When he’s not standing behind the lens, David Chan (pictured above) uses his Playboy paychecks to travel around the country. His ambitions? Talking to college girls about their studies, reflecting on career aspirations, and highlighting their favorite extracurriculars… all while they stand in front of his camera completely and utterly naked. Right. His method of persuasion? Twisting exciting, forward-thinking ideologies like ”female empowerment”, “self-expression” and “rebellion” with the intention of exploiting young girls for a feature in Playboy.
Oh also, David is 40.
In September 1979, co-ed policies had just started reaching the Ivies, and Playboy rose to the occasion by releasing its first ever Ivy League edition. The magazine, run for the profit and pleasure of men, had focused this release on a “back to school spread,” revealing dozens of nude female students from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Brown.
On campus, the issue was groundbreakingly controversial. After David Chan advertised the edition in college newspapers, he was met with significant backlash, triggering widespread protests on campuses. Some viewed Playboy’s presence as an attack on the recently-established, and quite fragile, respect for women in academia. Others worried that banning the ads meant censorship. The controversy was exactly what Playboy wanted.
After The Crimson, Harvard’s daily, refused to put David’s ad up in their paper, Playboy saw a PR opportunity and pounced on it. David ran to the Globe: “I couldn’t believe it. I got censored. I felt very sad about that. I thought people went to university for higher learning.”
His performance worked, and Playboy got its publicity. The outcry stuck in the nation’s mind like those Playboy pages hidden under a Bible stick to your uncle’s nightstand.
Playboy realized that intellectual women in higher education were a luxury good and could be profited off of unlike any of the other college women they’d photographed in the past. This was the first time that the magazine ever referred to female students as “women” instead of “girls.”
The cover of the issue reveals the inherent tension: can women be intellectual and sexual? Can both truly coexist? Playboy marketed the answer as yes—that the world needed to see smart girls could also be desirable. But here’s what Playboy actually understood: men who feel intellectually inferior need to dominate women in other ways. Offering them access to smart women’s bodies gave these men a new fantasy: dominate the body, dominate the mind. Playboy turned this into profit. They weren’t celebrating these women but selling the thrill of conquest. They were selling access to women’s bodies that had previously seemed untouchable, with the added fetishization of their intelligence.
Across the “Back to School” spread, Chan captured these students in their natural habitats: dorm rooms, dance studios, crew docks, and other campus locations. He added cheeky captions to go with the erotic photos. The words highlighted their brains and credentials in the most condescending way possible:
“She was president of a feminist organization”
Translation: We got the feminist to strip. We won.
Some of these very women came out to the media years later stating that they regretted ever posing for Chan.
Playboy found these women at a particularly vulnerable time. Nationally, women were fighting to prove they had agency over their bodies and choices, breaking free from traditional conservative restrictions. Meanwhile, young adults have always been desperate to rebel– told that university is the perfect time for “finding themselves.”
Playboy weaponized this moment: Want to rebel against your parents and outdated “lady-like” expectations? Pose nude in a coverfold!!!
They sold women the idea of “beauty AND brains.” At the time, intelligence was seen as more of a masculine trait, and Playboy gave them an opportunity to change that–or so they said.
The problem is that the “beauty and brains” dichotomy shouldn’t exist at all. Most women don’t naturally exist in just one category, and more importantly, they shouldn’t have to choose. Yale associate psychology professor Mahzarin Banaji, who taught at Yale at the time, observed that “the world being what it is, it’s plainly the case that when these students decided to pose for Playboy they wrote off a lot of options for their future. When you make a decision to emphasize the body in any way, it’s hard for people to think of you as intellectual.”
But that’s part of the problem too. Not the women’s choices, but a world that punishes them for it. Women can be sexual, intellectual, naked, ambitiious– all of it, simultaneously. The issue isn’t nudity itself. The issue is who’s framing it, who’s profiting from it, and who’s consuming it.
Playboy made women view posing as a way to reject the stereotype of the uptight, desexualized intellectual. These women weren’t wrong for wanting to prove they could be sexy without sacrificing ambition. They were just sold a lie: that they could reclaim their sexuality through the lens of male profit and male pleasure. Playboy’s platform for self-expression came with a stage where men held the camera, wrote the captions, collected the checks, and controlled the narrative.
Playboy’s version of “beauty and brains” was never about coexistence— it was about conquest. The appeal wasn’t that these women were attractive. The appeal was that Playboy had managed to strip down women who were framed as elite, respectable, and untouchable— and make them publicly consumable.
We’re not claiming to have some profound solution. We’re simply pointing out that women have been exploited sexually from the moment they’ve been allowed on Ivy campuses.
Even today, this tension still exists. We’ve watched some of our classmates’ perception of our intelligence drop the second they learn we’re in Theta. It’s not subtle. The irony isn’t lost on us. As some anonymous posters on Fizz put it:
“I think it’s hilarious that theta is also the name of the lowest functioning brain wave”
“will Theta let you in if you’re a virgin?”
We’d love for our intelligence not to be inversely proportional to our perceived sexuality, but changing decades of bias might require more than one article.
Until then, stay the hell away from David.
Addy Gorton
