a' 4A -- The Michigan Daily - Monay, March 26, 2001 Ulie Aid igun il idg 420 MAYNAR IcSTREuT ANN ARimop, Ml 48109 daily. I etters ~aumich. edu Tit for tat: the Playboy/NOW smackdown EMILY ACHENBAUM IAMON D IN THE IwROuGHt EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICIGAN SINCE 1890 GEOFFREY GAGNON Editor in Chief MICHAEL GRASS NICHOLAS WOOMER Editorial Page Editors Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily s editorial board. All other articles, letters and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily asked my boyfriend to buy me a Playboy yesterday. If I had known that the magazine wouldn't have lived up to its lurid 'n' lush reputation, I would have been a liberated women who can buy porn from Village Corner with a straight face herself. I wanted to read the April issue before hearing Playboy contribut- ing editor and columnist Asa Barber and National Organization of Women President Patricia Ireland speak at Rackham tonight. It was not the bull's eye feminist target I was hankering for. All this fuss over a magazine more excited to present their in-depth inter- view with Metallica than its own centerfold? There are so many great things the feminist movement can do, and blindly attacking Play- boy is not one of them. Key word here is blindly. Let's pay attention to the details and be aware of the following: Playboy's advice columnist is surprising- ly less demeaning than expected, answering a debate over cup size with "when a man loves a woman, her breasts look just right" and telling a would-be philanderer that "a man can't live on cheap sex alone." The infamous cartoons, jokes page (and amusing who voted for Gore/who rents porn graph on page 61) are pretty tame. The film reviews, fiction and interviews are sophisticated - and make up the majority of the magazine. Does that make Playboy harmless? Of course not, but if it is going to be attacked, it should be for the right reasons. I'm not going to touch on the pornography debate as a whole, but rather the specific reason why the pornography in Playboy is dangerous. Playboy suggests that there is only one type of "beauty": fake-tan, fake-blonde, fake- boobed. When you have to use the word fake three times to describe the typical Playboy model, perhaps it is needless to say no one naturally looks like that, but hey I guess the fantasy/reality line can be hard to draw. Two weeks ago I saw Students Promoting Education, Awareness and Knowledge about Eating Disorders (SPEAK) perform at their Speak Out, where brave women (with vary- ing cup sizes, hair colors and concentrations of melanin) spoke about their quests for the unattainable. The cause of eating disorders is multi-faceted, but there is no denying the role of the mass media. Playboy does not offer a lot of variety - they picked one view of female beauty and have stayed surprisingly monogamous to it. Playboy can try to squirm out of the you- make-girls-hate-their-bodies accusation by claiming they promote a "womanly" figure, but silicone does not a woman make. Take a look at last week's People magazine, which had the audacity to proclaim "Healthy bodies are back!" on its cover. Featured are Drew Barry- more and Kate Winslet (who have always been Hollywood's zaftig heroines), Catherine Zeta- Jones (whose soft tummy and swelling breasts are not a statement but the result of just giving birth) and former Baywatch star Gena Lee Nolin (who claims to love her new curves, now that she's up to 129 lbs. on her 5'9" frame). What these women and Playboy's women all have in common is a rack, be it a baby fat, post- baby-fat or a silicone-induced rack. Tits, no matter their origin, make 120 lb., 5'11" models like Heidi Klum and Giselle "curvy" and "fem- inine"; their boobs are heralded as double-hand- edly responsible for the end of heroin chic and self-starvation. Is causing self-doubt exploitive? In Play- boy's case, yes - they make a fortune off of it. Playboy's first cover model, Marilyn Monroe, is the ultimate symbol of 20th Cen- tury female exploitation - and insecurity. Playboy contributes to an environment where women feel insecure, and capitalize on their desire to prove themselves worthy - making them think they are beating the system, yet they are becoming its ultimate victim. The weird thing about Playboy's models is that they, despite being crowned Perfect Woman with a photo spread and intimate wax job, don't look radiant. They know damned well what their breasts and hair once looked like, what their faces look like with- out crazy amounts of makeup, what their butt looks like without self-tanner. But they were convinced that "themselves" wasn't good enough, and all the foundation in the world can't mask the fear of not quite meeting a warped standard. And that's not very sexy. Emily Achenbaum's column runs every other Monday. Give her fedback at www.michigandaily.comfrum or via e-mail at emilylsa umich.edu. 0. Henson sells out to lucrative Yankee deal TO THE DAILY: Say it ain't so, Drew. I must say that the recent news of Drew Henson's signing with the Yankees leaves me just a bit disillusioned. It's not the fact that Henson gave up a promising football career for baseball - baseball is a very fine sport. The thing that gets me about this signing is that Henson signed with the Yan- kees, a team that has the highest payroll in the major leagues, nearly twice that of my beloved Detroit Tigers. In a recent press conference, Henson said, "Why not go to the team with the most tradi- tion, with the best chance to win?" Now, impli- cations for the inadequacy of Michigan aside, I think that Henson is misunderstanding what it means to win. No one will deny that the Yan- kees have won three of the past four World Series. But I would certainly deny that a team so obviously built on money - the kind of money that drew Henson away from a possible Heisman Trophy - deserves to be called a "winner." Winners are characterized by grit, by determination, by a refusal to give in. The 1984 Tigers were that kind of team. The 1997 Wolverines were that kind of team. Henson may or may not be a winner in his professional career. A bite out of the Big Apple will bring him no closer to that goal. As for myself, I look forward to seeing Henson's debut at Comerica Park. Without a doubt, I will cheer as Henson's name is announced and he steps to the plate. And I will cheer even louder when the Yankees lose. DANIEL PROPSON Education senior 'The landlords need to stop raising rents before they drive everyone - entrepreneurs and franchises away.' - Amer Bathish, owner ofnAmer's delis and Cava Java coffee house, last week on Caribou Coffee's decision to close its State Street location because of the skyrocketing cost of rent in Ann Arbor. I WAS REALLY GLA TO SEE THEM WIN. NOSObY ELSE THAT WAS IN THE RUNNN REALLY DESERVEt TO w"..GET IT. I'M GLA I'M NOT THE I WAS TALKING ABOUT ONLY ONE THAT TAKES THE OSCARS. MSA IS THE MSA ELECTIONS A JOKE. SERIOUSLY. AA University's investments in Burma send anti-humanitarian message V CODE WATCH PART OF THE DAILY'S EDITORIAL PAGE SERIES 'UNMASKING THE CODE' ''. Y Hughes to face 'U' discipline officials tomorrow After rescheduling his Code of Student Conduct hearing from this past Friday to tomorrow, LSA senior Ryan Hughes is to meet with Office of Student Conflict Resolu- tion officers to address the University's alle- gations that he assaulted anti-gay protesters during the LGBT Kiss In Feb. 16. Although neither the Department of Pub- lic Safety, nor the protesters, have filed charges in the matter, the University adminis- tration is charging Hughes - who unsuccess- fully ran for the Michigan Student Assembly presidency under the pseudonym Galaxor Nebulon - with assault and vandalism. Under federal law, the University cannot comment on individual discipline cases; this casts a veil of secrecy over the Code of Stu- dent Conduct process. Hughes has allowed the Daily to follow his case through the Code process so students can gain a better under- standing of how administrative discipline policies really work. OSCR officials and other administrators claim that University discipline is only an edu- gossip and rumor, the lack of a "beyond a rea- sonable doubt" standard are great injustices among other unfair Code practices. All students should pay attention to Hugh- es' case. Regardless of whether he is guilty or not, this case will shed light on the Universi- ty's extremely unfair discipline policies. In order to fight the Code, students must rally behind the Michigan Student Assem- bly's Student Rights Commission and its sup- porters. Turn out for a rally tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. outside the Fleming Administration Building to show your opposition to the Code's unjust practices. Henson right to seize his Yankee dreams To THE DAILY: Someone I know well grew up dreaming of becoming a doctor from the time he was a little kid. During his senior year of high school, he got the chance to go to medical school straight from high school through one of the BS/MD programs and he went - and passed on accep- tances from Harvard, Stanford and the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology to do it. It was an accelerated BS portion, and it meant he did end up missing perhaps a lot out of his college experience ... but he got to live out his dream. And certainly today he unhesitatingly believes it was worth it. The generous financial package Drew Hen- son will receive from the Yankees is undoubt- edly nice. But if it were only about money, Henson could have left last fall, before the Yankees traded him away ... he could have entered the NFL draft this spring. Although nobody can really claim to get inside of Hen- son's mind other than himself, I suspect that the chance to wear the pinstripes in the House that Babe Built is itself worth at least as much as the money ... the fulfillment of a dream. He's led the Wolverines - helmed the Maize and Blue in the greatest stadium in the country - and done a dang good job of it, too. That was the fulfillment of one dream. Now he's being offered a straight shot at another and a nice chunk of change, too. The alternative is VIEWPOINT In Burma, writing a viewpoint like this can get you killed. That's because the mili- tary dictatorship of that country - which is located between India and Thailand - doesn't like students speaking their minds. Universities have been open for only 30 months since 1990 and hundreds of stu- dents who advocated democracy have been imprisoned, tortured and killed by the mili- tary regime. The students aren't the only ones. Since the generals cancelled democratic elections in 1990, Burma has suffered a reign of ter- ror. The elected president, Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has been under house arrest for six years. Millions of Burmese have been drafted by the military for forced labor projects. Ethnic minority groups have had their languages and cultures banned. Rape, torture and execution have been sys- tematically used to intimidate dissenters, including hundreds of students. Meanwhile, the generals who run the regime have cozied up to the drug lords who peddle 50 percent of the United States' heroin supply, and presided over the clearcutting of some of the last pristine rainforest zones in Southeast Asia. The United Nations, U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and the AFL-CIO have all spoken out against the human rights abuses there. Burma is a long way from Michigan. Some people on campus think that the Uni- versity shouldn't pay attention to anything that happens outside of Michigan Stadium, much less overseas. But the connections between us and the Burmese are not as small as you might think. Here are three things we can do about the situation in Burma: r;«.o4 -: hn ea c.fr -enar - r that do business in Burma are directly help- ing the military regime and its atrocities. The University should get rid of this stock. Divestment is not an appropriate solution for every political problem. But in Burma, where the economy is tightly controlled by the dictators, every penny of foreign invest, ment strengthens the regime. Finally, Marina Whitman, a professor at the University's School of Business Administration, sits on the board of direc- tors of Unocal. This oil corporation is a business partner in a pipeline project with the generals. While Unocal's operations may have been beneficial to the few hun- dred people employed by the pipeline, the project has been responsible for environ- mental destruction, increased use of forced labor for infrastructure projects in the area, and giving credibility to the military dicta- tors. We should call on Whitman to do the right thing and advocate that Unocal get out of Burma. . Dozens of corporations have withdrawn from Burma already. Levi-Strauss with- drew from Burma after concluding that "it is not possible to do business in (Burma) without directly supporting the military government and its pervasive violations of human rights." Even the Wall Street Jour- nal - no great supporter of boycotts - has called against investing in Burma. The least we at the University can do is use the free speech we have to speak out on behalf of our fellow students in Burma, and against University involvement with the dictatorship. Corporations doing business in Burma are profiting from crimes against humanity. It is inappropriate for Whitman, as our representative, to participate in sup- porting human rights violations. It is even less appropriate for the University to invest our tuition dollars this way. What to. An ahnt ;i t tin t Ihenirnn- " " FOR MORE INFORMATION READ THIE DAILY'S COMPLETE EDITORIAL PAGE SERIES "UNMASKING THE CODE" AT www.michigandaiy .com/code.' E-MAIL MWICIAEL SIMON AND RomRI GooDnsPEE, CO-CI lAIRS OF TIL MI I-IIGAN STUDN'N' ASSEM Iwy's STUDENT RIGI-ITS COMMISSION AT src-core@umich.edu.