Playboy Magazine recently visited Dartmouth in search of models for their 1995 "Women of the Ivy League," sparking much protest on campus and debate over the women in America today.
Although three College coeds decided to pose for the magazine, they perhaps should have talked to former College students who posed for the magazine, one of whom says she now regrets her decision to pose, and two women who say posing has had little effect on their lives.
Sharon Cowan '78 posed for Playboy's 1979 Women of the Ivy League pictorial during her senior year at the College.
She said she made her decision "on a whim," adding she initially saw the "decision as something quite personal and not really of much importance."
"Why shouldn't I indulge the whim, pocket this extra cash, have some fun and have something to tell my grandchildren about," she said.
But 16 years after her moment in the pages of one of America's most famous magazines, Cowan, who now works in Rome as a United Nations officer, said she regrets following that whim.
"Absolutely. I would not do the same thing again today," she said. "Today I see publications like Playboy as harmful to women's efforts to gain equality. I feel I did a disservice to my own gender."
Although Cowan said she now regrets her decision, Amanda Hanson '88 and Carrie Margolin, a 1981 Dartmouth Ph.D., said they still feel much the way they did as undergraduates -- that posing for Playboy is a minor decision with few consequences.
Margolin, who appeared half-clothed in the 1979 issue, said she regrets nothing. "Did it make me into an object?" she said. "No. I never felt used. I am very much who I am. I am a professional woman, and it didn't change that."
A psychology professor at a small college in the northwest, Margolin said her professional life has never been affected by her image in the magazine.
"The image of a college professor is not of someone who would be doing this," she said. "Most people think it adds an interesting dimension to my personality."
Hanson, now a lawyer in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, posed fully clothed in the 1986 Women of the Ivy League issue.
"Professionally, it has never come up. People know, but it is no big deal because I was fully clothed," Hanson said. "The only regret I have is that it wasn't a better picture."
But Cowan, who wore only socks for her photo, said posing for Playboy has adversely affected her career.
"Sometimes it comes up when I don't want it to," she said. "I was working as an editor in Massachusetts, and rising rapidly in the company. I had a staff of 40 or 75 people," she said. "All of a sudden one person, a guy, found out somehow his boss had been in Playboy, and it was a most annoying experience from a manager's point of view."
"The word spread like wildfire," she said. "What could have been more undermining?"
Both Cowan and Margolin said their photographs immediately led to a lot of attention from men.
Cowan said her Hinman Box was also suddenly stuffed with mail from strangers. "I received a few which were vulgar, but mostly I was surprised to receive almost reverent letters from men," she said.
Margolin said, "I got a lot of phone calls from men. I got invitations to parties and had men call me up and ask if they could meet me. Or say 'if you are in town, give me a call.' "
"I was young and adventurous enough to call up some people and see where it would go," she said. "I went to some parties, but that was it."
Margolin said her pictorial garnered so much attention that she was invited to the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills in 1983 to shoot a "pictorial retrospective." Although the feature never ran in the magazine, Margolin said she spent "a couple weeks on a couple occasions" at the Playboy mansion.
Cowan, who said she failed to understand what "more militant feminists of the time" were talking about when they picketed Playboy in 1979, said she has changed her mind.
