Once known for soft porn and pink-and-white bunnies, Playboy magazine’s latest centre-fold has people talking once again. Except that this time, the iconic spread has the picture of a 22-year-old Muslim journalist wearing a hijab. The picture and interview have drawn both appreciation and criticism.
Noor Tagouri, an American journalist, has been featured in Playboy’s October ‘Renegades’ edition – a special issue focusing on men and women “who risked it all—even their lives—to do what they love”. For a magazine like Playboy to move into the serious news feature space is not all that new, but to centre its focus on a hijab-donning Muslim woman is defnitely making waves.
The photograph shows Tagouri wearing a black leather jacket, jeans, sneakers and a hijab, or headscarf; and she has been described as “a badass activist”.
“I know what it’s like to have the narrative of our community be skewed and exploited in the media,” she told the magazine, which made a policy shift away from nudity earlier this year in a bid to appeal to the masses.
“I was like, ‘Hey, I know what it’s like to be misrepresented in the media. I won’t do that to you. I want to tell your story because it’s important and deserves justice’.”
Creating a stir in media circles is not new for Tagouri, who had garnered a lot of attention back in 2012 when she posted a picture of herself at an ABC 7 newsdesk, saying: “The first hijab wearing news anchor on American television”. Of Libyan decent,
Though there have been many positive comments on Tagouri becoming a game changer, one contrarion voice really stood out. That of fellow journalist Nishaat Ismail, who wrote scathing piece titled ‘I fail to see why I should celebrate a hijab-wearing Muslim woman appearing in Playboy for the first time’ in The Independent. “Do we really need to go down the route of associating with an institution based on the objectification of women in the name of challenging perceptions and celebrating female empowerment? Are the voices of women – and in particular Muslim women – buried so deep under the cries of those who claim to speak on our behalf that our only available response is involve ourselves with Playboy, a magazine that has solely existed for the past 63 years for men to gawp at the bodies of half-naked women? Is this really how we reclaim our own narrative?”
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