Beauty and brains do not have to be mutually exclusive. Add razor-sharp wit and a dash of deadpan humor and you get Miss June: Juliette Fretté, a self-proclaimed “artist creatrix” from California who is just as stimulating to talk with as she is to gaze upon. By day she is a painter of surreal, vaguely erotic colorful works who also writes art analyses for Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art online. By night, well, we can only dream. “How I adore written masturbation,” she says about writing her thesis “Posing for Playboy from a Feminist Perspective: How Media Images Impact Women’s Empowerment,” which she is currently expanding into a book. “The first time I worked for Playboy was for the Girls of the Pac 10 issue in 2005, followed by Special Editions and Coed of the Month in 2006. I used my thesis to sort of analyze women’s empowerment in the context of Playboy. I made a case that objectification is not necessarily a bad thing. Objectivity and subjectivity exist in the world, and it’s more about reciprocity to me. I found that it’s not horrible to be an object of beauty as long as you have a sort of mobility to be both a subject and an object. If you look at it within relationships, you change roles between the aggressor and the submissive person. My identity, our identities, can be as fluid as we wish them to be.”
For Juliette, this has meant reexamining the definition of “feminist” and tossing away the tired clichés. “In truth, a real feminist is anything but a man hater,” she says. “I am definitely a man lover. A lot more feminists are open-minded to the fact that celebrating sexuality is empowering. I’m just embracing this celebration of beauty and different manifestations of myself. I consider myself sexually liberated, but I think I still have a lot to unleash!”
]]> One way Miss June liberates herself from sexual taboos—not to mention her bikini—is in her unwavering pursuit of the perfect nude beach, even at the risk of injury. “One time I crawled under this rock formation during high tide trying to get to a hot spot on one Malibu beach and got whipped against a cliff,” she says. “I scraped my foot and was crying like a dumbass. It was really scary.” When we ask Juliette how to find directions to this heretofore-unknown nude oasis of femininity, she laughs. “Well, there is no sign there that says, ‘Watch out for dangling boobs.’ It’s just known for it. My idea of a good time is nude sun bathing, teahouses, reading, writing, painting, socializing with friends and cooking. I make better food than a lot of restaurants out there, if I do say so myself.”Someone who has a lot to say during our chat is Juliette’s pet cockatiel, Isis, who screeches incessantly if she doesn’t give him attention. We can sympathize. “He’s probably extra obnoxious because his name is Isis and he’s a boy,” she says. “I bought him in the fourth grade with $45 that I saved—a big chunk of change at that time. He’s very charismatic and has been my little brat every since.” And what say Juliette of a male brat in her life of a more human variety? “I am a monogamous person when it comes to relationships,” she says. “I believe in soul mates. Do I believe that you only have one soul mate? No. I believe there are several out there. I think sex and love can exist separately, but I prefer they exist in union. It’s more fun and joyful that way. I want to create joy and progress and have a positive impact on the world.”
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Dan Henrick of Playboy.com is wearing out his iPod to bring you this report:
Crown Royal invited Assistant Editor Rocky Rakovic to experience auto racing with the Royal treatment. He was given a pit pass, a ride in the pace car and shadowed the race’s Grand Marshal. Oh yeah, Rocky had never watched a race, doesn’t much like cars and is content on taking the subway to work. Here’s his first dispatch:
Intern Callie Enlow has been reading the paper. She is surprised by what she’s learned.
Tim Lowery of Playboy.com checks out the new offering from James Frey:
The other shoe dropped last week. Senator McCain appeared before a group of students at Wake Forest and vowed to appoint judges "strictly faithful to the Constitution'' who would not engage in "the common and systemic abuse of our federal courts." As the New York Times noted, "The issue is of enormous importance to conservatives.'' 
Historian and journalist Rick Perlstein has just published Nixonland, a history of the mid and late sixties, roughly from the Johnson landslide of 1964 to the Nixon landslide of 1972. The book is a tremendous read that does justice to that turbulent period. It’s not a feel-good book; one keeps encountering calamitous decisions and catastrophic ends. And yet, for all that, the book is lively and incisive. Perlstein was kind enough to answer some questions: