A Feminist's Arduous Task
Getting Paid to Scrutinize Naked Women Was the Last Resort of a Desperate Man
By Libby Copeland Washington Post Staff Writer

It is a little tough to feel bad for Leif Ueland.

"I really got tired of writing about sex," he says mournfully.

When Ueland decided to write "Accidental Playboy," about the six-month bus trip he took in 1998, documenting Playboy's search for the Playmate of the Millennium -- during which he was dragged to strip joints, obliged to photograph topless women and forced (well, maybe not forced) to sleep with two tryouts -- his publisher wanted to use the subtitle "Living the Ultimate Male Fantasy."

"I just wanted to shoot myself," says Ueland, descendant of feminists, recovering sexual neurotic, gay-seeming straight and all-around Sensitive Male. He made a counteroffer: "Caught in the Ultimate Male Fantasy." That, he felt, more accurately captured the angst of his journey.

Ueland, a struggling writer, was living in Los Angeles and working on a novel when he was offered a job writing daily dispatches for Playboy.com about the Playmate tryouts. The great-grandson of a suffragette, Ueland worried that the Playboy job would turn him into a "pig." But he accepted the offer, eager for cash and adventure and egged on by his shrink.

Once on the bus, he met his subjects: small-town girls and strippers, young mothers and even grandmothers, with gorgeous faces and worn-out faces, dream bodies and botched boob jobs. He saw the leers of one of the other Playboy staffers, watched the way a set of muscly hustlers tried to latch onto the bus to score dates, and felt "guilt by association," "embarrassed to be a man."

Last week, Wisconsin resident Ueland, 37, was in town visiting friends during a break from promoting his new book, and -- in homage to his time scoping out talent at bikini contests and restaurants where the true entree is the wait staff -- we took him to a Hooters in Fairfax.

Here are the women: in push-up bras with cleavage-baring shirts and orange "shorts" that look like bathing suit bottoms, nicely complemented by rust-colored stockings that could pass for support hose.

And here come the men: in suits, in hooded sweat shirts, in pairs and in packs, with fox-stealing-chicken smiles. They perch on stools in this good-time place; greasy fingers and sticky eyes.

In the presence of this well-choreographed mating dance, Ueland can only voice "the disconnect I feel from men. I look around, the men in here -- it just boggles me. I have no idea what they're doing here."

He eats a chicken sandwich.

"There's two things going on," he says, to sum up the surroundings. "There's the objectification and then there's also just the sheer tackiness."

This is the Sensitive Male's burden.

"Accidental Playboy" is perhaps too honest, the kind of honest that makes you feel itchy. It details Ueland's sexual hangups, his dating humiliations and his frank discussions with his therapist. When he began the job -- handsome but perhaps a little too nice, with no job, no money and no car -- he had not had sex in five years. (Then there's the gay-seeming thing. Ueland is well aware of it but he has little explanation for the slightly effeminate voice and expressive mannerisms. It may be relevant to mention, however, that he was a child underwear model.)

On board the bus, he was at first a poodle among pit bulls. Acutely self-conscious and tortured by "a nonstop inner narrative," Ueland hesitated even to approach women for the clothed pictures required for his Web site dispatches. When charged with the task of filing the semi-nude Polaroids taken of the tryouts, he couldn't seem to locate his libido. "Shouldn't I be feeling something other than numb?" he writes.

But Ueland's sensitivity is what saves "Accidental Playboy" from being a mere chronology of blond hair, breasts and bright smiles. While he was biased toward the unusual-looking tryouts, like the one whose "nose is the tiniest bit bulbous," as well as the ones who seem to feel a bit cynical about Playboy and its mission, he was surprised by the unquestioning enthusiasm many tryouts seemed to feel for Playboy. For many, making it onto those glossy pages would mean refuge from the smallness of their lives.

He listened to the women's very American stories (Divorced at 21? Inhabitant of 70 -- 70?! -- foster homes?), noted the sense of humor that strippers tend to have, wondered what it's like to possess the open-sesame beauty that provokes instant marriage proposals and wildly exorbitant gifts. (As if to provide evidence, the Hooters waitress serving Ueland tells of a customer who regularly tips her $100 for his $10 meals.)

He watched countless women undress Read more...