We learn from the public prints that Arizona State University has lowered the boom on Playboy magazine after a recent issue included female students from the institution in a "Girls of the Pac-10" feature: A letter bidding the magazine to cease and desist using ASU’s logos in such a context has been sent.
Looks like that little devil, Sparky, can hang out with hotties in deshabille no longer.
This stern measure is a triumph of sorts for ASU Undergraduate Student President Yaser Alamoodi, a Saudi Arabian political science major whose jihad against comely women who pose for Playboy was detailed in a Nov. 21 article in the ASU student newspaper, State Press.
Alamoodi has been pushing to add a rule to the student code of conduct that would actually punish students who disrobe for Playboy’s cameras. The appearance of ASU’s logo and name in association with "such magazines" left him concerned, he told the State Press.
"I don’t want the name of ASU to be a joke anymore," he sniffed, "and I think the Playboy association is a big reason why the ASU academic reputation is not up to what it should be."
My, my. Perhaps Alamoodi would prefer to see ASU’s lovelies portrayed as women must appear publicly in his homeland — clad in a head-to-toe black robe.
But then again, maybe not. After all, this is the same Yaser Alamoodi who told the Phoenix New Times, in an Oct. 10, 2004, interview about his being contacted by the FBI before last year’s presidential debate at ASU’s Gammage Auditorium, that, "Man, I haven’t gotten laid so much in my life as I did after 9/11. . . . Girls always confuse sympathy with sex. And guys are always up for it. And I’m not gonna say no."
Wherein Alamoodi’s jocular boast — in an article that prominently and repeatedly mentioned his ASU affiliation — of the ease with which he can get a hookup is less notionally prejudicial to ASU’s reputation than the revealing glamor shots for which some students have posed is hard to discern.
His reasoning seems to parallel that of the pigs in Orwell’s allegorical novel "Animal Farm": All risqué publicity hurts ASU, but that of some hurts it more than that of others.
