Years after historic ‘Big Brother’ win, Taylor Hale is reclaiming her agency with Playboy shoot
TheGrio...
Hale won ‘Big Brother’ in 2022, becoming the first Black contestant to win the show’s grand prize. Yet with nude images of her circulating online without her consent, the former beauty queen is taking things into her own hands.
Being on reality television allows for a different level of vulnerability. In Taylor Hale‘s case? That meant having to deal with strangers critiquing her every move. For her next step? The “Big Brother” winner is putting herself forward, becoming one of the few reality TV winners to ever pose for Playboy.
Hale, who was named Miss March, stripped down for the pictorial, which hits newsstands in April. Along with a personal essay, Hale reveals her experience during the shoot echoed her time in the Big Brother house, where she became the first Black contestant to ever win the show’s grand prize in 2022.
“Inside the ‘Big Brother’ house, I understood that I was being watched. It was explicit and contractual,” Hale writes. “But even there, the psychological boundaries of consent were more fraught than they appeared. There’s a difference between agreeing to be observed and being consumed,” Hale wrote.
That “consummation” led Hale to have a serious moment when nude images of her were being circulated online, without her consent. It is what pushed her to pose for Playboy and be intentional, picking the right photographer, what to wear and how to be viewed.
“I was an active participant in this photo shoot,” she wrote in her essay. “I was a collaborator… It’s an opportunity for reclamation—for active consent in my most vulnerable form.”
Outside of her essay, Hale expounded on her thoughts in a tease for the men’s magazine, “For women especially, visibility has become one of the few reliable ways to bypass traditional gatekeepers. We no longer need to be discovered through pageants or talent searches. Or, to be coy, the pages of “Playboy.” But visibility also changes the terms of ownership. Once you become visible enough, the public begins to feel like a participant in your existence. Except they’re not just an audience; they’re a stakeholder as well.”
With Tiffany “New York” Pollard as her reality TV inspiration, Hale credited one of the originals for letting her know that it was OK to be “unafraid of being uninhibited and free on TV.”
Pollard reset the game during her time on “Flavor of Love” and “I Love New York,” quickly becoming a personality fans couldn’t get enough of and eventually one of the more recognizable faces in reality TV history. For Hale, a former beauty pageant winner, “New York” represented freedom and with her shoot in Playboy, it’s assessing that everything is under her terms.
No one else’s.
“Surveillance may be the defining condition of modern life,” she wrote in her essay. “But consent, real consent, still belongs to the person being seen. This is something none of us should take for granted. And it’s something I remain committed to fighting for. Even if it took me posing in my underwear for you to think twice about it.”