I Confess: I Stalk Playboy College Models

I don't remember when I got the idea of looking up the information of college students who pose for Playboy's annual October "Girls Of The ..." issue. I think I remember seeing one of these editions when I snuck into the back room of local comics store Shinders, or maybe when I asked my friend to lend me his copy he got from somewhere, or maybe even when I snuck-read my parents' Hong Kong edition of this spread.

All I know is that I had a particular fondness for these babes. All the naked girls in Playboy are hot, but the quality Hugh Hefner always said he wanted in his magazine, that the girls who appear in it are just "the girl next door," wasn't 100% true for any other woman who appeared inside except for the college girls, in my opinion.

I think I realized that I could actually reach out and touch them my senior year in high school. It feels weird since the Internet has seemingly been around all my life, but that was the year when I discovered this thing called "e-mail." I was able to take classes at the University of Minnesota my senior year, and that was where I heard about this new, easier and cheaper way to communicate with people. E-mail was of a piece with "The Internet," and though I didn't really know about the World Wide Web (with that ancient browser, Buddha bless it, Netscape), I think that's when I learned I could look up a college student's information through this nebulous contraption. I think I learned that even before knowing that a sports website like ESPN.com (when it had the URL of espnet.sportszone.com -- my God, those were the days!) even existed. Maybe I thought that this cyberspace thingy was a way to find information that was actually useful, instead of searching for porn.

Anyway, my perverted mind and investigative nature were put into overdrive when I found this, and so I got the idea in my head that as soon as I went to L.A. for school, and the Playboy college issue came out, I'd buy it, write down the names of all the hot babes that had the courage to show their hee-hees and hoo-haws for all the world to see, find their information online, and e-mail them. Who knows, I thought; maybe they'll be flattered, maybe they'll start a conversation with me, and that might lead to a friendship or maybe even in a hookup. And maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to fulfill my dream of fucking a chick who posed for Playboy. I had weird dreams then. Wait a second ... that's still a dream for me.

I had one sheet of lined notebook paper that I used to write down all the names. This being the halcyon days of print, before all magazines started to squeeze pages out of its editions because they didn't have the circulation, there were a lot of girls' names I had to write down. It filled all the front side and half the back. And with that I used my USENET tricks (and, before I realized it was easier, the directories from each of the school websites) to hunt these chicks down.

I was happy for whatever yield I got. I think I found contact info for, like, seven of the, oh, thirty(?) or so babes who appeared in the "Girls of the Big 12" pictorial my first year doing this. Most were e-mail addresses, though I actually called one girl from Tennessee -- same name, wrong chick, oops.

Out of the girls I e-mailed, I eventually had a sustained, year-long correspondence with two of them: Hilary from Texas A&M and Brenda from Colorado. Brenda had this crush on the starting quarterback for the Buffaloes; that was funny. I asked Hilary a lot of junior high school stuff -- if you were a tree, what would you be, stupid shit like that -- and it got to the point where we exchanged a couple letters (yet another vestige from pre-Internet days). In her last card to me, the following school year, she said that she tried to call my dorm room but it was disconnected. I was in the same room two years in a row, however I switched beds and telephone connections my second year in there just for variety's sake (I was in a double that, thankfully, I had all to myself as a single). I regret every day that I failed to receive that call.

I sent a couple more letters to her after that, but I got no reply. I miss Hillary terribly, and Brenda, too. I wish it could've gone somewhere, either to getting laid or to a lifelong love or something.

That hasn't deterred me from buying the college issue each September and tracking down a whole new set of babes. I've done it every year since 1994, and not only do I look forward to it, sitting down and looking them up may be one of the happiest days of the year for me. I think I'll do it till the day I die because it makes me so happy.

I've learned a few now-obvious things over the years. First of all, many of the girls who do it don't want to be found. That makes me appreciate the ones that do respond to my e-mails all the more; they're the brave ones, the babes that know exactly what they're getting into and not only are not scared of the attention, but embrace it, take control of it. One of the ways they remove any trail that could lead to their true identities is to give a fake last or even whole name. I now get annoyed when I see a girl whose surname is a blatant first name, like "Lynn" or "Anne." That could be their real middle name or a complete fabrication.

The other main thing I've discovered is that the women who are most likely to reply back are the ones who model for a living. It's necessary in their line of work to get feedback, so they don't mind having an admirer tell them they masturbate to them (which I've never done, I swear). That meant that they aren't necessarily being nice when they reply to me, they just want another fan to tell Playboy to give them more modeling gigs, or even make them Playmates. Not to say that's happened all the time; I've had a couple back-and-forth messages from several girls, on average about once a year, since I started that were, like, flirtations that elicited replies on, like, Thanksgiving break and stuff. But I haven't found a chick who isn't a professional and just wanted to talk to me on a deep level since Hillary and Brenda left me.

The past several years have modified the ways in which I stalk these girls. Once I realized that most of them, even the non-models, had their own MySpace pages, I changed my stance that those social networking sites were just wastes of time and signed up immediately. I am on MySpace now because I was stalking these hotties. MySpace and facebook are now the prime and most lucrative ways to get info about these ladies.

Unfortunately, my yield of usable info on every year's new crop shrinks. This is partly because they have, also over the past several years, cut down on the number of pages they've devoted to the spread and the number of coeds they show. This year's "Girls of the Pac-10" pictorial, which I promptly "read" through a few weeks ago, had only enough names for me to reach halfway down one side of my sheet.

Of the, like, 15 girls that appeared, I got contact info from only four. Three of them had e-mail addresses, and so I dutifully wrote them and said I'm sorry to message them out of the blue and how hot they were and how they took my breath away the moment I saw them. No response, from any of them. Frankly, I'm hurt.

So thank Buddha for Ophelia Shallot from Cal. She is the one that didn't have an e-mail addy. Instead, I found out she has a facebook profile. She added me a day after I friended her, and we've exchanged a couple messages on the site. She even promised to send me a signed copy if she gets the chance. Now, she is a model, so she's used to this. But I'm still glad for the reciprocated attention. And she is a babe too, with a large back tattoo. Girls with tats like that are sexy.

I hope doing this, and more importantly, saying this, doesn't get me in trouble. I've thought for a long time that a man has an innate need to confess. So, there's mine.