UA students pose for Playboy magazine

By: Gentry Lassiter

Posted: 9/10/07

Two UA students posed for Playboy's "Girls of the SEC," which hit newsstands Friday.

The two women - who would allow themselves to be identified only by their pseudonyms - said they see themselves doing something like this again.

"I do, because it's more of a classy magazine, not trashy," said one of the women whose pseudonym is Julieanne Hansen, a junior who is studying business.

Stephanie Schaffer, a communications junior, said that she would pose for Playboy, but not for other magazines. "Playboy would be the only one," she said.

The two women went to tryout sessions last fall, they said, where they were asked by magazine representatives what type of poses they were willing to do.

"They asked you if you wanted to pose implied, fully nude or just topless," Hansen said. "Then they took you into a room with a photographer and took test shots." There were about five women who were chosen to be photographed, Hansen said.

"I didn't know if I was for sure in it until this summer," Hansen said, "when I got [a notice] in the mail asking me to do promotions in the fall."

Hansen said that her motivation for posing in Playboy was the opportunity to be in a magazine and experience modeling.

"Well, you got to be in the magazine, you got to be seen, possibly go on to be a Playmate or any kind of model or actress or anything. We did get a paycheck, and it was a reasonable amount," she said.

The women said they were given pseudonyms to protect them from potential stalkers. "I had no idea what to do for the name," Schaffer said. "I was going to do Nichole, like my middle name, but I guess somebody already had that one," she said.

Hansen said she's not very concerned about stalkers because she has a false name. "I mean, I have a Facebook [account], they could possibly match my face up, but my profile is completely private," she said.

"I'm completely comfortable with this town - I mean this is Fayetteville," Hansen said.

The women do not expect their decision to pose for Playboy to affect their future professional lives, they said.

"I don't expect [future employers] to put it together. If they do, they'd probably be too embarrassed to say anything about it - hopefully. Then it would be silent. If they did have a problem with it, then I would have a problem with it and I wouldn't want to work there anyway," Hansen said.

Schaffer said she also would not work in an environment that would be critical of her decision.

Both women said people they know are supportive of them.

"My parents were really excited," Schaffer said. Her parents told her to be prepared for some criticism, but they were otherwise supportive, she said.

"My friends are very supportive of me. They were really excited about everything," Hansen said. "They're going to the promotional stuff like the autograph signing and then we're going to Speakeasy that night," she said.

Playboy is hosting various promotional events around town, including an autograph session at Hastings on Tuesday and a bar party at Speakeasy that evening, according to a Playboy publicist.

Although the majority of Hansen's friends are supportive of her, she said that she did have one acquaintance who did not approve of her posing in Playboy. "She can have her opinion, and she doesn't have to push it on me," Hansen said.

Chancellor John A. White expressed some thoughts about the situation in an e-mail.

"While their actions are not endorsed by the university, nor do we encourage such actions, students are absolutely free to make their own moral choices and engage in legal endeavors as independent adults," White wrote. "However, I hope they do so with full recognition of the long-term impacts such decisions could have. Just as decisions regarding content in [social networking sites] can have long-term effects, so can decisions to be included in magazines such as Playboy," he wrote.

"[White] has his opinion and we can have our opinion," Hansen said. "He's not going to force that upon us, then that's fine."

Schaffer said that as long as she isn't in danger of being kicked out of the university then she is not bothered by White's opinion either.

Two students appearing in a magazine will not have any noteworthy impact on a community as large as the UA, White wrote.

"People whose opinions of the university are impacted negatively are obviously missing the bigger picture of what is happening on our campus," he wrote.