"The thing that they were more freaked out was that I had done a spread for Playboy years before, and as Playboy always does, they exploit the exploitation and re-release different pictures"
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Blackwood’s line has the weary snap of someone who’s watched a moral panic get misdirected at the wrong target. She’s not confessing scandal so much as pointing to a double standard: people weren’t “freaked out” by her choices as a working woman in media, they were freaked out by the permanence of those choices once a powerful brand decided to keep repackaging them.
Her phrasing does a lot of work. “Done a spread” is blunt, unsentimental, almost clerical - a job completed, a gig taken. Then comes the sharper pivot: “Playboy always does,” a tired inevitability that drains the company’s glamour and replaces it with a business model. The key accusation is in the compact, cynical slogan “exploit the exploitation.” She’s naming a second-order extraction: the original shoot may already trade in a certain kind of objectification, but the real machine is the endless “re-release,” where consent becomes murkier over time and context collapses into a recycled product.
The subtext is about control of narrative and the economics of reputation. Blackwood, a celebrity whose persona was built in a highly mediated era, is describing how female visibility can be treated as a renewable resource by institutions that outlast any individual’s ability to manage her image. The anxiety she’s describing isn’t prudishness alone; it’s the threat of being frozen in one version of yourself, then resold indefinitely, while everyone else gets to evolve.
Her phrasing does a lot of work. “Done a spread” is blunt, unsentimental, almost clerical - a job completed, a gig taken. Then comes the sharper pivot: “Playboy always does,” a tired inevitability that drains the company’s glamour and replaces it with a business model. The key accusation is in the compact, cynical slogan “exploit the exploitation.” She’s naming a second-order extraction: the original shoot may already trade in a certain kind of objectification, but the real machine is the endless “re-release,” where consent becomes murkier over time and context collapses into a recycled product.
The subtext is about control of narrative and the economics of reputation. Blackwood, a celebrity whose persona was built in a highly mediated era, is describing how female visibility can be treated as a renewable resource by institutions that outlast any individual’s ability to manage her image. The anxiety she’s describing isn’t prudishness alone; it’s the threat of being frozen in one version of yourself, then resold indefinitely, while everyone else gets to evolve.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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