Thanks, Eteocles, for your thoughts on Karen. I hadn’t thought about Karen’s comments in the December 1981 PM review. As you say, they suggest that she would have been delighted and honored to be POY, despite her rough go as a PM during the first months of 1981 and her second thoughts about posing. I’d like to think she would have accepted and enjoyed the title, knowing as she surely did that she was far and away the favorite of fans like us. It does appear that they broke the news to her by the spring of 1982 that she wouldn’t win, which must have hurt, even if she was relieved not to have to spend an additional year at auto shows and mansion events.
Still, I worry that Karen may have talked her way out of being POY with her candid remarks to the press. I fear that PB took advantage of Karen because she’s smart, articulate, and interesting. They featured her in press interviews and 17 times in the PM’s corner, but may have deep-sixed her as POY for that very reason: because she was too intelligent to toe a party line and too sensitive not to be hurt by the actions of jerks who didn’t appreciate her or the spirit in which she posed. What’s worse, Hef kept punishing Karen for his decision to name his ex-girlfriend POY. Remember the PB special edition celebrating the 100 top PMs of the first 50 years? Karen was in there—in 55th place. That’s worse than a joke—it was an attempt to create space between her and Hef’s ex-girlfriend. When fans vote, Karen is always in the top five, and often #1.
I wish that every day of Karen’s two-year gig (and of the reign she deserved as POY) could have gone like this one in Canada:
PB should be about fun, flirting, and fantasy. I hope Karen loved being the dream girl of us regular guys (and I hope she still does in some small way). And as Eteocles says, Karen’s smile is her best feature. When she’s smiling, she's impossibly cute!
The sad thing, as Eteocles points out, is that Hef doesn’t always get the point of PB. It’s an odd thing to say about the guy who founded PB, but if Hef had gotten the point, he would have treated Karen right and named her POY. By putting Karen in the company of lechers at the mansion, he demeaned her. And Hef helped make PB irrelevant by failing to appreciate what Karen could have done for PB. America’s ideal of womanhood had changed by 1981, and Karen represented the future. What would it have meant for PB’s future to honor a young woman who was that bright? Let Karen speak her mind, share her thoughts, and be a force to reckon with.
Does Hef realize what he missed when he didn’t honor her with a POY video? What would it have said about PB and its ideal of beauty if he had opened Karen’s video with scenes of her performing acrobatic stunts with friends at Muscle Beach? Or tumbling and somersaulting on the beach? Or performing at the gym on the balance beam, the uneven bars, and the floor routine mat? Why not celebrate Karen’s athleticism? Strength? Daring? That’s what we love about the women we love in real life, so why not let us love that about the women we adore in our fantasies? Hef could have kept PB relevant by championing Karen, but he was stuck in the fifties—a gain for his ex-girlfriend, perhaps, but a loss for Karen, for us, and for PB.