June Venus: Debbie Davis

Another clear winner this month from the 57 June Playmates in the shape of Debbie Davis from 1972. We have said before that we like a young lady with prominent teeth and Debbie has a fine mouthfull here. But the centrefold, by Bill Figge, with its lightly tanned figure isolated against the abstract white bubbles and peek-a-boo lower half is what makes this Triple P's June favourite.

A somewhat dryer Debbie


Louann Fernald June 1979

In second place we have to have Louann Fernald. We were recently contacted by Ms Fernald who said: "After trying to ditch the 'Playmate' identity my entire adult life, I give up. I can no more retrieve my photos from the Internet than BP can retrieve all the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. And so I will take this opportunity to spread the word about Veganism.
Do your part to help save the planet. GO VEGAN.
With Love,
Louann Fernald"

Neatly put, we feel! This raises a couple of interesting issues. Obviously some people posed for Playboy and never had a problem with it subsequently but for some, later on, it became an issue. Possibly because it makes it extremely easy for others to drop you into a category which completely ignores anything else you may have achieved in life. We suspect part of the problem, also, is to do with living in conservative America, which still has a peculiar attitude to nudity. We find it extraordinary that network TV in the US still can't show naked bodies or that topless sunbathing for women is prohibited in places like California (as B found out on the beach at Santa Monica). Strange! So we can appreciate that this could be an issue for Ms Fernald in her current life. Without being ungentlemanly about it, she did appear under her own, somewhat distinctive, name whereas it was quite common to use an alias at this time. But no doubt, at the time, she didn't think anything of this. The real issue, of course, is that models of the time could never have imaginied that pictures they posed for in something as disposeable as a magazine would be preserved and instantly available to the entire world through the internet. If, for example, Agent Triple P had remembered Ms Fernald's pictorial ten years later in 1989 (he did, in fact buy this particular issue from a newsagent near Heathrow airport, where he was working before going up to Oxford) and had wanted a copy, he would not have known where to start. Now, however a few clicks can give him the option of downloading Ms Fernald's pictures or buying an old copy of the magazine itself.

So we have decided to delete the paragraph on this blog detailing Ms Fernald's current whereabouts and activities giving her a little less chance of being so easily located today. We are also quite happy to broadcast her plea for Veganism. We will not be removing her pictures from here because this blog is about the depiction of the most beautiful women in history, a category into which Ms Fernald triumphantly falls.

Gail Stanton photographed by David Chan

Our next June favourite comes from a year before, 1978. We have always preferred Playboy's horizontal format centrefolds and this sauna set one is a particularly nice example.

Karin Taylor photographed by Arny Freytag

Leaping forward to 1996 we have the scubalicious Karin Taylor, one of our favourite Playmates from the 1990's. We do like a girl in a wetsuit (we remember V and her wetsuit with great affection) and although she has one of those rather contrived Playboy poses the sheer quality of Ms Taylor overcomes the rather cheesy pose.

Brittany Binger from 2007

We are not usually a fan of the current Playboy photographic style; we find it over-lit and over digitally processed. Nonetheless, when we went backwards and forwards through our June choices we kept coming back to the alliteratively named Brittany Binger (!). Brittany manages to be sultry in a way that completely escapes many Playmates and the only thing that spoils the rather studio bound picture is the sinister stuffed seagull in the background. Nevertheless it is a reasonably successful eveocation of 1950s style and brings our June review to a very pleasant close.