A Few Days Without Being Anyone’s Mother

My ex put a water pistol through my television during an argument years ago, which is how I ended up falling behind on Alles was zählt—Germany’s most reliably melodramatic daily soap opera on RTL. For anyone still tracking its ongoing crises: Juliette Greco, who plays the long-suffering Lena Öztürk, has appeared in Playboy for the second time, and she looks exactly as good as you’d expect from someone who has made a career of being attractive on camera.

The interview alongside the shoot is more interesting than these things typically are. After the pregnancy it took me a long time to be okay with myself again, she says. I’m a very self-critical person. On why she’s done this twice: Because I can shed my everyday life. For a few days I’m a princess, I’m sexy. I’m not a mom, I’m not married. That does me good.

I’ll leave that without commentary. It’s more honest about why someone actually poses like this than you usually hear—these accompanying interviews tend to oscillate between performative empowerment language and barely disguised coercion, with nothing real in between. The photos are by Florian Lohmann. Naked women available digitally for a small fee: the future arrived exactly on schedule.