What Sort of Woman Reads Playboy

February 4, 2010 8:05 AM

By day Peggy Wilkins runs Unix servers at the U. of C. By night she tends her apartment-size collection of Playboys (mildly NSFW), moderates the Playboy Mailing List, builds Playmate databases, and even sends free advice to Hef (via)
posted by Joe Beese (35 comments total)

Heh Beese

Just picked that up on the newstand this morning!
posted by timsteil at 8:19 AM on February 4, 2010

By day Peggy Wilkins runs Unix servers at the U. of C. By night she tends her apartment-size collection of Playboys

This is the strangest superhero backstory ever.
posted by The Whelk at 8:20 AM on February 4, 2010 [20 favorites]

This is the strangest superhero backstory ever.

She was also bitten by a radioactive spider.
posted by Dick Laurent is Dead at 8:23 AM on February 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

She was also bitten by a radioactive spider.

Obviously a radioactive bunny.
posted by delmoi at 8:24 AM on February 4, 2010 [4 favorites]

See kids, if you indulge in too much pornography, this is what happens; you end up managing Unix servers. Best beware, children.
posted by happyroach at 8:30 AM on February 4, 2010 [25 favorites]

Obviously a radioactive bunny.

Ha ha, your so right.
posted by Dick Laurent is Dead at 8:30 AM on February 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

Unix admins are, as a rule, all sexual deviants. Also, if you pick out the most cluttered and chaotic cubicle in an office, chances are the Unix guy/gal sits there... and the clutter will be an even mix of obsolete hardware components, cables representing every socket, port, connector and dongle ever represented on any computing device, vendor freebies, five year old trade journals that have never been read and superhero action figures.

Women have a tougher time being recognized as a dangerous pervert, err, Unix admin, as they are exempt from growing beards, wearing brightly colored suspenders or smoking briarwood pipes. (They aren't prohibited or discouraged from this, though.)
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:39 AM on February 4, 2010 [18 favorites]

I keep my apartment sized collection of furniture in my house. By day I lounge about on it.
posted by Elmore at 8:39 AM on February 4, 2010 [6 favorites]

Unix adminspeople are, as a rule, all sexual deviants.

FTFY, Slap*Happy. (and: very funny)
posted by IAmBroom at 8:46 AM on February 4, 2010

I keep my apartment sized collection of furniture in my house. By day I lounge about on it.

get a job hippie hth
posted by grobstein at 8:59 AM on February 4, 2010

Hah, somebody sends us a link or rediscovers Peggy's collection every so often. Nice to see her get greater recognition for her obsession.
posted by me3dia at 9:01 AM on February 4, 2010

Derail inc...

Playboy is "porn"? Maybe if it's 1951. People who look at playboy are "sexual deviants"?

Wow, good thing you can't see what's on *my* torrent hard drive.

I mean, seriously, Playboy = the Victoria Secret catalog with some airbrushed bush.
posted by TomMelee at 9:13 AM on February 4, 2010

See kids, if you indulge in too much pornography, this is what happens; you end up managing Unix servers. Best beware, children.

Worse, you have to do it at a university rather than actually being paid real money for it.
posted by cmonkey at 9:14 AM on February 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

I wonder if this Playboy thread will degenerate into a debate about web technologies. It would be more appropriate in this case, considering her day job.
posted by brundlefly at 9:19 AM on February 4, 2010

Datapoint: I am from Kalamazoo and am not obsessed with Playboy magazine.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 10:35 AM on February 4, 2010

IIRC the Reg has all the issues of Playboy in its stacks.
posted by kenko at 10:51 AM on February 4, 2010 [2 favorites]

Slap*Happy, you are completely incorrect: I have Lego people, not superhero action figures.
posted by fings at 11:07 AM on February 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

Thought I'd draw attention to the first comment on chicagoreader.com:

What is up with the Reader using a nude model with a headline that implies she's Peggy Williams? It's even worse in print as the picture is on the cover and the model credit is on a different page. Why not go with a picture of the real Peggy? Were the editors wishing she had shown more skin?

It strikes me as thematically tone deaf considering the article. [...]

posted by Plutor at 11:09 AM on February 4, 2010

If you have them shoot imaginary energy beams at each other or make one fly around while making a "whooshing" sound loud enough for the guy in the next cube to hear, they totally count as superhero action figures.
posted by Slap*Happy at 11:17 AM on February 4, 2010

*desperately suppressing instinctual "marry me" response*
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:27 AM on February 4, 2010

the Reg has all the issues of Playboy in its stacks.
Really--where?? No one told me this!!
posted by njbradburn at 11:30 AM on February 4, 2010

Ah, hooray for UofC; it is truly a haven for the geekily-endowed.
posted by LMGM at 11:40 AM on February 4, 2010

Playboy is "porn"? Maybe if it's 1951.

Yeah, sexualized images of nude people purchased for sexual gratification- who would ever think of that as pornography?
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:47 AM on February 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

Hey so maybe after coffee would you like to come up and see my etchings my playboy collection?
posted by odinsdream at 12:12 PM on February 4, 2010

She shares an apartment with her current boyfriend, Dean Armstrong, in Hyde Park, and rents the one-bedroom apartment above them to house her collections.

DAMN.

"Having a Playboy collector as your girlfriend is fantastic," says Armstrong. "There's no downside to it."

If the genders were reversed, this sentence would have to be heavily edited. Or just completely removed.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:14 PM on February 4, 2010

Yeah, sexualized images of nude people purchased for sexual gratification- who would ever think of that as pornography?

Heh. The internet has skewed what that word means, hasn't it? To many people, something isn't "porn" unless it's 2 Girls 1 Cup projected on the the rippling buttocks of an oversized person in the midst of a foursome in the center of a room with 12 60" TVs all playing Japanese gang bang videos. Then, just maybe, it might be considered a bit more racy than the lingerie catalog.
posted by Burhanistan at 12:19 PM on February 4, 2010 [3 favorites]

"Having a Playboy collector as your girlfriend is fantastic," says Armstrong. "There's no downside to it."

Well, until she starts citing The Playboy Advisor to win arguments.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:47 PM on February 4, 2010

Really--where?? No one told me this!!

Just do a search for a journal called "Playboy"; it's the third result. Some of them appear to be housed in the special collection. But beware:

Notes:
"Entertainment for men."
University of Chicago Library's copy: Some issues mutilated and lacking pages.

posted by kenko at 12:59 PM on February 4, 2010 [2 favorites]

Call number AP2.P71.
posted by kenko at 1:00 PM on February 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

See also: King Of Porn. (Maybe sort of NSFW for the title and brief glimpses of magazine covers.)
Meet Ralph Whittington, who amassed one of the largest private collections of pornography ever. His collection can now be seen and studied at the Museum of Sex in New York City.
posted by zoinks at 1:46 PM on February 4, 2010

Meh, Playboy's closer to Art than porn. I think the exploitive blood and guts pics from war-torn wherever are porn, I think lots of things are porn.

Still, to me, playboy's not porn.

Your classic metafilter "I take what you say and put a definition behind it to make you look teh dumm" snark, it does not give me giggles.
posted by TomMelee at 1:54 PM on February 4, 2010

Your classic metafilter "I take what you say and put a definition behind it to make you look teh dumm" snark, it does not give me giggles.

Well, the problem is that the definition of "pornography" has been wantonly made a moving target. It doesn't have to be synonymous with "overly-salacious" or "hyper-kinky" or even "shocking", it just simply means:

2 : material (as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement

That's it, really. All these discussions about what that means to you are kind of pointless when in practice Playboy is in fact intended and used for that, even in 2010.
posted by Burhanistan at 2:21 PM on February 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

University of Chicago Library's copy: Some issues mutilated and lacking pages.

Back when I was a wee lad and left free to roam the stacks of PCL (UT Austin's biggest library), I was very very excited to learn there were archives of Playboys in the publications section. So I tried to look inconspicuous and grabbed one of the giant bound volumes and went to a secluded corner. And then... all the pictures were cut out. Every single one. I was soooooo disappointed. I still don't know if that was done by some goody two-shoes trying to purge "perversions" from a public library, or somebody building a free Playboy pictures collection of their own.
posted by kmz at 2:38 PM on February 4, 2010

Usually it's both.
posted by The Whelk at 3:05 PM on February 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

Yea, I can post definitions too:

creative activity (writing or pictures or films etc.) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire

pornographic - Containing an explicit depiction of sexual activity; Depicting something in details, usually unnecessarily

I'm not really arguing that it is or isn't "porn", per se. I was merely having a lol at the quick-to-judge "OMG PORN" response earlier in the thread, or the idea that there's something inherently offensive about airbrushed glossy photos of ladies, or that a woman should automatically object to them. I mean, any more than she should object to, say, the Miss America Scholarship, anything on MTV.

And, if we're going by the supreme court decision, "I know it when I see it."

Really, in my own mind, it's not porn till it's exploiting someone. And yea, you could argue that all those ladies and gents make their own decisions and get paid for what they do and it's not exploiting anyone, but to me (and I realize this isn't the common sense or understanding), "pornography" is generally synonymous with "offensive", and for it to be "offensive" to me, it needs to have exploitation. So that's me, and my entire point wasn't to challenge the architecture of the literary foundation of the legalities of "pornography", it was to speak my opinion that viewing Playboy as "Teh Pr0ns" is...well, outdated.
posted by TomMelee at 3:07 PM on February 4, 2010