Karen Elaina Price

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Karen’s Expressiveness

I’ll never have a chance to know Karen as a person, but I’ve always sensed, from the expressiveness of her photos, the candor of her interviews, and her success as an artist, that she’s a person who feels things deeply and wears her heart on her sleeve. I don’t think she could suppress her warmth, her enthusiasm, her passion, or her sensuality if she tried, and I wouldn’t want her to try, because it’s a joy to see her feelings bubble up, and to feel the joy they bring her and her fans. It’s not hard to imagine why Karen bruised so easily during her two-year stint as a PM—her openness and accessibility left her vulnerable, and she takes things to heart. A lot of what she had to deal with was unpleasant—something I’ll always feel guilty about as a fan, since it caused her great pain and worried her at times that she was becoming an altogether different person than she wanted to be, “hard,” as she put it. But what made it hard for her to be a PM is what made her an extraordinary PM. Her ability to connect with us emotionally, whether she performs an acrobatic feat or poses for a picture, is the key to her power. She’s not just beautiful and athletic. She’s captivating, because she can communicate her feelings with a simple gesture or a subtle change in her smile, and draw us to her.

I can’t get enough of Karen having fun. Her smile is so genuine, her body language so eloquent, that we feel her warmth right through the camera.




But I love her other expressions too, whether she’s welcoming,




Inviting (a promise of things to come!),




Enticing,




Bold,



or Passionate.



Karen’s face and body work in harmony in every shot to express and reveal her feelings. Intelligent and articulate as Karen is, she doesn’t need words to speak to us. Her emotionality and physicality—the keys to her artistry as a gymnast and acrobat—say it all. Karen may never feel she made the right choice to be a PM, but no one has ever been more right for the part.

[Patty Hearst]

Happy birthday to the perfect Playmate Karen Price.

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I hope fellow VEF members don’t mind me writing now and then about Karen. Hers is the second most visited Softcore Models Discussion thread—coming up on 200,000 views—so I hope I haven’t worn out my welcome, having made most of the posts myself. The lack of new material from PB is a problem, and I worry that the PM threads may lose support over time as a result. But Karen’s are still going strong, so I thought I’d try to do my best with the new material we have from other sources. And do please chime in—I know many of you have thoughts about Karen. It would be great to have a real discussion!

Thanks to UTube, we have more newspaper articles and appearance ads for Karen. One interview new to VEF helps us better understand how Karen became a PM and her feelings and experiences in her first months as a PM (I’ve written about that interview in two posts below). And Karen’s account in that interview of her photo shoots left me desperate to see more. She said that her shoots took place over three months. “Each session took a day, and sometimes we did three or four sessions a week.” Think of all the photos PB has in its vault, that it won’t let us see. I don’t mind them holding Karen’s photos hostage, but couldn’t they just make a ransom demand like any self-respecting hostage taker, and let us pay whatever they want with crowd sourced funding? Is there some problem in their contract with their web affiliate that has them holding on to her photos? Who really controls the vault? And does anyone there know how to run a business? Make money? Reward fans for their loyalty? Give customers what they want? They need to put a fan or two on the board of directors. I wouldn’t demand a vote—just a chance to say “help!”

Another article that UTube found, however, puzzled me. Karen was still making appearances as PB’s Miss January 1981 in the spring of 1984—more than a year after her original two-year contract had run out. I had thought (as a friend of Karen’s confirmed in a post on VEF) that Karen had so soured on her PB experience that she couldn’t wait for her obligation to PB to end. But there she was, nearly three and a half years later, doing the same kind of public appearance (a World of Wheels event at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds). And she used a publicity photo we hadn’t seen before, the most revealing photo of her that I’ve ever seen in a newspaper. The publicity photos I had seen before in newspapers showed Karen wearing a blouse or something more formal, or were cropped tightly to focus on her lovely face. PB apparently promoted Karen as she wished in 1981-2, as a genuine, down-to-earth girl-next-door. For example, in March 1981:



So it was a surprise to see something a bit hotter in April 1984—in the vein of the publicity photos she had always signed for fans—bare shouldered and leaving the rest to our hyperactive imaginations. Not that I’m complaining!



It seems to have been taken after Karen lost a lot of weight in an effort to look thin (not that she had to lose weight on our behalf. She always looked great! Indeed, it’s sad that PB felt the need to lie about how much Karen weighted when her layout was shot, claiming it was 123 pounds, when she admitted in an interview that she had been a very athletic and curvaceous 135 pounds—perfection!).

Of course, the photo wasn’t as torrid as the promotional photo PB published in OUI in December 1980 to sell her newsstand issue. Newspapers couldn’t go there. That ad was for the ages, even if the opening line of the copy was coy and uninspired. Couldn’t PB just let Karen’s passion and beauty, and Ken Marcus’s artistry, speak for themselves? Or if words were necessary, couldn’t they have spoken about Karen as a person, and about the erotic intensity of her performance? I did enjoy, however, the play on words in the bold script:

Don't Miss Jan.

And I can see why Karen might have had trouble looking at that picture of herself (“OMG! Did I do that?”).



But given how upset Karen was at being treated as a sex object rather than as a person, and how tired she was of most of the events PB booked for her, her promotional appearance in 1984 leaves me confused. Does anyone know how long she offered to make appearances as a PM? Maybe she was only under contract with World of Wheels, which may have had a license to hire former PMs for its shows. Anyway, I had thought Karen was done with PB by then and of promoting herself as a PM, but she wasn’t. Did she earn enough at these appearances to make them worth the aggravation?

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Alas, thanks to the articles Utube found, we’ve gotten yet another “reality check” of how hard life could be on the promotional circuit for a beautiful PM like Karen. She did the best she could in the months after she appeared on newsstands, but she soon realized that she had walked into something she wished she hadn’t. Some of the events seem harmless, so hokey that Karen might have enjoyed them. At one of her first, in January 1981, Karen appeared at the World of Wheels in Los Angeles—credited between “Twiki” of TV’s “Buck Rogers” and “Valletta the Hypnotic Wizard.” At least that sounds camp! But a number of the events that Karen appeared at in her first and second year with PB were god awful, humiliating, and demeaning. We know that not only from her comments, but from reporters who wrote about those events. Once when she was on stage, the guys who introduced her “made a bunch of cracks, very nasty ones, to make the audience laugh,” and she was so hurt she asked them to stop and think about how she felt. At another event—a free-for-all fight night in Walla Walla Washington (not promising!)—fans were invited to attend with the promise that Karen would “show her wares.” When she stepped into the ring at the beginning of the festivities, dressed gamely in a top and skin-tight pants that showed off her curves, she received not only cheers from the crowd, but according to a reporter, “raunchy invitations”—perhaps meant in fun, but certainly in bad taste, and not fun for Karen, who was hurt by the thought that “75 percent of the people I talk to believe I don’t have any morals.”

Why for the life of me would guys behave like this in front of a breathtaking young woman who was willing to share her beauty with us? It’s beyond me. Why hurt Karen’s feelings? For goodness sakes, she’s a living, breathing goddess, totally out of our leagues. Why treat her that way, instead of showing our appreciation and admiration? As anyone can see from her photo shoots, Karen had fun creating her fantasy for us. Why spoil it for her, when she has given us so much fun? And as Karen said, posing was hard work, and she worked hard, because she wanted to be not just another PM, but a spectacular PM. She did everything she could to knock our socks off. And she was a smashing success—the heartthrob of more Vintage fans than any other PM. So why make her feel that her hard work was wasted? Unappreciated? Misunderstood? Why make her feel that it nearly ruined her life? I suppose it’s just another sign of how messed up our society is when it comes to sex, fantasy, gender equality, and compassion. And for guys who don’t care about the feelings of beautiful PMs, at least be selfish and self-centered in a practical way. Were you encouraging young women to follow in Karen’s footsteps by behaving like jerks? Any woman as beautiful and talented as Karen who read her interviews or the articles about her appearances would have said no, no, no to PB, because of the stupid behavior of men.

In fairness, however, to us ordinary guys, the stupidest male behavior occurred at the Mansion, with no small degree of complicity from some of the PMs. Karen was appalled, and she didn’t mince words. She had no interest in dating celebrities, who were on “ego trips” and “probably married,” nor did she want to drink, use drugs, or end up depressed and drug dependent, like a PM she knew who had appeared five years before her and had allowed herself to be kept by a wealthy older man who eventually abandoned her. According to a reporter for Gannett New Service, Karen was “frightened by her sudden celebrity status and how all the glamour might affect her.” And what upset her most? In her words: “I know if I ever meet a man, I’ll never know if he wants to go out with me because I’m Miss January, or simply because he likes me.” Every beautiful woman has that problem. But Karen had it in spades.

It’s too bad we didn’t have fan groups like we do today. PB as we knew it then is dead, and we can’t go back and fix the past. But I hope, as I’ve said before, that Karen can look back and realize how much she was and is appreciated by her fans, how much happiness she’s given us, and how much happiness we wish for her.

And thinking out loud about better venues for PMs, given the President’s recent tacky speech to the Boy Scouts, wouldn’t teen aged guys rather hear from Karen than from politicians? What if Boy Scouts could invite PMs to hand out their badges at courts of honor? How much more popcorn would Scouts sell to make that happen? The BSA would make a mint—no more financial problems! And would the Scouts misbehave? Not on your life. They’re too young. They’d be polite and totally in awe. Of course, I suspect parents would try to put the kibosh on this, but isn’t Scouts supposed to be boy led? Shouldn’t they make the decisions? And wouldn’t Karen, a born teacher who loves kids of all ages, have had a great time? And what a role model. Who among us is more physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight than Karen? And she proves that people with good values can be sexy! I rest my case.

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Karen was candid as always in her March 1981 interview in Tucson, Arizona with the Gannett News Service (as published in the Elmira (New York) Star-Gazette). So we’ve finally learned exactly how her father broke the news to her that he had sent her pictures to PB, and how she learned that PB had “accepted” her—an understatement if there ever was one. Family photos sufficed! Karen was at dinner at her father’s house, which confirms our hunch that her parents were divorced. And the article spells out exactly one of the sources of tension between her and her father—his ambition (since she was twelve) that she enter “show business,” which ran up against her desire to teach gymnastics to children, which she was already doing at the time. I hate to think of what he saw as a dad when Karen turned twelve (I’m hoping it was her gift for gymnastics), but I think we all have a good idea of what else he might have seen in Karen, because we as twelve-year old boys would have seen it too. A one of a kind beauty.



That’s a heavy burden to place on a daughter, particularly from a father who may have been most at fault in her parents’ divorce.

Her dad put the prospect to her jokingly in material terms. He asked, would she “like to make $10,000?” She asked how, and he told her how. It’s hard to know how she felt at that moment (she later said she “didn’t feel good” about it), but she said to her father without missing a beat, “You’ve got to be kidding, those girls are 10s.” But Karen must have realized by age nineteen that she was a ten—on an exponential scale (yes, a ten to the tenth power!). And she must have thought about show business, not only because of her father’s urgings and his example as a performer, but because of her interest in acrobatics and the fact that she seems to have discovered already that college (despite her intelligence) was not for her. And the money must have been tempting to an underemployed young woman. So, according to the reporter, “she decided to go through with the Playmate role to find out whether she could stand to be in show business.” It turned out to be a baptism by fire.

As we know from her later interviews, she agonized over her decision, and sought out friends and especially her mother and sister for their opinions—maybe because she trusted them more than she trusted her father. And although I can’t be sure, her relationship with her father might have been more complicated than we think. She was a teetotaler, and she told everyone that it had to do with her values and her concern for her body as an athlete. But she would have said the same thing and have acted the same way if drugs or alcohol had destroyed her parent’s marriage and she wanted no part of them. No doubt she loved her father and wanted to please him—nearly all of us feel that way about our fathers—but as we’ve discussed before, his behavior was way unusual, and probably in retrospect a sign not only of a show business dad, but of a dysfunctional adult who didn’t quite know how to be a father to a beautiful, gifted daughter he had disappointed. Thank goodness Karen was strong beyond her years, as children of divorce often are, and that her rough initial months as a PM took her back to her own dreams and her own sense of herself. By August 1981 she had righted the ship, and she declared in an interview that she was an “athlete”—she didn’t say model or pin-up or actress. She knew in her heart what she wanted to do. And bless her heart, she did it, as a gymnastics teacher, acrobat, and stunt woman. But the more we learn about why Karen became a PM, the worse I feel about it. If her friends or boyfriend had sent in her pictures, and ambition and a desire for stardom had led her to volunteer, that would have been one thing. Ambition and a short-lived desire for stardom probably played a role. And thank goodness Karen didn’t follow a tragic path to being a PM as some young women did. She wasn’t a lost soul from a broken family, and she didn’t let people take advantage of her. But Karen’s may have been the most unlikely path to PM ever.

[keats]

Originally Posted by utube

One more try with the newspaper clips - edited for content.

Pretty sure that this is some kind of photoshopping by a fan

[utube]

Yep. Some guy had the most awesome website I've seen for PB PM's in movies or TV, and Karen's page included her appearance on Magnum PI.

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It’s not often that we PB fans speak about the most compelling photos of our favorite PMs, the ones that are truly “erotic,” as PBs photos are at their best—the photos that are not only beautiful, but exciting beyond belief—the ones that arouse our deepest sexual feelings. I love the “boudoir” photos of my favorite PMs, the glamour photos, and the girl-next-door photos. But I must admit (and I think most PB fans will agree with me) that the photos I can’t get out of my head—the ones I think about time and again—are the ones that overwhelm me and leave me burning with desire. Not every PB model was willing to go that far—to create truly erotic art. Most never ventured beyond glamour or boudoir photography. But a brave few, like Karen, didn’t hold back, and worked with PBs greatest photographers—Ken Marcus, Pompeo Posar, Dwight Hooker—to create erotic art for the ages.

Karen said on a number of occasions that she didn’t know how to model when she arrived at her first shoot. It took her some time, she admitted, to learn. But think of what she had to learn. She didn’t sign up to be a fashion model or a runway model, which is hard enough. As Karen said in her interview with the Regina Leader, which paraphrased her thoughts, “Looking sultry and seductive takes skill, not to mention nerve, when you think about all those people hovering around you and you’re the only one with your clothes off.” Fortunately, Ken Marcus, who was hired by PB to heat things up, is a master teacher, and Karen (who would become a master teacher of acrobatics in her own right) was a coach’s dream.

Karen did a wonderful job when it came to her “girl-next-door” photos. She’s adorable.



Karen and Ken Marcus also did a great job in her glamour photos, with dramatic lighting, costuming, and makeup. She’s out-of-this world beautiful.



And Karen did a sensational job in her boudoir photos, which captured her beauty in lingerie. She was relaxed, poised, and welcoming. She didn’t hold us at arms-length—she drew us in, as if she had posed just for us.



But none of these photos were meant to rouse our sexual desires to a fever pitch. They leave us yearning to see more, but alas, most PMs stopped there, and left us hanging. Karen didn’t. She and Ken Marcus kept going, and created the finest erotic art that has ever appeared in PB—one more reason why Karen is the most beloved PM among vintage fans.

It’s hard to know how Karen’s great erotic photos came about. Karen got off to a superb start in her tease in the gym. With another model, these might have been just glamour photos or girl-next-door photos. But Karen’s expressions—alternating between sultry and giddy—and the grace of her movements, her stunning curves, her nervous energy, and her joy at giving us a chance to fantasize about her gigantic breasts popping out of her top, never fail get my heart pounding, my nerves tingling, and my blood pressure past the red line. We can feel Karen's excitement as she drew nearer and nearer the moment when she’d peel off her gym togs and become a real Playmate. She was ready to shine. And thanks to Karen’s and Ken Marcus’s artistry, we can sense Karen’s feelings, moment to moment, as they bubbled to the surface. There’s nothing more genuine, or erotic, than that.



But Karen’s most erotic photos took place in the sexually-charged atmosphere of her bedroom shoot. Most every PM had a bedroom shoot, but few were as determined, as Karen was, to drive us into a frenzy. She wanted to arouse our sexual feelings, and she did, with Ken Marcus’s help. And think of how hard that was for Karen. If you’ve seen Ken Marcus’s video on glamour photography, you know what Karen meant when she said her photo sessions were hard work. Think of how difficult it was to create a photo that drives me wild every time I see it.



It’s a stunning mash up of two genres: high-fashion and erotic. It’s a glamour photo, as we can see from Karen’s hair and makeup and the way Ken Marcus photographed her face. The setting is sumptuous: a fur rug, plush satin sheets, a designer bed, and Karen’s elegant heels. Everything bespeaks the luxury and wealth we would expect in a glamour photo. But Ken Marcus wanted Karen completely nude—not the most common attire for a glamour photo. He realized that Karen would look her best—her most fashionable—not wearing a stitch. Clothes would only hide her riches. And Karen knew what Ken Marcus was going for emotionally. She wasn’t there to sell clothes or household furnishings. She was there to sell Playboys--her Playboys. He wanted Karen to seduce us, flat out, and leave us speechless at the sight of her gorgeous body, her beautiful face, and her spectacular breasts. He asked Karen to drop her breasts as far as she could, straight down, so our desire for her would burn white hot.

Think of how hard it was for Karen to hold that pose, knees bent, feet together, stooped over, tummy muscles flexed tight to give her a tiny waist, her lovely behind thrust out, and her back as straight as she could make it. And Ken Marcus and his assistants must have taken many minutes to get her photo just right, as Karen held her pose. They backlit Karen to accentuate the curves of her hair, back, and behind, and front-lit her to illuminate her tan lines and make her gorgeous, pale breasts glow in an otherwise dark setting. The staff combed Karen’s hair so it would appear to fall naturally and would accentuate the cascade of her breasts toward the floor. Ken Marcus must have moved Karen’s hands and elbows several times to get just the right angle, the right pitch of her body, the right turn of her head to create this spectacular shot. And then Karen, probably fatigued at that point, and perhaps even sore from posing in such an awkward and unnatural position, had to rise to the occasion and give us that look—the most important element in her photo. She didn’t appear fatigued, distant, hesitant, or frightened by what she was doing. She let us know, as she looked straight into our eyes, that she was proud of what she was doing, that she wanted us to enjoy her, that she enjoyed being with us, and that she wanted to thrill us to the very core of our male beings. She wanted us to desire her more than we had ever desired a woman. Yes, she might even have been thinking about stardom. And in the firmament of PB, she succeeded.

But again, it was not just Karen’s artistry, her expressiveness, but her collaboration with Ken Marcus that created her heart-pounding erotic photos. I wish Karen and Ken would speak with us about how those photos came about—who pushed whom. But I have the feeling that they pushed one another as Karen got turned on. There’s little doubt in my mind that Karen was aroused by what she was doing. Once she got comfortable on the set with Ken Marcus and the crew, and grew confident in her modeling and in the beauty of the photos they were creating, it appears she let herself go. As Patty Duffek said in a chat with fans years after she posed, she got so hot and bothered one day on the set that she rushed home and made her boyfriend very happy that night!

Karen was one of those special PMs who PB photographers yearn for—who embrace not just the glamour and boudoir shoots, but the erotic possibilities of PB’s art. PB photographer David Chan described his ideal PM in an interview in 1982, which certainly speaks to Karen. He searched for “a looker with lots of oomph. The face comes first. We still want a little bit of the girl next door. We still want a bit of innocence. I usually look for the eyes that sparkle and entice you. The lips, the mouth, the way they pout. When you’re doing a Playmate, you have to have everything. Be a 10.” But he hoped for more. “When I get aroused is when everything clicks. When the shooting is great, when she responds. That’s great guns. That’s my high.” Karen has all of those qualities. And to say Karen “responded” to Ken Marcus and his camera would be the greatest understatement in history of PB.

But how did Karen’s great erotic photos come about? Were they her idea or Ken Marcus’s, or did they press farther and farther on together as the set got hotter and hotter, as they realized that they were creating extraordinary erotic art, the perfect collaboration between photographer and model?

It’s still a mystery to me how Ken Marcus coaxed that performance out of Karen, and how Karen summoned the courage, despite her anxiety about the whole enterprise, to throw herself into it the way she did. Erotic doesn’t begin to describe her bedroom shoot. I wish Ken Marcus would speak with us someday about Karen and her shoots, so we could get a better sense of how they came about, what from him, what from her, and what from the moment. I mean, did he say to Karen, “I’d like you to look down at yourself, and . . .”



Or, “Karen, I’d like you to crouch in front of the bed, brace yourself with your right arm, and with your left I’d like you to . . .”



Or, Karen, I’d like you look straight into the camera, and with your fingers . . .



Or, “Karen, I’d like you to take the strap of your gown and . . . “



Or, “Karen, I’d like you to lean back against the bed and . . . “



Or, “Karen, I’d like you to open the top of your gown, and with your right hand I’d like you to . . . and with your left . . .”



Or finally, “Karen, I’d like you to open your gown all the way, reach over your head as far as you can with your right hand and grab hold of the ornament on the top of the bedpost, and with your left I’d like you to . . . “



I don’t think I could ever say such things to Karen or anyone else. I’d be too embarrassed. Heck, I’m too embarrassed to write them in this note, which is why I suppose I wasn’t cut out to be a photographer for PB. How do you ask a young, beautiful, inexperienced model to play with her body that way? And why did she say yes, yes, yes, in the most passionate way? Did she hesitate at first? Did Ken Marcus encourage her, and if so, how? Maybe these photos were Karen’s idea, and maybe Ken Marcus dared to ask. I’d love to know. But Karen must have known in her head and heart what he was asking, or hoping for, and how turned on we’d get if she agreed. It doesn’t appear that she was tricked into these photos. She is too daring and committed in these photos for that to have been the case. And she was anything but naïve—she (and Ken Marcus) knew what would thrill us, and she knew she was so breathtakingly beautiful she could do it.

So we don’t know how these photos came about, and may never know, but I’m glad they did. As I’ve said elsewhere, Karen didn’t just fulfill my fantasies—she created them.

Yet her photos, superbly staged and sexually charged as they are, would not have been perfect had it not been for the extraordinary looks on Karen’s face. When you think of how long she had to wait as Ken Marcus and his assistants bustled around her, fussed about her, and repositioned her, about how difficult her poses were to hold and how far she was asked to go, it’s amazing that she was ready, willing, and eager to thrill us when it came time to click the shutter. Her knowing look as she cradled her breasts, her bold look with the strap of her gown, her inviting look in the next photo, when she flat out offered herself to us sexually, and the last two, when she let her feelings flow, aroused and passionate—my God, how beautiful, and how, well, to put it euphemistically, erotic! Has any fantasy woman ever turned you on more than Karen does? And it’s clear that she meant to arouse our sexual feelings and desires. She knew what PB hoped for and what PB fans were desperate to see. And she was not only willing, but happy and excited to go all the way for us. Yes, she wanted her issue of PB to fly off the shelves, to bring her fame and fortune. But the honor of posing for Playboy meant more to Karen than that, as we can see from the passion she poured into it. I have the feeling that at that moment in her life, she believed in erotic art and embraced it. And I think (and hope) that she was as turned on as we are, and happy to be on that set. That’s the excitement of erotic art at its finest. Fun for us and for our heartthrobs alike.

Karen’s shoot appears to have been an artistic turning point for Ken Marcus. None of the PMs he had photographed before, from Aziri Johari to Lisa Welch, displayed the degree of sensuality and sexuality that Karen did. But after Karen’s shoot, he recaptured again and again what he had achieved with Karen, and he apparently asked every willing PM from then on to play with her body as Karen did. He reached that same artistic and emotional peak with Patti Farinelli, as her fans well know.







And he persuaded Cathy Larmouth, Heidi Sorenson, Alana Soares, and his last PM, Justine Greiner, to strike the same kinds of erotic poses. And he photographed every prodigiously endowed PMs who graced PBs pages from Karen until the end of his time with PB, I imagine by choice, given his seniority—trying, I'd like to think, to recreate what he had with Karen.

Karen’s vintage fans are not the only ones who have noticed how compelling and erotic her photos are. Ken Marcus’s peers awarded him the PB photography award for his layout of Karen. To this day he gives that honor a prominent place in his honor-laden bio. And VEF members who are on other, shall we say more “demonstrative” threads, are as taken by Karen as we are. Those threads aren’t my cup of tea, nor are PMs in general their cup of tea, but I do follow posts on Karen or Patti wherever they lead. On the most frequented such thread (initials “WC!”), most PMs from PB’s Golden Era have received not a single post. Fans on that thread prefer hardcore or hard softcore photos, so even the greatest PMs don’t receive many posts. But Karen surpasses by far every other PM in posts on the WC thread, followed by Patti Farinelli and Alana Soares—a testament not only to their beauty, but to Ken Marcus’s skill and to the erotic intensity of their photos. We softcore fans feel the same way: no PM has more posts on the “My First Playmate Crush” thread than Karen.

I’d die of embarrassment if Karen were to read our thread and be embarrassed or upset by our passion for her, when she should be proud of everything she did. What an accomplishment. What Karen did was hard to do—physically, emotionally, and artistically—and she did it splendidly: a virtuoso performance by a young woman who had to learn from scratch. It’s sad to think so many people tried to make her feel terrible or ashamed for having done something magnificent. She and Ken Marcus created beautiful, timeless art. The problem is that erotic art is not cherished and admired the way it should or could be in our culture. Hypocrisy abounds. But we’re human, our favorite PMs are human, and we should enjoy our humanity, including our sexuality. What guy wouldn’t love to have a beautiful, large, framed, signed, limited-edition, gallery-quality print on his wall of Karen bending over in the front of the brass bed? And what fan of Karen, looking at that print, would think of her as just a “sex object,” as detractors of erotic art insist? We fans think of Karen as person, extraordinary in every way. Don’t blame us for the tacky sideshow of the old-fashioned PB clubs, the PB mansion, and the PB “lifestyle.” Even PB’s trying to get away from that under the leadership of Conner Hefner. And why shouldn’t Karen enjoy being gorgeous and sexy? I’m pretty sure from her photos and her artistic career that she does. Every beautiful woman I’ve ever known does.

I hope to write another note on Karen’s discussion thread in defense of erotic art, and in praise of Ken Marcus, but for now, let me say again and again as I have in the past, “Karen, thank you. We’re ordinary guys who know the difference between fantasy and reality, and love both. Glad that you, a special yet down-to-earth person, also know the difference between fantasy and reality, and embrace both too.” Why not live life to the fullest? Karen has. She’s an exemplar (and dare I say a “model”) for all of us.


For a great interview with Ken Marcus in Model Mayhem, in which he discusses his career, see:

Part 1

Part 2

[utube]

Courtesy of worthpoint. Maybe just the world of wheels is new, but any pic of Karen is worth viewing again and again.

[banquomerc]

I believe it was Ken Marcus who did the Playboy lay-out of Bridgette Monet in March '84-"Princess of Porn".