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Hefner did not just promote hedonistic sex, but supported loving, committed relationships. The magazine offered many, often competing, messages. Those interpretations are not wrong, however, I would argue that they are incomplete. The Playmates, in this way, seem to say that women are only as valuable as as their sexual attractiveness to men. They pointed to the nudes as evidence of the ways in which Playboy prioritized (mostly white) male heterosexual power and privilege. They argued that Hefner was a chauvinist who exploited young women for his own sexual and financial gain. When the women’s movement emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminists like Gloria Steinem and others railed against the sexism inherent in the Playboy worldview.
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Of course, it was the sex that most people associate with Playboy, in particular the Playmate centerfolds. So he paired sexuality with the various other interests he imagined that a hip, urban man might desire – jazz music, highbrow fiction, fashion, decorating and cooking tips, and by the 1960s, progressive politics and cutting-edge interviews. He wanted to make discussions of sex and nude pictorials respectable to bring them out of the proverbial gutter and onto the coffee tables of middle-class Americans. Playmate dancers perform during Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Year celebration in Las Vegas in 2010. The wild success of Playboy – which grew from a popular magazine into a media and pop culture empire in the 1960s – can be attributed to Hefner’s particular treatment of sexuality. Subsequently, it grew in popularity so quickly that Hefner had to skip an issue in 1954 in order to expand his production capacity.
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The first issue of Playboy, in December 1953, featured nude Marilyn Monroe photographs, a cosmic stroke of luck for Hefner when he acquired them from the Baumgarth Company, who owned the rights to the prestardom Monroe photos. His genius was in imagining that other men had the same dreams – even if he was the only one who would make that fantasy a reality. He fantasized about fun-filled days and sex-filled nights, freed from the obligations of marriage and fatherhood. His vision was not of a mere magazine, but of a total lifestyle for himself. But Hefner felt constrained by the conservative post-World War II culture that pressured men like him into traditional domestic life. He had everything a middle-class man was supposed to want, including a wife and children. In 1953, Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine, was an ordinary man living an ordinary life. I also spoke to the editors and centerfold Playmates from the era.Īfter years of research, I came to the conclusion that the sexual politics of Hefner and his magazine were much more complicated than most observers – for or against – have acknowledged. I was given unprecedented access to the Playboy company archives in Chicago, and had the opportunity to speak with Hefner about his politics and philosophy. Others, especially many feminists, lambasted him for objectifying and exploiting women.Īs a historian of American gender and sexuality, I’ve explored the ways in which Playboy magazine promoted its own version of masculinity and femininity at the height of its influence, the 1950s to the 1970s.
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Over the nearly 70 years since Hugh Hefner, who died recently at the age of 91, laid out the first issue of Playboy on his kitchen table, the magazine and his personal lifestyle embodied the ultimate expression of heterosexual male privilege and sexual freedom.īecause he was surrounded by young, beautiful women well into old age, celebrants saw in Hefner an almost heroic figure who challenged American sexual puritanism, fought for free speech and lived the ultimate straight male fantasy.