“Crystal,” the second girl photographed during Playboy’s “Girls of the ACC” casting call stop at the University of Virginia, is lying on a bed atop a fleece UVA Athletics blanket. She may be wearing a swimsuit, or perhaps lingerie she brought for the audition; her breasts are either covered or bared for the camera.

I can’t say for sure, because I’m in the adjacent room with her photographer, former Playmate-turned-photographer Cynthia Kaye, paging through several magazines worth of naked women.

“My daughter did the hair and makeup for this photo,” says Kaye, and points to a brunette with dark skin, a slender frame and, yes, ample breasts—the sort of features Kaye herself displayed in Playboy’s international editions in the late ’80s. She identifies her daughter’s detailing on each woman—pastel bows here, a chunky necklace there—with a mother’s unassailable pride.

If Playboy magazine were a woman, she’d be similar to Kaye. In age, certainly—the house that Hefner built is 56 years old, and Kaye’s MySpace page lists her age as 50. But also in the place she occupies in the world—past her wild years, a bit out of touch (“Do you watch soap operas?” she asks Crystal), more of an approachable stage mother or, in the magazine’s case, a relic from a different era of sexuality. Practically—entirely?—harmless.

And this quality seemed to put Kaye’s willing UVA students at ease. Her first subject, who I’ll call “Brooke,” was a curvy blonde sophomore with no modeling experience and no experience reading Playboy. To prepare herself for her shoot, she said she made a music playlist (“A lot of Beyoncé, I Am Sasha Fierce”). She has a boyfriend, but didn’t tell him about the audition.

“You can go into the bedroom and put on lingerie or a swimsuit—whatever you’re comfortable wearing,” Kaye told her. “And heels, hopefully.” Brooke opted for a striped bikini with a pair of brown heels that looked a bit incongruous and posed in the bedroom while Kaye snapped shots and liberally applied compliments.

“Point those toes. I like that. I like that. You’re beautiful,” cooed Kaye. Until, a few moments later, Brooke warmed up and allowed C-VILLE and NBC29 into the room to shoot from over her shoulder while Kaye snapped a few more photos.

“Brooke, you’re a natural,” exclaimed Kaye at the end. And Brooke, fairly quiet until then, made a relieved sort of laugh, as if she felt happy to let a bit of tension go.

Crystal was another story entirely. A diehard fan of Playboy’s “The Girls Next Door” TV show, she arrived in an outfit similar to Kaye’s—jeans that hugged more than hips, heels (black and with a vinyl sheen to Kaye’s leopard-print pumps) and a Playboy t-shirt. (Crystal also sported a bunny-branded bag and a wristwatch.)

When Kaye asked whether she’d considered an ideal scene for a Playboy photo shoot, Crystal responded with this:

“We’ve got crossed sabres in the middle of our football field, and I’ve always wanted to lay on it, just wearing one orange and one blue tube sock.”

Crystal’s preparing in the other room now—with tube socks, perhaps?—while Kaye shows me a photo she took of a nude woman sprawled across a bed. To nab the photo, Kaye scaled a tree outside the window and took the shot—a move that strikes me as a brilliantly intuitive read on voyeurism, but also a bit oldfangled.

Playboy’s not doing too hot, after all; Playboy Enterprises announced one week before this shoot that it would close its New York City offices. And in an age where the slow reveal is bested by a fast web browser and a totally uninhibited world of pornography, are we still titillated by college coeds that might be “naughty” enough to bare a breast? Are we even shocked? I look at the photos, then turn toward the bedroom door.

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