Paulina Gretzky Says Her Dad is Cool with Her Instagram Photos but Dustin Johnson Kept Her Out of Playboy
I don't have a daughter, but I have friends and family that do. And as tough as it is to raise a couple of sons, I always assumed raising girls is harder by an order of magnitude. As someone once put it, when you've got a son, you only have to worry about one thing. But with a daughter, you worry about everyone else's one thing. (In case that's not clear, it's referring to penises. You worry about other people's penises.) And from the conversations I've had over the years with my Girl Dad buddies, the key to navigating their ships through the treacherous waters of their young womanhood is to raise them to be strong, confident, self-assured and to demand respect. Which always sounded to me like the best possible plan. And, I'm happy to say, seems to have worked out just about every time it's been tried. At least in my social circle.
What I'm even less clear on is what it's like to raise a daughter in these times. An age of social media where they're living a substantial part of their lives posing and posting. Modeling and influencing. Dressed up for each other and appealing to that dreaded Male Gaze that used to be such a concern back in a day when her phone was just something you gave her to carry in her purse so she could call when it was time to get picked up from the mall. I mean, when every high schooler is carefully posing for Golden Hour shots so some shoe company marketing exec can comment "Amazing! DM us for a collab!", maybe the whole notion of being overprotective of men ogling your baby girl is getting a little antiquated. Again, I have to plead ignorance on this.
But one thing I can say for certain, it's that every man who loves a woman has his limit. Somewhere out there is a line that he does not want crossed. Regardless of his age. And that line is determined on a case-by-case basis. Take the case of Paulina Gretzky. A perfect example of the aforementioned strong, confident woman. And most definitely someone who's spent a decade carved into the Instagram Celebrity Mount Rushmore.
The men in her life have weighed in on how much of her sharing is oversharing. From Hollywood Life:
Paulina Gretzky called out the haters who try to guilt trip her into posting less sexy content to Instagram by saying she’ll upset her father. The model stopped by the Pillows and Beer podcast to chat with her friends, Southern Charm stars Austin Kroll and Craig Conover, and set the record straight about what her dad really thinks about her constant stream of sizzling bikini photos. The answer may actually surprise you. …
No, Wayne Gretzky is not shielding his eyes every time he logs onto social media. The haters ‘are like, Wayne would be so upset. I’m like… my dad is not looking at my Instagram right now. My dad is like, ‘I love you.’ He’s just not,” Paulina said. …
Her fiancé, Dustin Johnson, is totally cool with the sexy Instagram photos, as well. Something he wasn’t too keen on? Paulina doing Playboy! She revealed that when they first started dating nearly a decade ago, she was approached to do a spread for the iconic — and scandalous — magazine. Dustin apparently told her that he’d match the amount of money they were offering if she didn’t go through with it!
The obvious question that needs to be asked is, "How did Playboy ever survive long enough to be contacting Paulina Gretzky?" My guess is that, to some extent, we're all asking the next logical question which is, "How would The Great One feel about her being in Playboy?" But I'll leave that to someone else to ask and give it a good leaving alone.
I don't know what's more surprising though. That Paulina's 60-year-old dad is cool with her making a career out of content like this:
Or her 34-year-old husband would bribe her to not pose nude. I mean, when Wayne Gretzky broke into the old WHA at the age of 18, the big shows on television were The Incredible Hulk and Mork & Mindy. Three's Company was also a hit. It was a sitcom about a guy sharing an apartment with two women he was not having sex with and pretending to be gay so the landlord wouldn't boot him out. And that was considered scandalous.
By the time Dustin Johnson hit adulthood, the internet was bringing unlimited free porn into everybody's computer, if not their phones. I'd assume that to his generation, Playboy is about as salacious as Robin Williams playing a zany alien in love with a boring human woman. And that given the fact that the love of his life has already inspired tens if not hundreds of millions of jagoff sessions, that by now the difference between her own photos on the 'Gram and showing her nipples in the magazine that invented tasteful nudity would really be splitting the tiniest of hairs.
But again, it's an individual thing. One man's acceptable amount of skin is another man's "A Butt Cheek Too Far." I just hope that Johnson made good on whatever amount he promised to pay her to stay out Playboy. Because we all made a sacrifice on that one.