Read for the articles / Work for love

Today: Terry Nguyen, essayist, critic, poet, and author of the newsletter Vague Blue; and activist, musician, and writer jj skolnik.

Issue No. 11

What Was Playboy?
Terry Nguyen

Love + Work
jj skolnik

What Was Playboy?

by Terry Nguyen

I’d thought the Playboy bunny was just a bunny, perhaps a more serious version of the buck-toothed Happy Bunny, when I spied him on a classmate’s shirt in seventh grade. Boy or girl, I forget. What I remember is the mild scandal caused by the shirt. 

A debate arose between the teachers who deemed the shirt a violation of the school’s dress code, and the teachers who argued that it was—contentious logo aside—still a shirt, and that the school had no business punishing students for wearing a shirt, especially when those opposed were struggling to articulate what was so offensive about it. This was during the late aughts, when graphic tees featuring cartoon characters were the norm. A cartoon bunny was not particularly lewd or vulgar. The problem, we later learned, was what the bunny stood for.