one that already agrees with you, and another that’s too naive and full of sh*t to care. No matter how many times you bring it up.
In fact, a lot of these pervert fan boys just hate you more for it. (you being us, people who want a better world, full of healthier, happier people)
I don’t know what else there is. What’s the solution? because I’ve heard about the problem a thousand times before.

I thought you made a good point with the comparision Playboy made to Carter, Lisa. I wonder if Carter will come out and admonoish linking the two?

Futhermore, I wonder if DC and its parent companies will have a problem with using Wonder Woman’s image, or if they’ll accept it as free publicity. With Simone finally writing WW, I’m not sure this is the image they’re currently striving for.

Oops. Spelled “admonish” wrong. As the kids say, my bad.

Yeah, I don’t know. Just seems like the exact same thing you would see on the cover of a Wonder Woman comic brought to real life. The only difference is that its on the cover of Playboy, which automatically is going to carry negative connotations. Especially with feminists. I don’t see this as any more damaging than your typical WW cheesecake cover.

Yeah, see, usually, I’m totally with the feminist movement’s criticisms of the exploitation of female characters in superhero comics, but … this?

I’m sorry, but in the words of Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog, “This? This is nothing.”

I mean, I’m sorry, but all I can assume is that whoever wrote this article has obviously not seen any pornography that’s been produced in the past two decades, because if they had, they’d know that Playboy is quite possibly the last adult magazine in existence to finally feature a model undressed as Wonder Woman.

No, really; go ahead and check. Penthouse, Hustler, Club, Score, Swank, Genesis, High Society … literally every single one of them has already used this idea (many of them more than once), and I can guaran-goddamn-tee that every single one of them was far fucking filthier than Playboy’s layout has any hope of being.

Now, if you object to seeing an icon of female independence being reduced to a male fantasy, fair enough, but at this point, “Wonder Woman as a porn character” has become such an overused trope, even within the relatively repetitive genre of pornography, that it’s long since become cliche.

By all means, object to what it represents, but please recognize that what you’re objecting to is not a new thing, and indeed, considering that this latest iteration of it is coming from Playboy, I’d wager that it actually stands a decent chance of treating the character more chastely and respectfully than the actual comics themselves.

At this point, taking offense at anything done by Playboy is like thinking that the worst problem facing public schools is kids who wear their baseball caps backwards, because even within the realm of degrading portrayals of female comic book characters, this doesn’t even rate. I’d still consider Identity Crisis and “One More Day” way more offensive, from a feminist standpoint.

But the bulk of the eyerolling hasn’t been at porn-WW qua porn-WW from what I can tell, but the write-up accompanying it.

This assumes that the sort of people who would a) seriously be influenced by the text in a Playboy pictorial would also b) be at all inclined to read the text in a Playboy pictorial.

And again, I’m sorry, but wasn’t one of the original feminist objections to magazines like Playboy that such critics were calling bullshit on those magazines’ claims that anybody “reads them for the articles”?

Can’t have it both ways.

My buddy DID used to work on putting the Braille edition out, after all!

… You gotta be shittin’ me. I always thought the “Braille edition” of Playboy was a standup comedy joke, for obvious reasons.

And I understand and accept the rest of your position on this.

K-Box has a good point. But to expand on that… think of Playboy as the gateway porn mag. It’s probably the safest, tamest, most friendly, recognizable, household-name porn magazine out there. It’s the one fathers buy for their teenage sons with a wink and a nod…

and if Playboy’s doing it, then by golly, it must be okay and safe and acceptable. When Hustler and Swank and all those others did it, it was sleazy and well, porn. Smut. You call it as you will. When Playboy does it, it’s saying that it’s acceptable to sexualize Wonder Woman, and take it mainstream. And people are afraid of that. And they object.

That’s my thought. Part of why people object to this is because it represents the transitioning of the sexualization of a comic book icon from the back alleys of porn where it could be politely ignored, to the mainstream world, where it’s in their faces.

I could be wrong, though. :>

And yet DC does EVERYTHING in its power to prevent the sexualization of Batman and Robin.

I wonder why there’s a double standard (he said sarcastically).

K-Box, nobody over the age of sixteen is stupid enough to buy Playboy for the pictures alone. What does each issue give you? Twenty pages of girlie pics? For six bucks? That’s the worst value for money I’ve ever heard.

Young boys have always bought American comics (at least in part) for their sexualisation of women, with hyperrealistic or even downright preposterous anatomy and costumes most real women wouldn’t even wear on a beach. They use pictures of women as a substitute for real women, and then when they become adults they use real women as substitutes for the pictures. All mainstream superhero comic readers that have passed puberty have to acknowledge this as part of their psyche. Playboy operates in a similar way, as did the Wonder Woman TV series.

??What if they cast this model, Tiffany Fallon, in the much-rumored Wonder Woman movie? Stranger things have happened!