The most recent issue of Playboy magazine features a pictorial with actress and notorious party girl Tara Reid naked. Why might men want to skip this most recent issue?
–*They’ve already seen Tara Reid naked in the film Body Shots.
–*They’ve already seen the pictures of Tara Reid naked on the red carpet at a notorious P. Diddy party a few years ago.
–*They’ve not only seen the pictures of her at P. Diddy’s party, but have noticed that she’s undergone several flawed plastic surgeries that make her less appealing and a little alienating.
–*They’ve seen the pictures, noticed the plastic surgery and realized that her neurotic need to be perfect–when she was already pretty enough–also makes her less appealing.
–*They’ve seen the pictures, noticed the plastic surgery, and realized that the Tara Reid they are looking at now is largely a reconstructed Terminator version of the actress and that really they are masturbating to pictures of a robot.
–*They’ve seen the pictures, noticed the surgery, realized that they’re masturbating to a robot, but also likely realized that Playboy so excessively retouches and airbrushes its women that pretty much every woman they’re masturbating to in the magazine is a robot.
–*They’ve seen the pictures, noticed they’re masturbating to airbrushed robots and realized that they are masturbating to an over-culturalized ideal of beauty in the first place and that their responses to Tara Reid are mostly conditioned by tastemakers and scum bags.
–*They’ve already seen Tara naked, noticed they’re masturbating to the Terminator and realized that the whole idea of femininity is over-culturalized.
–*They’ve seen her naked, realized they’re masturbating to R2-D2, and figured out that both men and women share masculine and feminine traits and that the cartoonish version of female sexuality that the silicone version of Tara Reid represents is degrading to both men and women alike and fails to address the fullness of a person’s sexuality and humanity.
–*They’ve seen her naked before, they’ve realized they’re jerking off to Robby the Robot, and they realize that all sexual attraction is an illusion based on a need to propagate DNA and that mostly the female object of the male gaze is an elusive and non-existent semion that represents only the male’s ideal version of himself–an unachievable goal that leads him only to frustration and a lack of enlightenment.
–*Seven bucks? Jesus, the porn on the Internet is free!
SIDENOTE
Dear reader:
I wrote this comedy blog post 15 years ago. (My, aren’t we all getting old!) I noticed recently that it has received an uptick in new viewings, which has forced me to read it again and reassess its merit. Some of the language now seems pretty harsh and mean spirited and adolescent and gross. Given the way we treat our female celebrities in this country (arrogating the right to ourselves not only exploit them but in some cases to manhandle them) I thought perhaps the piece would not age well and I would be embarrassed. I even thought of taking it down.
But then I remembered what I was doing: Using bullet points to move through the stages of a developing male mind, starting with a grabby and fumbling adolescent viewpoint and ending with a more mature, more fully developed, more feminist viewpoint.
Good comedy should not have to explain itself. Period. But I do worry, especially in this day and age, about the extreme people (right and left) who would run off with the wrong idea and think Tara Reid is the ultimate target of this piece. She isn’t. (Nor is Jennifer Aniston the real target in similar pieces I’ve written about her.)
As Baudelaire might have said, the hypocrite reader is whom I’m talking to. I thought it courteous to say so.
–E.R.R., January 2025
Beauty is Imperfection 