Are Europeans Getting Infected With U.S.A. Prudery?
That’s the only explanation I’ve come up with for the negative reaction to this very nice photo of Lily Cole, which is the cover of October’s French Playboy:
Go here to see a full-size picture, from Anorak.
The blog post kicks off with, “LILY Cole dresses like a nine-year-old on the cover of Playboy,” and asks readers if it’s perverted to look at women dressed as schoolgirls. Some say that it is……but, chaps, is she not in fact rather more undressed than most nine-year-olds would be? She is obviously lusciously curvy too, something most girls that young are not.
I thought Europeans were less squeamish about most kinds of roleplaying in sex…..and surely the schoolgirl look on a fullgrown woman is closer to kink than it is crime. I don’t go all cross-eyed and breathless over these kinds of pictures, but it’s still a great picture of a gorgeous woman and I’m just not seeing where all the fussing comes in.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=2486
You’ve got this all wrong. It’s the bear that’s the problem. How dare those wicked French show a BEAR pressed between the breasts and thighs of a naked woman. It’s just….twisted.
Where people *want* to see evil, they will. Two things, though :
1. I’m not sure it’s right to say “Europeans are getting more prudish”. Maybe one editor from an British blog is, but that doesn’t mean much ;)
2, Being French myself, let me tell you that “the schoolgirl” is nowhere near a national fantasy, because in France, uniforms haven’t been required in public schools for decades. So French Playboy’s readers definitely won’t “feel” that cover the same way British readers (or, say, Japanese ones) would. To us, that picture says “barely legal” and “60’s pinup”, but not schoolgirl at all.
French maids don’t resemble French maids either. That hasn’t changed the imagery of French maid fantasies. Does it make you feel horribly classist to want to bend over your (fake) domestic employee’s? It probably would if more of us had maids.
‘Europeans are getting infected with US prudery’ is not the ‘only explanation’ for a blog post written by one single person. I mean, I suspect we are a little bit, but… get back to me when we hormonal birth control and STI testing stops being free at point of use, or we start to run abstinence-only education in our schools.
And the UK has always had a massive panicking about paedophilia thing, which pictures like that sensitise.
In any case I notice that the article ends with a question, and that most of the commenters don’t have a problem with it.
Don’t underestimate just how paranoid the current British media/public are about paedophilia it’s really not representative of europe or even british standards as a whole it’s just one thi g that has an absolutely massive sensasionalist air round it (rest assured these same allegations have been aimed at Britney Spears and her “hit me baby one more time” video
Pigtails are back in–they are soooo behind! As for the stuffed bear, many adult women have at least one. I’ve never tried to snuggle with one like that, sounds like a weekend project! ;->
I think it’s a wonderful photo. Reminds me of classic pin-up not a underage girl.