Gillian Daley/ Staff Writer
In case you haven’t heard, Hugh Hefner is dead.
The 91-year-old porn mogul died of old age at his Holmby Holmes estate, popularly known as the Playboy Mansion.
The life and times of the founder of the Playboy empire have been causing waves of nauseating contention since Hefner began Playboy magazine in 1953.
Peeling back the layers of misogyny, feminism, objectification and empowerment involved with Hefner’s legacy is a complicated endeavour — one that may lead you to the conclusion that sex work is never easy.
On one hand, you have Hefner as the jet setting pioneer of America’s sexual revolution. His magazine served as an expansive platform from which the nation was able to observe women in a completely new and titillating way.
The magazine fostered a plethora of authors and novelists — you know you can actually read Playboy just for the articles — who wrote groundbreaking intersectional works.
Examples of these are Arthur C. Clarke’s interview in which he described having a gay experience and an excerpt from Alex Haley’s interview with Martin Luther King.
On the other hand, when looking at Hefner’s life through a more personal lens, one can see the heroic glamour of ‘the Playboy emperor’ begin to shed.
As you look more closely at Hefner’s personal life, the progressive honors that have been attributed to him begin to slough away until all we are left with is a perverse old man who made a living by preying upon uncomfortably young and economically vulnerable women.
It’s a jarring juxtaposition from being heralded as one of the fathers of the sexual revolution and empowerment movement.
However, there have been multiple personal accounts from former bunnies and girlfriends, stating that behind the gilded gates of Hefner’s $200 million mansion, he ran his affairs like the leader of some kind of hellish sex cult.
In her memoir, “Down The Rabbit Hole,” Holly Madison said, “This old man had just humiliated me — and I sat there taking his ridicule like a child. I curled up on the vanity stool and sobbed for what felt like forever. . . Like Beauty locked up in Beast’s castle, I developed my own brand of Stockholm syndrome.”
She went on to describe how Hef — as she called him — would organize nightly routines for the girls who called the Playboy Mansion their home.
He orchestrated a sexual hierarchy by preying upon the financial, physical and mental insecurities of dangerously young women, coercing them into a situation that was eerily similar to prostitution.
Hefner would dole out a whopping 1,000 weekly allowance to each of his ‘bunnies’ in return for implicit sexual favours, according to the New York Post.
Though many believe Hefner left behind a legacy of empowerment for women — which, in some cases, may very well be true that his legacy resulted in the empowerment of some — the opinion that it was his intention to ‘be feminist’ isn’t shared by all.
Isabella Garcia, a junior working towards her Women and Gender Studies/ English double major, said that “the system in place is very against what I believe in. I feel like for women especially, there were more negatives than positives. I wouldn’t like to work for a man like Hefner who views me as a piece of profit rather than a human being.”
It’s amazing to see how complex the world of sex work can be. There are no black and white answers about the morality of it.
However, in this particular case, intent matters. The “Playboy” magazine played a major role in sexual revolution of the 1950s and 1960s and has an ongoing history of giving opportunities to women for their financial advancement.
“I won’t apologize for the choices I made,” Holly Madison stated “Because all of them brought me to the wonderful place I am today.”
That being said it is obvious that the man behind the empire did not love women. . . or rather, he loved women for the wrong reasons.
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Photo taken from Flickr.
