Playboy Recruiting Ad Opposed : Protesters Seal 7,000 Copies of SDSU Student Paper

About half of the Daily Aztec newspapers distributed Monday at San Diego State University were sealed shut by women protesting the newspaper’s acceptance of an advertisement from Playboy magazine seeking female students to pose for its photographers.

Lori Saldana, a graduate physical education student and volunteer for the university’s Women’s Resource Center, said the stickers were applied to about 7,000 Daily Aztecs because “We’ve had enough of the Aztec’s policy on advertising (and) their acceptance of ads that we find offensive and insulting to women.”

She said the stickers were applied to the newspapers after the campus police said there was nothing illegal with the activity. About 15,000 newspapers are distributed free each weekday from campus news racks.

The stickers read, “SDSU Women Say No to Playboy” or “Playboy and This Aztec Insult Women.” The stickers were folded over the edge of the newspapers, forcing readers to tear the seal open to read the inside pages.

R. Andrew Rathbone, editor of the paper, said he was irritated by the protest but didn’t plan to take any action against the women involved.

“They made their point,” Rathbone said. “We weren’t too happy about it, but by the time we got a judge to issue a temporary restraining order, it would have been more hassle than it was worth.”

Rathbone said he was perplexed that there was a protest against the newspaper’s acceptance of advertising by Playboy and services that play recorded erotic telephone messages. “The CIA recruits with ads in our newspaper, and they do all sorts of dirty stuff and they kill people, but nobody ever protests their ads,” Rathbone said. “But I’ve never heard of a breast killing anybody.”

Saldana disagreed, saying sex-oriented advertising contributes to violence against women on campus and runs counter to the newspaper’s own editorials promoting greater student safety and rape awareness.

She noted that a petition bearing 1,500 names had previously been submitted to the Daily Aztec protesting the ads for the phone services--more signatures than the number of students who voted in the last student body election.

The Daily Aztec responded with its own letter, saying the newspaper would “continue to print advertising within the limits of the law . . . (and) leave the choice up to the individuals.”

“It disturbs me that something like this gets so much publicity when there are so many more important things they could be doing,” Rathbone said. “When you add up all the time and expense they went through putting the stickers on the newspapers, why didn’t they just place an ad? It could have done the same thing for a lot less hassle, and we wouldn’t have turned them down.”

Playboy, meanwhile, said it began making appointments Monday for interviews with interested SDSU women, to be conducted today through Thursday. Assistant photographer Gary Hannabarger said SDSU was the second of 10 college campuses visited so far by the magazine in a search of women to pose for its October issue, featuring students from the nation’s “top 10 party schools.”

Hannabarger said more than 80 women from the University of Miami were interviewed at the magazine’s first stop. The magazine will pay a sliding scale for the women, depending on whether they pose fully dressed, partly dressed or nude.

By Monday afternoon, he said, more than 20 SDSU women had called to make appointments for interviews, which include filling out a short application and posing (clothed) for a picture to be forwarded to magazine executives in Chicago.