Roger Ebert To Working World: Grow Up

I’m liking Roger Ebert the blogger way more than I ever liked Roger Ebert the TV movie reviewer. Apparently after last week’s blog about Playboy (which I mentioned here), he got a lot of flak because he (horrors!) included a Playmate photo in the blog post and didn’t include a NSFW warning for timorous puritans.

Well, his most recent blog post begins as a spirited defense of his posting the photo without an NSFW warning:

As a writer, it would have offended me to preface my article with a NSFW warning. It was unsightly — a typographical offense. It would contradict the point I was making. But others wrote me about strict rules at their companies. They faced discipline or dismissal. Co-workers seeing an offensive picture on their monitor might complain of sexual harassment, and so on. But what about the context of the photo? I wondered. Context didn’t matter. A nude was a nude. The assumption was that some people might be offended by all nudes.

I heard what they were saying. I went in and resized the photo, reducing it by 2/3, so that it was postage-stamp 100 pixel size (above) and no passer-by was likely to notice it. This created a stylistic abomination on the page, but no matter. I had acted prudently. Then I realized: I’d still left it possible for the photo to be enlarged by clicking! An unsuspecting reader might suddenly find Miss June 1975 regarding him from his entire monitor! I jumped in again and disabled that command.

This left me feeling more responsible, but less idealistic. I knew there might be people offended by the sight of a Playmate. I disagreed with them. I understood that there were places where a nude photo was inappropriate, and indeed agree that porn has no place in the workplace. But I didn’t consider the photograph pornographic.

He goes on to contrast our puritanical American attitudes about nudity with more relaxed standards prevailing in Europe, and to make a favorable comparison of the artistic merits of the photo with various bits of classical fine art that would have raised no eyebrows. The only weirdness about the piece is, after essentially defending the photo and his publication of it without a warning tag, and gently ridiculing at length the poke-noses who complained, he wraps the whole article up with two unexplained sentences in which he apologizes and says he won’t do it again:

In the future I will avoid NSFW content in general, and label it when appropriate. What a long way around I’ve taken to say I apologize.

What a long way indeed, Roger — and nothing in your blog post prepared us for that jarring and inconsistent conclusion to an otherwise fine if somewhat rambling blog. Is that something the Chicago Sun-Times told you they wanted to hear you say?

Similar Sex Blogging:

• More On NSFW
• Your Work Is Not Safe For Sex Or Boobies
• Offended By Pornography
• Safe To Cuddle

Roger Ebert on Playboy

Yesterday Dr. Faustus happened to email me a link to a review by Roger Ebert of a new documentary about Hugh Hefner. I found Ebert’s commentary about the social significance of Playboy magazine to be more interesting than his take on the movie, though:

You may believe Playboy was the enemy of women. It objectified their bodies. It schooled men to regard them as sex objects. It stood for all that feminists fought to correct. There is some truth to that, but it doesn’t impact upon my experience, and the best I can do here is be truthful.

Nobody taught me to regard women as sex objects. I always did. Most men do. And truth to tell, most women regard men as sex objects. We regard many other aspects of another person, but sex is the elephant in the room. Evolution has hard-wired us that way. When we meet a new person, in some small recess of our minds we evaluate that person as a sex partner. We don’t act on it, we don’t dwell on it, but we do it. You know we do. And this process continues bravely until we are old and feeble.

Yes, Playboy presented women’s bodies for our regard. Yes, they were airbrushed and photo shopped to perfection. Not a blemish, not a zit, not one single chewed fingernail. This process of perfection doesn’t deny nature, it reflects it. When we meditate on the partner of our dreams, the mental image we summon is without flaw. We don’t dwell upon a pimple or a bad tooth or a little underarm fat. We meditate on the gestalt. We meditate on being accepted and loved by that wonderful person.