Girls of the Ivy League

The Montreal Gazette printed quite the inflammatory article about McGill today.

Playboy magazine has just named Montreal's answer to the Ivy League as one of the Top 10 Party Schools in North America. The only Canadian campus to make the grade, McGill shares chugalug laurels with such institutions of higher learning and advanced cheerleading as Florida State and the University of Georgia.

To celebrate, the 52-year-old men's monthly is putting out feelers, so to speak, for nubile young women willing to bare all for their alma mater in the May 2006 edition. Gives a whole new meaning to striving for 4.0 scores. Then again, people do say they buy Playboy for the articles.

It's bad enough that McGill is still grappling with an ugly hazing scandal. As homecoming weekend dawns, it's being touted as a bastion of good times and hot babes. Never mind the objectification of women - somebody really should break it to those geeks in the chemistry lab!

By Monday, Playboy photographers will be parked at a downtown hotel, ready to snap Polaroids of "coed cuties" stripped down to two-piece swimsuits. By Wednesday, Playboy will narrow the field for a nudie feature of the McGill student or students with that certain je ne sais quoi - and a desire to share it all with the world.

Eh, so what? They did the Girls of the Ivy League while I was at Yale. They parked at a hotel that was essentially on campus and took topless polaroids of hundreds of girls. As far as I know, it hasn't hurt Yale's rep. Playboy never picks anybody interesting anyway. The girls are made to look inanimate and that's not very sexually interesting.

Now, it seems that McGill has been picked for Playboy as a party school, essentially owing to the 18+ drinking age law. That's hot stuff for you Americans who can't hit the bottle until the ripe old age of 21. If anything should be embarassing to McGill, it should be that they aren't being included in the Girls of the Ivy League issue. McGill, as some of you will know, has a massive inferiority complex. In their quest for Ivy League status, McGill makes it a point to totally ignore undergraduate and graduate teaching alike so that its profs can focus completely on research projects that may or may not add anything to that elusive Enlightenment-born, Hegelian march towards the ultimate scientific truth. No random research, no tenure.

Women whose pictures are used will be compensated "enough to pay for a really nice spring break or help with tuition."

Models won't have to show more flesh than they are comfortable with, she said, but it is Playboy, and the bathing suits will eventually come off. "We are looking at some sort of nudity."

Yeah, if memory serves me correctly, Yale's proud contributions to Playboy paid for tuition/spring break with a whopping US$500, which is a massive CDN$580.70 according to one popular Currency Converter. I'm not against nudity. Accept the five hundred bucks for an artsy gig, or even Arena or Maxim. If you're going to show all for a skin mag, make sure you get paid some serious money.