Was Playboy good for America? The question feels exhausting. You can see the magazine from literally any analytic angle and find what you are looking for. Want to prove how pornography hurts women? Sure: Hefner called feminism his “natural enemy.” Want to show how hetero pornography supported and made mainstream gay liberation when America hated gays? Okay: In 1955 it published “The Crooked Man” by Charles Beaumont, a story about a dystopia where heterosexuality was taboo. In defense of his decision, Hefner wrote that persecuting homosexuality was “wrong.”
Perhaps the only true generalization there is to make about Hugh Hefner is that he is regularly given far too much credit for his role in American history. On Thursday, Julie Bindel wrote that Hefner “was responsible for turning porn into an industry.” He did not make pornography successful—his readers did. Meanwhile, the tweets proclaiming him a man of good literary deeds and bad sexual ones also miss the point: Hefner did not pen “Late Night.” David Foster Wallace did.
As we come together to bury Hugh Hefner, let us admit that his greatest legacy lies in the writing done about him by women. The greatest of these achievements is “A Bunny’s Tale” by Gloria Steinem, published May 1963 in Show magazine. Over eleven days spent working undercover at a Playboy club, Steinem put the lie to Hefner’s claims that he was the herald of a new sexual consciousness and showed how it was only offered up to men. She wrote of how she was tested for STIs by her employers, and told whom she may or may not date. She was expected to pay for her own false eyelashes. The wages were dismal.
In the early 1980s, Barbara Ehrenreich published The Hearts Of Men, American Dreams and the Flight From Commitment. It contained some of the best analysis of Playboy’s role in the so-called sexual revolution. “The magazine’s real message,” Ehrenrich wrote, “was not eroticism, but escape.” It offered men freedom “from the bondage of breadwinning. Sex—or Hefner’s Pepsi-clean version of it—was there to legitimize what was truly subversive about Playboy.” The nudity was not the central pillar of Playboy’s significance, she claimed. Instead, its message was about masculinity and the family unit: “every month, there was a Playmate to prove that a playboy didn’t have to be a husband to be a man.”