Hugh Hefner, who most millennials will know through E! reality series The Girls of the Playboy Mansion, filmed at a time he had three girlfriends (whittled down from seven), has died age 91.
The founder of Playboy, which published cerebral and famed writers such as Wodehouse, Nabokov, Dahl, Murakami, Kerouac and Palahniuk, Hefner sired more than a magazine. With it came TV shows, porn films, merchandise, and, of course, its home in Beverly Hills: the Playboy Mansion, a vast estate with an infamous grotto, where male celebrities and sports stars took their pick of the ‘bunnies’ on display. When Sex and the City visited, Carrie's voiceover told that 'Samantha had worshipped Hugh Hefner ever since she was old enough to steal her father's _Playboy_s'. Miranda, meanwhile, spotted the hot tub and yelled 'tit soup!' and Hefner, of course, made a cameo, along with his then-girlfriends.
Having lived such a long and famous life - he lived to see both Marilyn Monroe and Kim Kardashian on the cover of his magazine - there is of course nuance to Hefner’s history. He was so regularly pictured next to women a quarter of his age, but to place him alongside an iconic woman his own age, Margaret Thatcher, who was just a year his senior, there are easy comparisons to make. Like Thatcher, his power faded in his final decades - his daughter took over the business in Playboy in 1988, free porn online usurped the mag’s importance as a masturbation aid, and he ended up having to lease out the Mansion as a tenant - this trailblazer’s status was reduced to a mascot of the monster he’d created.
Yet still, just like Thatcher can be felt in the very crumb of Britain's soil, for better or for worse, Hefner's influence on the world - in his case, porn and raunch culture - now weaves throughout the barely-there fabric of our lives. It’s impossible to unpick him from his context, to wonder if the world would have been better off with or without him. But here are just some of his many complexities.
1. He was cool with gay men
In 1955, sodomy was illegal in all 50 US states (and the UK), punishable by either a lengthy jail sentence or the death penalty. But Hugh Hefner didn’t like this, publishing a science fiction story by Charles Beaumont called The Crooked Man in which the roles were reversed; heterosexual people were persecuted in a homosexual dystopia. Hefner later responded to angry readers: ‘If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society, then the reverse was wrong too’. It doesn't necessarily mean he was, say, cool with lesbians as autonomous beings outside of his bedroom, doing it not for the pleasure of a man, but their own thrills, though. But later, during the push for marriage equality in the US, he told The Daily Beast: ‘The idea that the concept of marriage will be sullied by same-sex marriage is ridiculous. Heterosexuals haven't been doing that well at it on their own’
2. He was cool with black men
In 1959, Hefner launched the Playboy Jazz Festival, which gave some proceeds to the NAACP. It returned in 1979 and was frequently MCed by, um, Bill Cosby. On the better side of things, Playboy also published interviews with (male) leaders of the civil rights movement such as Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, and Hefner refused to give franchises to clubs banning black customers. Jesse Jackson paid tribute to him today, saying he ‘was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement. We shall never forget him. May he Rest In Peace.’
3. He said he was a feminist
‘I was a feminist before there was such a thing as feminism!’ he told *Esquire *in 2007. But what did he actually do to be a feminist? In the late 1960s and early 70s, not only did he lobby for widespread use of condoms, but he contributed funds to Roe vs Wade, the court case which eventually gave women the right to get a legal abortion in the US as well as hailing the contraceptive pill'a powerful weapon'
However, when feminist writer Gloria Steinem went undercover at the Playboy Club for Show magazine only to discover the women workers’ awful working conditions, she asked him: ‘Don’t you understand that you've made woman objects, more easily exchanged than sports cars?’ His response? ’I'm all in favour of women being able to vote, own property, and all that. But I want women to be attractive to men.’ As for Erica Jong, who wrote about the ‘unzipped fuck’ in her seminal pro-sex feminist text Fear of Flying, she told Playboy in 1975 of their bunnies: ‘No, I don't think they're being exploited, but they're not really women to me, they're almost figments of the imagination, sort of the apotheosis of the male mammary dream.’ And Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale even wrote short stories for Playboy!
4. He really did think women were objects
He told NY Daily News in 2010: 'The notion that Playboy turns women into sex objects is ridiculous. Women are sex objects. If women aren't sex objects, there wouldn't be another generation. It's the attraction between the sexes that makes the world go 'round. That's why women wear lipstick and short skirts.'
5. He mansplained films
In Holly Madison’s 2015 tell-all book Down the Rabbit Hole, she explained that not only would Hefner stir up trouble between his seven girlfriends so they would vie for his affection, ‘During movie nights, he would lean over to me to explain the plotlines and time periods in the most condescending of ways.’ He didn’t even talk about books, politics or current events with her. Oh, and every woman who entered the mansion? He would get a staffer to take a photo of her, then he’d rate it A, B, or C. Holly was, of course, an A.
6. He loved movies, but not femme fatales
Though he had a film library of more than 20,000 films and donated $2m in 2007 to the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, he didn’t like one of the 20th Century film industry’s most charming inventions: the femme fatale. In fact, he preferred women to be passive at least and playful at most. In 1967 he told Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci why he’d chosen the rabbit to symbolise the Playboy brand, and he responded:
‘The rabbit, the bunny, in America has a sexual meaning, and I chose it because it’s a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping - sexy. First it smells you, then it escapes, then it comes back, and you feel like caressing it, playing with it. A girl resembles a bunny. Joyful, joking. Consider the kind of girl that we made popular: the Playmate of the Month. She is never sophiticated, a girl you cannot really have. She is a young, healthy, single girl - the girl next door…we are not interested in the mysterious, difficult woman, the femme fatale, who wears elegant underwear, with lace, and she is sad, and somehow mentally filthy. The Playboy girl has no lace, no underwear, she is naked, well-washed with soap and water, and she is happy.’
7. He was ok with sexualising really, really young women
‘I don’t care if a baby holds up a Playboy bunny rattle’ Hefner told a reporter in 2003 when asked if he was fine with his brand selling merchandise to teenagers and pre-teens. Indeed, his most recent wife, Crystal Harris, was 23 when they met in 2009, when he was 83.
8. He was fine with infantilising slightly older women
Izabella St James, a former girlfriend of Hefner’s, lifted the lid on what it was like to live with him in 2009. She spent five years in the mansion, but as well as the curfew, she wasn’t allowed alcohol in her room, and was given $1,000 a week allowance. When Hef handed over the money, he would ‘bring up whatever he wasn’t happy with in the relationship…Most of the complaints were regarding lack of harmony in the group, or lack of sexual participation, or that we didn’t watch movies with him.’ Her 2009 book Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion, also explained how Hefner ‘liked our rooms to look like little girls’ rooms, white carpet and pink walls.’ On top of that, the dogs were allowed to relieve themselves all over the decaying house.
9. He’ll be buried next to Marilyn Monroe
In 1992, Hefner bought the crypt next to Norma Jean’s for $75,000. Without her permission, obviously. He featured the film star - before she’d quite broken through - on the front page of the first ever Playboy in 1953, and it sold 50,000 copies, helping the magazine - which he started in his kitchen using a loan of $8000 - on its way to becoming a household name. Again, Marilyn Monore did not permit him or Playboy to do this. As for where Hefner's soul will end up? In this fantastic Sunday Times interview, he gestures that heaven will look a whole lot like the Playboy Mansion. Perhaps without the old dogs and their territorial pissings...
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.