As photographers from Playboy Magazine interviewed Dartmouth women yesterday at the Hanover Inn, about 35 students marched around the Green and rallied outside The Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts to protest the magazine's visit.
Playboy photographer David Mecey and two assistants arrived in Hanover Sunday to interview women interested in posing for the magazine's upcoming "Women of the Ivy League" pictorial that will be published in the October issue.
Mecey said he conducted preliminary interviews with nine women yesterday and will speak with another four today at the Hanover Inn. Women who make the first cut will be called back on Wednesday, Mecey said.
During yesterday's interviews, Sarah Johnston '97 led a group of about 35 students who marched on the Green yesterday at about 4:00 p.m. chanting "Hey hey, ho ho, Playboy has got to go" and held up signs declaring, "Playboy = Degradation."
The protesters congregated and sat down in a circle in front of the Hopkins Center as reporters from radio and television stations and newspapers hovered nearby.
Reacting to the protest outside his window, Mecey said, "With all of the articles that have been run ... I was curious as to why, now that the day is upon us, why the big protest when they've made their point?"
"Now stand back and allow the women to make up their minds," he said.
Johnston told the crowd she was disappointed that even after she met with Acting College President James Wright on Friday, he would not make a statement against Playboy.
"We're not trying to prohibit women from using their bodies how they choose. We're saying, 'Make an informed decision,' " Susan Zieger '95 said at the rally. "When you put yourself in Playboy, you're putting yourself in a system that degrades women."
Cassie Ehrenberg '96 passed out paper Mars and Venus symbols, which represent the male and female sexes respectively.
Students, linking all of the paper symbols together, strung up the signs on the terrace of the Hanover Inn. Bob Linn, a custodian at the Inn, immediately took them down.
One protester, Tamara Norman '94, wore a dress made of a draft of her senior thesis to assert that "the women of Dartmouth should be known for that they have accomplished and not what they look like."
During the protest, Aren Goldsmith '96 and some of the other 25 spectators began to debate with the women.
"I think this is very classist and I think these are elitist Dartmouth kids trying to impose their morals, this pseudo-liberalism, upon people and deny basic liberties," he said.
"The body is no different from a natural resource like a mind," Goldsmith said. "Girls who have great minds are able to go on to law school ... win money as lawyers or professionals in corporations. Why can't girls who happen to have this one aspect -- this body -- use that resource?"
English Professor Thomas Luxon, who attended the rally, decried Playboy's mission of "liberation of men from marriage and the breadwinner ethic."
He said Playboy was started in the early 1950s because people like Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner felt men were endangered by the traditional structure of the family and needed an outlet in which they could feel dominant.
Director of the Women's Resource Center Giavanna Munafo, who also attended the rally, said, "I'm glad that there was a dialogue ... The visit of Playboy to our campus has made it possible for us to raise the issues of how the images of women affect women's lives."
One of the women who Mecey will interview today isStudent Assembly President Rukmini Sichitiu '95, a strong supporter of women's issues.
Mecey said he knows about her being an outspoken feminist and expects her either to miss the meeting or come to chide him.
Sichitiu wrote in an electronic-mail message yesterday, "I am writing an expose on the pornography industry for the upcoming issue of Spare Rib [a women's issues publication]. As such, I am attending the interview in order to experience the process firsthand."
Of the 13 women who interview with Mecey, a few will be called back tomorrow, Mecey said. Pictures of them will be sent to editors at Playboy's Chicago offices.
"I have to say that, out of the nine I have already seen, I have enough women to shoot ... They're excited by the chance to be in the magazine," he said.
Mecey said he will return to Hanover within a week to photograph the three or four women chosen to appear in the pictorial.
Playboy's visit to Dartmouth is the last stop on its tour through the Ivy League.
According to Mecey Playboy interviewed about 25 women at Harvard University, about 10 at Yale University and 35 at Cornell University.
Seventy-eight women from the University of Pennsylvania, 65 from Columbia University, 47 form Princeton University interviewed with Playboy.
Numbers from Brown University were not available.
