Enzo Escober in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Desire is among the United States’ most enduring global exports, an industry as profitable as war. As a 10-year-old child in the Philippines, Geena Rocero, the woman in the centerfold, snuck into her father’s bedroom to flip through his collection of Playboy magazines. Poring over the glossy pages, she grew enamored with the bodies on display. Smooth, bosomy emissaries of the American libido, they gave a young trans girl an education in comportment funneled through an imperial pipeline. In 1898, the US purchased the Philippines from its former colonizer, Spain, for $20 million and, after killing about 20,000 revolutionaries, held dominion over the islands for close to 50 years. To this day, it is the United States’ most secure sphere of influence in the Far East, a society where stateside cultural products emit a mystic gleam.
For many Filipinos, the US itself is a place of imports—a country one loses parents to. When Rocero was a teenager, her mother left Manila to take a job as a factory worker in San Francisco, sustaining her family on the power of the American dollar. The care packages she sent back were as redolent of excess as Playboy spreads.
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