All the Nudes Fit to Print

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."

All that debate did little to resolve the issues at hand, which was not surprising, since the conflict between free speech and perceived pornography is one of the great civil libertarian conundrums of our time. Those in the skin trade take full advantage of the public confusion, Chan among them. Even as the Crimson debated, Chan placed an ad in the Boston Globe and was himself profiled in the paper's Living section. "I got censored. I felt very sad about that," he told the Globe ingenuously. "I never thought it would happen here at Harvard, where presumably people think for themselves. We'll see if the rest [of the Ivy League papersl play follow-the-leader."

They did not. After due thought, and in some cases second thought, student papers at Princeton (where, as at Harvard, the editor is a woman), Columbia, Dartmouth, Yale and Brown ran the ad, deciding, as Brown Daily Herald Editor in Chief Robert Linn explained, "to let people make up their own minds." Unbowed and uncensored, Chan continued his wintry progression through the Ivy League, stirring up debate, protest and publicity At Yale, when Daily News Publisher Thomas L. Kelly accepted the ad, overriding the editorial board's published distaste, posters appeared on campus urging FIGHT PLAYBOYBUNNYISM. At Columbia the ad inspired a student symposium on campus sexism. When Chan hit Princeton last week, his hotel was picketed.

Having screened about 100 candidates at each campus, Chan claimed to be delighted by the response. "Frankly, I always have the best results in a small community," he confides. "The local papers and television and radio come after me. I can get lost in a big city."

Why would presumably intelligent women at the nation's most prestigious colleges aspire to notoriety as airbrushed sex objects? "The human body is an artwork in itself," says one aspirant, Brown Literature Major Cynthia Cohn. Adds Fellow Student Laurie Osmond, who has agreed to pose (fully clothed) for Chan: "It sounds crass, but you have to use your assets." Reports Chan: "They mention to me many times this is something to show to their grandchildren." That urge is apparently, widely felt. Some of Playboy's competitors now feature warts-and-all snapshots, usually taken by husband or boyfriend, sent in by women eager to memorialize their assets. "To each his own," says Chan. "We're not gynecological photographers at Playboy. All we're shooting is physical beauty. Inner beauty doesn't come out until after about 28." qed

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