Lots of really famous and “upstanding” people have had articles published in men’s magazines… John Updike in that same issue, for example. I know that some sci-fi/fantasy writers and cartoonists see Playboy as one of the best venues in terms of money paid and status. Now, if the article showed up in Barely Legal or something… Besides, there’s nothing wrong with good porn; it’s the bad porn we should scorn.

To get back to the scientifically illiterate. I maintain that most of America is illiterate when it comes down to “thinking like a scientist” in terms of being able to demonstrate the scientific method in a specific sense (since the method of studying in a controlled environment is not the only way to do research) and in terms of thinking about the world around them with an eye towards why and how things are the way they are in a more general sense. What I was getting at was that the audience may know it’s usually totally bogus what is represented in Hollywood, but their understanding of movies as not science prejudices them to what science can be. Their literacy in movies is spilling over into their literacy about science, which is to say, the way science and scientists are portrayed completely obliterates any sense of what science and scientists are.