RADIO PERSONNEL IN SEXY PICTORIALS: DO THEY REVEAL A DOUBLE STANDARD?

“I’m basically a lazy person. I want to make a lot of money not doing much,” said Playboy nude pictorial subject Erin Lee Clark.

Tall, giggly Clark, the 30-year-old advertising traffic manager at San Diego classical radio station KFSD, is no empty-headed teeny-bopper though, she says.

“You’re talking to a real feminist here,” she said. “You’re talking to a real fighter who believes in equal pay for equal positions. I don’t think that has anything to do with this.”

However, Clark is also pragmatic . . . and feminine. She offers up a freshly baked chocolate chip morsel as evidence of her traditional feminine upbringing in a staunchly Protestant family of eight.

“I baked them myself,” she told the interviewer who had just asked why she accepted $1,000 to appear nude, with arms and legs akimbo, in the March issue of Playboy magazine.

Clark was one of 17 women who work in radio and who posed for “Radio Visions,” a 10-page pictorial depicting deejays, programmers, saleswomen and other women who work at radio stations from San Diego to Fort Lauderdale.

Playboy’s publicity department says “Radio Visions” “presents the faces and figures behind some of radio’s sultriest voices--each one a perfect 10 on the Arbitron scale.”

Clark was more effervescent than sultry about the money. The $1,000 she got for posing represented a small fortune to a young woman who barely earns that much a month.

And, as icing on the cake, Clark was finally getting the kind of attention she believed she deserved. She was flattered. Men were really paying attention to her.

“I’ve got a fan club now,” she said. “Some platoon in Fort Worth, Tex. They’re putting together a package. For me! I’m the Betty Grable of the ‘80s. I just show my legs a little bit differently.”

There could be a professional modeling career ahead, Clark mused. She has already received a call from a representative of several auto repair garages. He wanted to know if she was available to pose for calendar art.

In fact, all day long the first week the magazine was on the newsstands, the KFSD phone kept ringing with secret admirers wanting to talk to Clark. Most calls, she said, had not been obscene.

“Yes, I’m greedy. Yes, I’ve got bills to pay. But, see, I don’t see anything wrong with it either,” she said of her sexually candid pose in Playboy.

Susan Brownmiller, author of the best-selling “Femininity,” sees everything wrong with it. The minute women take their clothes off for millions of Playboy readers, they are also shedding their self-respect, she says. In varying degrees, according to Brownmiller, they also shear away the self-esteem of every woman who chooses to be measured by her achievements rather than her appearance.

“To be asked to take your clothes off is still considered a compliment to women who should know better,” Brownmiller said in a telephone interview from New York.

For 20 years, Brownmiller has lectured, written and hit the talk-show circuit in a quixotic fight to persuade the Erin Clarks not to succumb. Lately, even Brownmiller is growing weary.

“A feminist like me who says, ‘Come on, don’t do it!’ doesn’t stand a chance,” Brownmiller said. “There is no point in my saying it because women have this tremendous need to be liked and they think by doing this, men will like them.”

Like the 16 other young women who appeared in the March Playboy, Clark was the subject of one of the semiregular “pictorials” the magazine has instituted in recent years.

They focus upon specific professions or exclusive communities of women. As such, pictorials play on the perennial theme that a sexual playmate can be as close as the girl next door.

“At the moment, we’re working on a pictorial of farmers’ daughters,” Playboy senior photo editor Jeff Cohen said. “These are actual women who grew up on the farm and moved to the big city. We’re taking them back to their roots.”

Last fall, the magazine persuaded “The Women of Mensa”--or at least some of them--to pose nude.

In the past, Playboy has turned its cameras on women in the military, law enforcement, rock and roll, body building and professional football cheerleading--often with well-publicized negative results for at least some of the women.

Marine Bambi Lynn Finney, for example, was discharged from the Corps early because she posed in and out of uniform for Playboy. An Ohio policewoman who posed was temporarily suspended from the force.

And the Chicago Bears are laying off their cheerleader squad--the Honey Bears--next fall. Cohen believes it to be a direct result of Playboy’s “uncoverage” of several Honey Bears, as well as other professional cheerleaders, in the first such pictorial that appeared in the magazine, in the late 1970s.

“That was probably our most celebrated pictorial because it led to the demise of so many cheerleading squads, and it’s probably the reason the Bears finally got rid of theirs,” Cohen said.

Bears spokesman Ryan Harlan denies that Playboy had anything to do with the decision to disband the squad, saying they had simply run their course as a Bears attraction. Cheesecake cheerleaders are passe, he said.

“We’re exploring other forms of entertainment,” Harlan said.

But Playboy isn’t.

Pictorials have worked in the past and will continue to work, Cohen said.

Playboy’s female counterpart and sometimes rival, Playgirl, is imitating that success formula. In its February issue, the women’s skin magazine published its own pictorial of men in radio.

The chief difference between the two pictorials was that the men did not have to take their clothes off.

“Of course the double standard still exists,” said Playgirl Editor Thomasine (Tommi) Lewis.

Her magazine was scorned when it printed nude photos of Sylvester Stallone, from one of his early films. But Playboy, Lewis is quick to point out, was applauded for its scoops when nude photos of Suzanne Somers and Madonna were printed in the magazine.

The double standard might be easier to dismiss if it stopped on the pages of the magazine, but many women--and some men--believe it doesn’t.

As one 39-year-old Los Angeles executive put it, the wide social acceptance of nude photos of women at the same time that male nudity is scorned “devalues our currency.”

Her demand that her name not be used for fear of reprisal from her chiefly male peers and bosses stands as mute testimony that the double standard is still very much in force.

Tacit approval is given female nudity at the same time male nudity remains shocking, Lewis said. Breasts and tufts of female pubic hair are commonplace in theaters and even on television these days. But male genitalia are still verboten. The social taboo surrounding the display of male buttocks and penises subtly spills over into every aspect of society, Lewis said.

“Advertisers are the best indication of the mood of the country, and they just won’t advertise in Playgirl,” she said. “They tell me it is obscene to have full frontal male nudity. They accuse us of being a gay magazine and they just don’t believe that women like looking at nude men.”

Playgirl’s demographics and circulation tend to dispute that premise. Playgirl market studies indicate that the average Playgirl reader is a 25-year-old female who has had at least some college and earns a relatively high income.

“They consume liquor and go to the movies and are willing to spend $3.50 on a luxury item like an entertainment magazine like Playgirl,” Lewis said.

Last year, the magazine’s average monthly circulation was 641,000 compared to Playboy’s hefty 4.1 million. Playboy is now in its fourth decade and, according to some, is an institution in decline. At its peak in the early 1970s, its circulation was more than 7 million.

“I do not think Playboy or Playgirl are in the avant-garde,” said Elinor Lenz, co-author of “The Feminization of America.”

“I think they are really mirroring the kind of things that are dying in our culture, but they still have their devotees and adherents.”

Playgirl’s Lewis says one thing Playboy has succeeded in doing is making the exploitation of female nudity socially acceptable.

“I wish we could get men to do the same, but . . .,” she said, her voice trailing off in a sigh.

Despite the feminist revolt of the ‘70s; despite the gains made by the National Organization for Women and the near miss of the Equal Rights Amendment; despite the nomination of Geraldine Ferraro for the U.S. vice presidency and the leaps women have made in the executive work force in the U.S. and abroad. . . .

Despite it all, the women of Playboy still show it all for America.

And the men of Playgirl?

“Playgirl is the only magazine of its kind for women,” said Lewis. “So, if all that’s available is chest hair, that’s all the women of America get.”

Erin Clark is also a little disappointed.

“I am a feminist,” she said between phone calls from admirers. “I am also a woman, and I enjoy looking at men.

“What kills me is, you’ve got Playboy, you’ve got Penthouse, you’ve got Hustler . . . and you have one women’s (skin) magazine. If I had the money, if I had the backing, if I had the knowledge of how to do all that, I would put out a women’s magazine.”

But Tommi Lewis already does, and she says it is a constant struggle. She rationalizes the male refusal to pose nude this way:

“Playboy has relied more on skin and we have relied on the man and what he’s all about. When they do their pictorials, they are looking for an extension of their centerfold. They pay $5,000 for their centerfold. We pay $1,000. And a man in Playgirl gets a lot more publicity and mileage out of it. He’s not subject to blackballing the way a woman is in Playboy.”

Nevertheless, Lewis’ photographers try to get men to show it all for the camera. Most refuse. They adopt Lewis’ rationalizations as their own. Women, they say, are more interested in the male personality than they are the male genitals.

The bottom line is that most men who pose for Playgirl pictorials are allowed to keep their clothes on, as long as their personalities shine through.

But Erin Clark and the other women of “Radio Visions”?

No way.

“Obviously, if we started publishing pictures of women with their clothes on, we’d be out of business,” said Playboy’s Cohen.