[Alex Chadwick:] Time now for another visit to the research lab that is Emily Yoffe's life. Emily, welcome back to DAY TO DAY.
[Emily Yoffe:] Nice to be here.
[Alex Chadwick:] Dear listeners, Emily's best known as the Human Guinea Pig for the online magazine Slate, where's she's a writer. In her Human Guinea Pig role, she takes on unusual or unpleasant tasks that the rest of us wonder about, but would never actually do. A partial list of her accomplishments include telephone psychic-you were great at that, Emily-matzo ball-eating contest-I can't remember how you came out on that one.
[Emily Yoffe:] I lost, but I was the leading female contender.
[Alex Chadwick:] Beauty pageant participant-and, it turned out, the winner, Mrs. Washington, DC-street musician. She's back today to tell us about-well, this would have to be your most revealing role so far, Emily. What exactly is it?
[Emily Yoffe:] I posed nude for an art class, twice.
[Alex Chadwick:] This didn't involve an ad in one of these free weekly newspapers, did it?
[Emily Yoffe:] Well, if you give me your credit card, Alex, we might work something out. No, this was utterly legit. This was at the Corcoran College of Art & Design in Washington, DC, a renowned institution.
[Alex Chadwick:] That's a big, important thing. And what sort of-I'll put this as delicately as I can-what sort of qualifications does one need to be a nude model?
[Emily Yoffe:] I found there were two main qualifications. One, you owned a bathrobe. Two, you'd be willing to take it off. I think those were probably the two things.
[Alex Chadwick:] Well, you don't-one need not be Rubenesque, say.
[Emily Yoffe:] The application asked me for a physical description, and I asked the interviewer what was meant by that and she said, `Well, you know, some people write "swimmer's build" or something like that.'I wrote `middle-aged woman,'and-but that was all right.
[Alex Chadwick:] It must be normal, I would guess, for art students to see this. But still, if I were in that position, I would be expecting maybe a room full of gasps or some horrified-I don't know.
[Emily Yoffe:] I myself really had to suppress giggles, and I mean, I could see a couple of the students were seeing me about to crack up, and then I thought, `Oh, if they start laughing, that's just going to be the worst.'So I got myself together; no one laughed. I mean, everyone's had the dream you show up in class naked.
[Alex Chadwick:] Yeah.
[Emily Yoffe:] And in the dream, you realize, `Hmm. OK, this isn't good, but I'm going to act like I meant to show up naked.'So it's very much like that.
[Alex Chadwick:] In your piece in Slate, you quote another woman who is a nude model, and I was interested to read what she said about it.
[Emily Yoffe:] Yes. Well, she was, as she described to me, a starving artist. And so there are certain starving-artist jobs and she said, `This was so much better than working at Starbucks or an electronics store.'And it paid better, too.
[Alex Chadwick:] What is the pay for nude modeling?
[Emily Yoffe:] It was $15 an hour. Now that's about three times the minimum wage just to sit on your rear end.
[Alex Chadwick:] Do you get cold? That's something that always seemed to me would be kind of a job hazard here. Wouldn't you get chilly?
[Emily Yoffe:] Good point. They hand you a list of guidelines. Now your obligation is to have proper hygiene at all times. Their obligation is to turn up the heat if you say you're cold.
[Alex Chadwick:] Well, how did it go as you're sitting there in class? What happened, and how did things develop?
[Emily Yoffe:] The first class, the teacher didn't tell me what to do, which made it both sort of interesting and a little more stressful. I started doing, like, semi-yoga things and I was worried, `This is verging on yoga porn here.'And I got in one pose-I was kind of down on all fours because I had to hold it for 20 minutes, and this middle-aged man who really liked the pose called out, `Great pose!'which actually made me a little uneasy. And he started painting away and painting away just really vigorously; I could hear him. And during the break, I went and looked at all the drawings, and most people were using pencil and chalk. And in some, I looked quite lovely; some I looked like a giant toad. And he had done this almost fresco-like portrait of my rear end. And I have to say I really wanted to buy it and put it over the mantelpiece. It was like the "Mona Lisa" of rear ends. It was really great. I mean, it was much nicer than my actual one.
[Alex Chadwick:] Well, maybe not. Maybe this is it. Are you going to continue? You have a-you've launched a budding career as a nude model, as the Human Guinea Pig. Is this something you would continue?
[Emily Yoffe:] No, I'm not going to continue because I looked up the history of artist models. It's very tortured. You know, they tend to have, like, breakdowns or commit suicide, and I just don't want to go down that path.
[Alex Chadwick:] Emily Yoffe is the long-suffering Human Guinea Pig for our friends at the online magazine Slate. You can find her article there on nude modeling at slate.com. Emily, thank you again.
[Emily Yoffe:] Thank you, Alex.