Hef is dead. And he still sucks.
Dedicated with love to the memory of Ms. Dorothy Stratten
Dorothy Stratten and — um — who is that guy again?
“Quaaludes were supposed to give you a nice buzz. Hef told me once that they were meant to put girls in the mood for sex.” — Izabella St. James in her book, Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion
I shed a tear at Hugh Hefner’s passing.
A tear of relief, that this no good, low down scumbag would never again have the opportunity to harm another woman.
And I wasn’t alone.
Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs wrote:
- Hugh Hefner was not a good person. From the accounts of its residents, Hefner’s Playboy Mansion functioned a lot like an internment camp. Hefner exercised totalitarian control over his “girlfriends”
- He would selectively belittle girls (“You look old, hard, and cheap”), talked down to them and “frequently made them cry.”
- He pushed Quaaludes on the girls, referring to the drugs as “thigh-openers.’
- According to Holly Madison, who spent years living with Hefner, he was manipulative, cold, and totalitarian. He refused to use condoms or be tested for STDs, and would require depressing group sex at regularly scheduled times.
But I sure did feel alone back in college, when I joined my campus feminist group in protesting Playboy magazine’s visit to our campus; a magazine model search held in honor of the fact that our institution had been named among the top party schools in the nation in a Playboy poll.
Lucky us.
As we picketed, made posters, and wrote editorials in protest of Playboy’s visit, my feminist group was attacked as being no fun feminazis who hated free speech and who wanted to tell other women what to do with their bodies.
I myself was singled out for criticism by some of my closest friends: cronies who knew that I myself wrote erotica and was an avid reader of Playgirl magazine, which was the feminist answer to Playboy and featured nude male models.
They called me a hypocrite; but, as I tried to explain to them, the core of Playboy magazine was far darker and sleazier than Playgirl, an independently produced magazine that I went on to write and work for years later.
I had learned as much several years earlier, when a friend of mine sent me a cartoon taken from Playboy that showed a frightened woman cowering behind a couch and staring in terror at two men who were disrobing in front of her.
“They say that sex should take place between two consenting adults,” one of the men says in the caption. “Larry is consenting and I’m consenting. 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.”
Historically, the victimization of women and girls has been widely treated as a joke in the pages of Playboy magazine.
R. Reisman writes in Playboy’s Historical Hate Rape:
For example, the November 1971 Playboy (redacted) image of a naked sleeping child urged dads to do what?” “BABY DOLL: It’s easy to feel paternalistic to the cuddly type above. Naturally, she digs forceful father figures, so come on strong, Big Daddy’!”
As I picketed Playboy, I thought about the fact that the photos of Brooke Shields taken in a bathtub at age 10 were eventually published in a Playboy Press publication. And I thought about the fact that director Peter Bogdanovich had accused Hugh Hefner of forcing himself on Dorothy Stratten, the talented, sweet-natured actress and Playboy model later murdered by her abusive photographer husband Paul Snider. Hefner denied the charge.
“[Bogdanovich] buys the continuum between centerfolds and ax murders,” wrote Rolling Stone in 1986. “The notion that when women are presented as passive receptacles of male sexual pleasure, anything can and will happen, that what trivializes women can kill them too.”
In 2009, Playboy launched a So Right, So Wrong online campaign to fantasy “hate rape ten conservative women, providing a gallery with their names, photos and videos.” In 2014, model Chloe Goins claimed in a lawsuit that Bill Cosby drugged and raped her in 2008 at the Playboy Mansion. The lawsuit named Hefner as a conspirator “and claims his properties were in fact the site of multiple of Cosby’s attacks on young women.” Hefner and Cosby denied all allegations.
Hugh Hefner was a vile scumbag who built his fortune on the backs of women and, more specifically, by putting women on their backs. His life was not a fairy tale, but rather a cautionary tale for young women with stars in their eyes, bewitched by a smiling older man who offers them the stars then leaves them in the gutter.
But back to my college protest. Our college yearbook shot a photo of me posed centerfold style with a hand behind my head; the other hand held a sign that read, “Go to hell, Hugh.”
Would anyone still call me a hypocrite for hoping that my wish came true?
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