Petting Party

So last week, my favourite geek-mag, Wired, reported on a worrying trend happening over Hef’s world-renowned smut empire but I’m not sure if it’s worrying in quite the way they seem to making out. They devoted a double-page spread to chart the growing chasm between the average Playmate BMI and the average american woman’s BMI. I do so love graphs, and any other visual representation of data so it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t reprint it below…

This is only a screengrab so you kinda miss out the more up-to-date data but you get the gist. Now Wired’s view is that Playboy are showing increasingly svelte girls who are more “an anime-ideal” than the national average. Whilst this is most certainly true, it is worth taking into consideration several factors:

1. The average Playmate BMI drops overall from a slim 19.4 to a fairly skinny 17.6. That’s a drop of only 1.8.

2. The average American woman’s BMI rises from a healthy 22.2 to a, dare I say it, dumpy 26.8. That, ladies and gentlemen is a whopping 4.6 increase.

3. Playboy is a business at the end of the day, and a business which basically sells fantasies. They just aren’t going to sell magazines featuring these sorts of women.

I genuinely think that this chart certainly says a lot, but it says more about dramatic changes in the American woman’s size, than it says about Playmates! As a skinny girl, I always feel I’m skating on thin ice when talking about fat people, but seriously, this chart is not highlighting any noticeable change at Playboy. If this sort of thing bothered American men *that* much, the US porn industry would resemble the UK porn industry a lot more. Here it possible to be hefty and still get work. It’s also possible to have a face like a bus back-ended you and still be popular. The point I’m trying to make here is that British men seem to have more diverse tastes when it comes to pornography and our industry reflects that.

One interesting point that Wired did make, and I think this is applicable to both sides of the pond, is about bust enhancement.

“We plotted each model’s bust size (chest circumference at the fullest points) and cup size (breast volume) for all years that data were available (early ’90s to now). While busts have shrunk faster than your 401(k), cup size has remained a buxom C or D. We don’t think evolution can explain this phenomenon.”

It is a common occurrence to see a beautifully breasted girl just starting out the industry ruin her chest with plastic footballs stuck on. I loathe it. Off the top of my head I can think of at least 3 or 4 girls in the past year I have seen do this to themselves and it irritates me to have to watch porn with them in post-op and see their reddened, stretched-marked breasticles NOT move while they bounce up and down in conjugal acts. I don’t think many guys like this look, and the few that do are the type who fetishise it. What’s really sad is so many of these girls feel they have to do it in order to get more work. And the really sad thing is they do get more work out it! This is clearly true for both the American and British industries. Make a stand and vote in my boob-poll…

***Screen grab from Times Online***

***Quote from Wired’s Infoporn article***

Filed under: journalism, porn