August feature, CSC: Crime Scene Cleanup

[Peggy Wilkins]

I was quite put off by the "CSC: Crime Scene Cleanup" article that
appears in the August issue.  I would guess that the presence of this
feature is based on the recent popularity of the "CSI" television
series.  I just sent the following letter (based in part on my earlier
posts to the cyber club message boards, http://boards.playboy.com/) to
Dear PLAYBOY via email:

  Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 22:54:11 -0500
  From: Peggy Wilkins <mozart@lib.uchicago.edu>
  To: dearpb@playboy.com
  Subject: August feature: Crime Scene Cleanup

  I think I finally figured out why Jenna looks so grim on the August
  cover: she must have read the "CSC: Crime Scene Cleanup" article.
  This unpleasantly morbid feature seemed to have little point other
  than sensationalism, and the accompanying pictures didn't improve the
  situation one bit.  I probably wasn't your only reader who was put off
  by the photographs of a stain left by a corpse and a blood spattered
  wall after a shotgun suicide.

  This article could have been greatly improved without the graphic
  photos, and if the writer had been able to transcend the sensational
  aspects and put it into a larger context.  Writer Pat Jordan only gave
  that context at the very end of the article, in its last few
  paragraphs. It is this larger context that should have been the main
  thrust of the feature -- not the sensationalism.

  I hope features like this won't be in PLAYBOY again.

  Peggy Wilkins
  mozart@lib.uchicago.edu
  Chicago, IL

I can give a bit more detail here than I did in that terse note... I
thought that the idea for the feature was potentially a good one, in
that it is an inherently interesting topic.  However, aspects of the
visual and written presentation really bothered me.  I think I make
the visual aspects pretty clear in the letter above.  When I open up
an issue of PLAYBOY, I want to see beautiful images; to see
indications of graphic violence, even reproduced in a small size, is
to me the antithesis of what PLAYBOY is (and should be) about.  I
don't want those associations, and I don't think PLAYBOY does, either.
There are already enough people in this country who see a connection
between sex and violence, and (illogically) correspondingly between
PLAYBOY and violent crime such as rape and murder.  As for the text in
the article, I felt it was not well written.  There seemed to be no
cohesive idea to it beyond the mere description of the gruesome facts.
I felt that this paragraph, near the end of the feature (p.153), was
the start of a good idea that could have been the basis for a good
article:

    What these guys have in common is the tendency
    to see in life's cruelties the natural order of
    man.  They don't see the murder and suicide and
    inhumanity through a moral prism.  That would
    be psychologically debilitating.  Instead, they
    see the scenes of destruction as the facts of
    man's existence...

Not exactly eloquently written, but here is what the focus of the
feature could have been; yet we don't even get the first hint of it
until the piece is nearly over.  As I said on the CC message boards, I
would have canned this writer and found a better one.

To me, to run a feature based on its inherent interest, without having
corresponding good writing to back it up, is a mistake.  I could have
written that article, and I'm not exactly a great writer.

I think it is unfortunate that the sidebar in this feature: "Six Feet
Under: What Happens After Death?" was done as a full page feature in a
recent issue of Maxim (April).  This may have been a coincidence (it
certainly isn't plagiarism, the PLAYBOY sidebar lacks Maxim's
tongue-in-cheek smartass attitude), but it does make it look like
PLAYBOY is hopping on the imitation bandwagon.  This is not a good way
to be perceived.

Peggy Wilkins
mozart@lib.uchicago.edu