"How Do They Judge Us?" she asked.

Mpho Tsila is South Africa Playmate of the Month of August 2011. Her long term goal is to be South Africa's finest fashion designer.

 Mpho Tsila


I am not complete in my understanding of Western men's concept of seeing nudity as a viable option and a step in the direction of women's professional pursuits in the arts and entertainment fields. On the one hand, there is an insistence that women are loose, almost lewd displaying their bodies for public consumption, and there is on the other hand an acceptance of nudity and sex tapes as business proposals, and there is the cultural assumption we all are suppose to accept and understand: 'business is business' (whatever that means). 

Pornography is gaining legitimacy because of the amount of money it generates into economies. But, in the myopic thinking about definitions the sex trade is not considered a part of the pornography business in the United States, for example, if it is given the veneer of legitimacy in the spirit of Hugh Hefer's Playboy empire. I don't want to take from Hugh Hefner's social contributions to the progress of our times because he was bold where others feared to tread in the Civil Rights movement, and women's issues on several fronts. His legacy is important because this discussion he raised from as far back as the 1950's with a level of simplicity and sophistication that should be, and was taken very serious. If judgment is to be placed place it where it is supposed to be placed within ourselves to allow the how and why we see and perceive the world(s) revolving around and within us all. 

Morality, I learned the long way from the Euro-Americans, is based upon value to the market place. This sense of morality has, and will continue to hinder the evolution of sexuality into the divinity it is sprung from in the First Place of Creation, and war against the reconciliation process between the races of men because business is an intangible reality, therefore distant from the spheres of one's being somehow in the lexicon of Western thought! 

Deep within the hinterlands of what we believe as American citizens, and hold dear as self-evident truths are the intricate weaving's of an unexamined structure that formed slavery into a legitimate business, and legitimized prostitution within said business plan as good business practices. This legacy lingers in new, but old forms. This is our story. This is our song, as the old hymn goes. 

- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories (1.20.14)

Marianne Gravatte nude 1982

Negro Science = a state of mind

FOR CONSIDERATION: "Black man and black woman shouldn't have to wait till death to find freedom in this world." posed by Lioness Daiba Sala



No.

What is bound on earth is bound above. What is released below is mirrored above. That being said is freedom of spirit guaranteed on the other side if one's spirit is not free in this plane? Now, I say that in the context of the North American continent. Let me be specific and clear, and further I hear Blacks here say, "Black People can only expect to pay taxes and die." or "The white man's foot is always on my neck. I can't get anywhere..." The same meaning different ways of saying, "The Black man and Black woman shouldn't have to wait 'til death to find freedom in this world!"

In light of all the freedoms won, and exercised in this country are we really talking about a way of looking at present circumstances with the eyes and perceptions of the grandchildren of ex-slaves? I look around and see the counter to this gloomy outlook in the Black community on a daily basis in or outside of the ghettos. Is freedom being discussed as a slave, as one who hasn't learned to think and direct things his/her way, or are we giving excessive attention to people deeply invested in defeat who are unskilled negotiating with power as a powerful person? - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 12.19.13

The world according to Paris Hilton  is what many of us ascribe to whether we admit it or not her lifestyle is enviable and imitated daily in our communities. 

Playboy South Africa

These pictorials of adorable Ukrainian Olga Ogneva by Viktor Krasnov is enough to make a snowman blush. See it in our December issue:   www.playboy.co.za/subscribe/ 

After all founder, Hugh Hefner has done for the advancement of progressive ideas in his time in the arena of racial equality and women's rights is it still preferable for the magazine to under employ Black South African models as the major draw? Or has the populations in industrial nations fixated on the notion that white European beauty is the template for the business of fashion and the only sure way to sell product? - Gregory E. Woods 12.19.13

South African Playmate

Playboy South Africa

It is not the norm to feature African women in the elegant style of Playboy. It is mostly the playground for the white women. Their appeal sales the concept, and the color is the color. Like any man Playboy has been an influence upon my thinking and a challenge to my beliefs. Playboy's founder, Hugh Hefner has reshaped women's freedoms, influenced the Civil Rights movement, and changed people's relationship with themselves, sex, and the human body. The writing staff is exceptional. The magazine's enormous impact upon American and global thought came by way of the interviews they published over the decades of people important to the social changes of the world.

I am reading the Playboy interview of actor, Samuel L. Jackson, now. It is eye opening. Jackson is as I thought: a profound man. Check this interview out: http://www.playboy.co.za/samuel-l-jackson/

- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 11.18.13

Samuel L. Jackson, actor

PLAYBOY: Living in a segregated environment, what were some other useful survival tools your family gave you?
JACKSON: There were certain things you necessarily had to be told as a child – things that would keep you alive and out of harm’s way. My family would point out this or that person as a Klansman or a grand wizard and tell me who specifically those men had killed and gotten away with it just because they’d said that black person was doing this or that. You could not look suspicious, because when people can accuse you of anything, there’s nothing you can say. They’d tell me not to get in a car with this or that policeman, saying, “I don’t care what happens, you run and run till you get here, and then we’ll deal with it here.”

PLAYBOY: Did movie-going influence your eventual decision to become an actor?
JACKSON: Before we even had a television, I listened to a lot of radio drama as a kid, hearing how people’s voices can tell stories. Every Saturday I spent all day in one of Chattanooga’s two black theaters, the Liberty and the Grand, seeing Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Lash LaRue, Westerns, Creature From  the Black Lagoon, Francis the Talking Mule.  Books had more to offer than movies. My mom’s rule was that for every five comic books I read, I had to read a classic. I read Shakespeare and Beowulf while other kids were learning how to diagram sentences and learning to conjugate so they could fill out job applications. My fantasies weren’t inspired by John Wayne but by Jules Verne’s 20,000  Leagues Under the Sea and Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. When I was in the room by myself reading, I would stand in front of the mirror pretending to be all those people in the books. I was acting for myself before I ever did it for anybody else.

PLAYBOY: Because of your involvement in the protest at school you were convicted for unlawful confinement. What did your family think of your evolving politics and budding involvement with the black power movement?
JACKSON: They actually got my militancy. They just didn’t want me to get killed running around, chanting with my fists in the air. But I was in Atlanta doing that anyway. One time, I had come home from school to Tennessee. From the time I was an infant, my grandmother had been buying all these bullshit life insurance and burial policies, and every week this insurance guy, Mr Venable, came to collect his nickel premiums. I had my hair braided and was sitting on the porch, and he walked up and said, “Hi, Sam, is Pearl here?” I said, “Motherfucker, why you calling my grandmother, a woman three times your age, Pearl?” I was cursing and yelling, babbling at him, and before I knew it, my grandmother was out the door and had me  by the hair, going, “What the hell is wrong with you?” It was the first time in his life Mr Venable thought he might have been wrong, and he felt bad, saying, “I don’t call anybody else older than me by their first name.” But my grandmother kicked my ass after he left. She still thought that he was going to call somebody and have me hanged.




Tersha Makwiya by Leah Hawker
Nov. 14, 2013


Tersha Makwiya - Playboy Playmate May 2013 is stunning, and probably has a lot going for her. But, she like others have decided to launch into nudity. Her reasons are hers. Always interested in why I would ask of her if I could.  Choices made reveal so much about us to us. www.playboy.co.za/playmates/tersha-makwiya/

PLAYMATE 1955

PLAYMATE: a tribute

What a perspective and insights she must've had now lost to so many whom probably didn't want to know, but needed to learn from her. Alas, the frivolous nature of a fast paced life style Americans cling pitifully to reveals when someone dies how pitiful we are in our rush to the red light. Breathing off the fumes of quick and consumed moments in a rush to the next thing the older and wiser people slump often into deep melancholy, deep silences within a culture's fear of Old Age. Who wants to hear from them, or listen to their stories? Today, who wants insight and light shed upon their young lives to illuminate and strengthen their capacity to walk paths never trodden upon before because of the gifts of the Old Ones who shared theirs?

Doomed to repeat a past lived and resolved each American generation enjoys the illusion of being original, waking up from that and following cow and sheep paths to conform to being a unit of measure while a small select group of artists and thinkers and doers change the world, and in their wake leave new thoughts, and views of the world, and new capacities to do new things, and accept new ways as if they (the dull and frightened) had discovered it all!

American attitudes towards Beauty and Sex changed profoundly with the advent and the long life of Playboy, and I know the bulk of American's today are ignorant of this, and do not know enough to, at the least, pay tribute to the pioneer and forward thinker, Hugh Hefner, who founded Playboy and hired Gloria Pall in 1955 in the midst of the cultural upheaval of his publication.

Hefner’s work in the Civil Rights movement, and Women’s Rights movement spearheaded change at a quicken pace. The dialogues he started and facilitated cool from his TV shows, or from his editing room led to lifestyle changes and the re-evaluation of beliefs that led into court cases before the Supreme Court, and laws changed.

© Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

On July 15, 1927 Gloria Pall was born. In 1955 she was hired by Hugh Hefner to pose for Playboy. On December 30, 2012 she died.