LETTER- How much did <i>Playboy</i> pay?

Shame on you for publishing pornographic nude photos of young women in our college-based community newspaper! ["Career launcher: UVA's Playboy models find big success"]

How much did Playboy magazine pay you for the free advertising?

Our intelligent and educated UVA female students are worthy and deserving of much more respect and dignity than to be exploited for their physical selves by publications that exist mostly to make a buck by pandering to and encouraging the insatiable appetites of male voyeurs. I often wonder how the male population would react to seeing a florid display of suggestively posed nude men in standard media...

If your writer and editors had chosen to run the story without the mural of pictures exposing the students and omitted a certain tasteless graphic quote by one of them, insulting much of your female audience would have been gratefully avoided.

 Need we remind Hook and your readership that our community newspapers are read by citizens of all ages, genders and religious persuasions and that kind of highly questionable visual content is startlingly offensive to a high percentage of us who choose not to subscribe to pornographic media? 

Poor choice, Hook!

In the future, please run potentially objectionable material by mature editors who, hopefully, consider the impact upon the well-being and perceptions of a large percentage of your audience in their young, impressionable and formative years including our children and teens, as well as the majority of our college-age population who come here to work hard to honestly and cleanly obtain a fine education and respectable degree here in our prestigious college town.

 Of our two major "alternative" community newspapers, we had previously regarded yours as the more reliably tasteful and upscale. Kindly continue to make an effort to maintain your inclusive family-friendly reputation!

Lara Fine, M.A.
Counseling Psychology

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