I guess we had better brace ourselves for the tidal wave of misogyny, s**t shaming and old school sexism that this article is bound to generate. You guys are nothing if not predictable…
Hey, mate, if being a s**t is not shameful, why do you asterisk the word? I guess hypocrisy is part of champagne socialism.
AC Harper
3 months ago
Hefner was not a symbol of Everyman, and Crystal was not a symbol of Everywoman.
The truth, probably, is somewhere in between. Hefner used women, but he was only able to because women like Crystal believed they could use themselves to extract money and power from the Playboy institution.
Much like other wage slaves working in jobs they dislike for the sake of the benefits they receive. So?
That’s the way the world is and the way it always has been and we’re living in it whether we want to or not. Our attempts to ‘fix’ things and eliminate exploitation have tended to end, and I’m being charitable here, somewhat poorly. Oftener than not, the attempt made things worse. We’re better off addressing specific problems and eliminating the worst abuses.
Harry Child
3 months ago
Perhaps Mary Harrington could right an article on why young women would sign up to a life inside Hefner’s zoo or marry some rich old man 60 years their senior. Baffles me!
Well obviously if you marry a rich old man you can be reasonably sure he won’t live too many more years and you will inherit a lot of money when he dies.
Well the original article explains it sufficiently doesn’t it?
There’s an ongoing negotiation of power, wealth and fame involved, and participants are using their looks as an access and negotiating tool.
Pretty straightforward – like when Mrs.Merton asked Debbie Mcgee ‘So what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?’
Legal self-prostitution. There’s a huge chasm between a Playmate crassly trading on her looks and a young runaway with a history of abuse being pimped out on a street corner.
Eowyn Fellows
3 months ago
Did Crystal eventually have the last laugh by inheriting Hefner’s fortune, or did he leave it all to his daughter?
Exactly. I’m not so sure she scored big-time, but it made for a nice wrap-up to the piece.
Jane Awdry
3 months ago
“Part of the genius of choice feminism, from the male point of view, is that it makes women complicit in their own exploitation.”
Absolutely this. Some women may wish to carry on arguing about ’empowerment’, but we all know where the power really resided.
Liakoura
3 months ago
“Women were the major beneficiary of the sexual revolution,” he told Cosmopolitan in 2015. “It permitted them to be natural sexual beings, as men are. That’s where feminism should have been all along.”
Actually it was the contraceptive pill, not Hefner, that freed women from the combined fear of sex and pregnancy hence the term – “Women’s Liberation”!
All Hefner and Playboy did was to make men who knew little or nothing about the mutual enjoyment of sex, even more horny for the unapproachable women who adorned the pages of his magazine.
Liakoura
3 months ago
“In the economics of choice feminism, the undesirable costs of sexualisation were outsourced to the sexualised, never accounted for”.
I’ve read this sentence more than a dozen times and still can’t make much sense of it. Are there some words missing?
I think it should be “In the economics of choice feminism, the undesirable costs of sexualization outsourced to the sexualized, were never accounted for”.
There should be more words missing. It’s quasi-Butlerian.
Liakoura
3 months ago
“This was a work of art as well as nature. When Crystal decided to upgrade her appearance, she went to “the plastic surgeon who did all of Hef’s girls”.
Or more likely it was from Hefner’s lack of performance, (a young man’s forte?) that persuaded him that paying for cosmetic surgery was rather better, in so many ways, than the headline – Playboy Hefner can’t get an erection?
These were after all, pre-Viagra days.
Liakoura
3 months ago
“As she admits in the book, she was “wooden and quiet”, although in her defence, she wasn’t being paid to be compelling. The deal was between the network and Hefner. He got $400,000 an episode, despite barely appearing. The girls — the stars — got nothing. “It didn’t even occur to me that it wasn’t a fair arrangement,” says Crystal. “I just felt lucky to be there.”
Some would conclude you were lucky to be alive?
Nearly 99% of perpetrators of rape are male.
“And those Marilyn nudes in the first issue? Bought from the photographer for $500. Monroe herself got nothing — a fact that was once seen as proof of Hefner’s business acumen.” And doubtless contributed to her decision to end her life.
“Part of the genius of choice feminism, from the male point of view, is that it makes women complicit in their own exploitation”.
In my experience the genius, exemplified by those men who came up against Margaret Thatcher face to face, was that they forgot almost everything, other than, at the end of the day, they were ‘mummy’s boys’.
This despite or maybe because Thatcher said – “I owe nothing to women’s lib,” during her first term in power.
One malicious truth here is that, whatever one thinks of Hefner or the women involved, this path to whatever lay ahead was only open to women. None of the girls was ever hauled into the mansion at gunpoint.
Correction: the path was only open to BEAUTIFUL women. Others need not apply.
Doug Israel
3 months ago
The original Playboy brand was 1. The girl next door naked and 2. The modern sophisticated urbane man. Maybe myth. Maybe not.
By the time Hef was finished on this earth he had clearly thrown over both. The girls were all, as noted, fake Hollywood blonds and the image was of a man that liked fake Hollywood blonds.
Steve Jolly
3 months ago
Between an aristocrat and a commoner, the commoner has always been mostly powerless. In prior ages, the sons of barons and dukes were expected to respect the virtue of ‘ladies’ but free to take whatever liberties they wished with the servants, who were expected to keep quiet about whatever liberties were taken and whether the party other party consented or not. Then as now, many did consent, either out of simple mutual lust or in the hopes that being the mistress of a lord and maybe bearing his b*****d child would improve their station, which it often did. Then, as now, people would risk a great deal for even a small chance at a more comfortable lifestyle. Just how much coercion there actually was and how much consent then would be as impossible to determine as it is now.
Today there are laws to limit the worst sorts of exploitation. Non-consensual sex is considered unacceptable to everyone regardless of social status. Still, lecherous aristocrats want women and have plenty of resources to leverage to get what they want. There are enough women in the world that some of them, like some of those servants in medieval times, will jump at the chance for even a little bit of wealth and status. They’ll offer themselves up willingly given the right incentives. All one has to do is come up with the incentives and make the procedure legal. I think Hugh Hefner understood that better than most. He never hid what he was, a wealthy, womanizing lech. He never apologized for it. If these women didn’t have a pretty good idea what they were getting into, that marks them as unbelievably, tragically naive. I just don’t believe the women are innocent victims. If they are victims, then so are the hundreds of unpaid interns who offer up their services for free just for the opportunity of getting on with a sufficiently famous or influential organization. The sexual aspect makes the subject more uncomfortable for the morally upright, but considered objectively, the pattern is the same.
I’m sure a lot of them regret signing up. A lot of us regret a lot of the choices we made when we were young. Doesn’t mean they weren’t our choices. None of us get to take them back. Can’t say I blame Crystal for continuing to profit off the man. That’s the nature of the relationship. She’s as free to sell herself as the naive little girl victimized by the lecherous old b*****d as she was to sell her body to the lecherous old b*****d in the first place. In #MeToo land, that’s a story that sells. A book filled with ‘good things’ about her lecher husband on the other hand, not so much. I suspect Hugh knew on his deathbed his dying request wouldn’t be honored, because he knew himself, he knew her, and he knew what their relationship really was.
angusmckscunjwhich
3 months ago
It’s seems disingenuous to equate the choices of young women too some concept of “choice feminism” that has never existed. Female emancipation has a long history of being interpellated into capitalism, Edward Bernays did a similar thing making smoking cool for women. No feminist ever said smoking was emancipatory like no feminist ever said monetising your body based on a male vision of your sexuality is exactly what we mean by liberation.
Hefner’s bunnies weren’t exposed to any feminism before entering his mansion and I doubt they’d read any Reich. They were, however, drip fed the American dream from birth and it’s Barbie’s all the way down… Karen is just Barbie at fifty: still bitterly defending the patriarchy that justifies her self loathing. just sad the dog whistles stopped (how else do you tell if you’re pretty?).
No mention of Don Cornelius and the twins he held hostage; or the cabin with the “important filmmakers” drugging the bunnies for pornography films. So much drugging in those days – never mind Bill Cosby, another of the Playboy regulars, Today it’s even worse.
I guess we had better brace ourselves for the tidal wave of misogyny, s**t shaming and old school sexism that this article is bound to generate. You guys are nothing if not predictable…
On the other hand, I found your comment entirely unexpected and insightful.
Yes, CS never fails to surprise us!
Hey, mate, if being a s**t is not shameful, why do you asterisk the word? I guess hypocrisy is part of champagne socialism.
Hefner was not a symbol of Everyman, and Crystal was not a symbol of Everywoman.
Much like other wage slaves working in jobs they dislike for the sake of the benefits they receive. So?
So?
Is that the kind of exploitative world you want to live in?
I doubt it.
That’s the way the world is and the way it always has been and we’re living in it whether we want to or not. Our attempts to ‘fix’ things and eliminate exploitation have tended to end, and I’m being charitable here, somewhat poorly. Oftener than not, the attempt made things worse. We’re better off addressing specific problems and eliminating the worst abuses.
Perhaps Mary Harrington could right an article on why young women would sign up to a life inside Hefner’s zoo or marry some rich old man 60 years their senior. Baffles me!
Is it really so complicated? Most women love power and wealth and he had both.
I would add status to power and wealth. Or, maybe status sums it all up. Either way, it’s an age-old story. Nothing complicated about it.
Druish princesses in particular I’ve heard. Not sure the almost word for word Spaceballs reference is intended or coincidental. Well done either way.
Well obviously if you marry a rich old man you can be reasonably sure he won’t live too many more years and you will inherit a lot of money when he dies.
Like Anna Nicole Smith. But that didn’t work out.
It was amazing the way he was able to exploit (some) women’s narcissism and desire for attention, for personal gain.
They genuinely liked him, and grew to love him
Nah.
Well the original article explains it sufficiently doesn’t it?
There’s an ongoing negotiation of power, wealth and fame involved, and participants are using their looks as an access and negotiating tool.
Pretty straightforward – like when Mrs.Merton asked Debbie Mcgee ‘So what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?’
It’s legal prostitution.
Legal self-prostitution. There’s a huge chasm between a Playmate crassly trading on her looks and a young runaway with a history of abuse being pimped out on a street corner.
Did Crystal eventually have the last laugh by inheriting Hefner’s fortune, or did he leave it all to his daughter?
He has I think three children.
Exactly. I’m not so sure she scored big-time, but it made for a nice wrap-up to the piece.
“Part of the genius of choice feminism, from the male point of view, is that it makes women complicit in their own exploitation.”
Absolutely this. Some women may wish to carry on arguing about ’empowerment’, but we all know where the power really resided.
“Women were the major beneficiary of the sexual revolution,” he told Cosmopolitan in 2015. “It permitted them to be natural sexual beings, as men are. That’s where feminism should have been all along.”
Actually it was the contraceptive pill, not Hefner, that freed women from the combined fear of sex and pregnancy hence the term – “Women’s Liberation”!
All Hefner and Playboy did was to make men who knew little or nothing about the mutual enjoyment of sex, even more horny for the unapproachable women who adorned the pages of his magazine.
“In the economics of choice feminism, the undesirable costs of sexualisation were outsourced to the sexualised, never accounted for”.
I’ve read this sentence more than a dozen times and still can’t make much sense of it. Are there some words missing?
Exactly. How does an attractive woman outsource her sexualization to some other sexualized woman without losing her sex appeal to the other woman too?
I think it should be “In the economics of choice feminism, the undesirable costs of sexualization outsourced to the sexualized, were never accounted for”.
There should be more words missing. It’s quasi-Butlerian.
“This was a work of art as well as nature. When Crystal decided to upgrade her appearance, she went to “the plastic surgeon who did all of Hef’s girls”.
Or more likely it was from Hefner’s lack of performance, (a young man’s forte?) that persuaded him that paying for cosmetic surgery was rather better, in so many ways, than the headline – Playboy Hefner can’t get an erection?
These were after all, pre-Viagra days.
“As she admits in the book, she was “wooden and quiet”, although in her defence, she wasn’t being paid to be compelling. The deal was between the network and Hefner. He got $400,000 an episode, despite barely appearing. The girls — the stars — got nothing. “It didn’t even occur to me that it wasn’t a fair arrangement,” says Crystal. “I just felt lucky to be there.”
Some would conclude you were lucky to be alive?
Nearly 99% of perpetrators of rape are male.
What?!
But more than 99% of males are not rapists.
“And those Marilyn nudes in the first issue? Bought from the photographer for $500. Monroe herself got nothing — a fact that was once seen as proof of Hefner’s business acumen.”
And doubtless contributed to her decision to end her life.
Nah.
What?!
One malicious truth here is that, whatever one thinks of Hefner or the women involved, this path to whatever lay ahead was only open to women. None of the girls was ever hauled into the mansion at gunpoint.
Correction: the path was only open to BEAUTIFUL women. Others need not apply.
The original Playboy brand was 1. The girl next door naked and 2. The modern sophisticated urbane man. Maybe myth. Maybe not.
By the time Hef was finished on this earth he had clearly thrown over both. The girls were all, as noted, fake Hollywood blonds and the image was of a man that liked fake Hollywood blonds.
Between an aristocrat and a commoner, the commoner has always been mostly powerless. In prior ages, the sons of barons and dukes were expected to respect the virtue of ‘ladies’ but free to take whatever liberties they wished with the servants, who were expected to keep quiet about whatever liberties were taken and whether the party other party consented or not. Then as now, many did consent, either out of simple mutual lust or in the hopes that being the mistress of a lord and maybe bearing his b*****d child would improve their station, which it often did. Then, as now, people would risk a great deal for even a small chance at a more comfortable lifestyle. Just how much coercion there actually was and how much consent then would be as impossible to determine as it is now.
Today there are laws to limit the worst sorts of exploitation. Non-consensual sex is considered unacceptable to everyone regardless of social status. Still, lecherous aristocrats want women and have plenty of resources to leverage to get what they want. There are enough women in the world that some of them, like some of those servants in medieval times, will jump at the chance for even a little bit of wealth and status. They’ll offer themselves up willingly given the right incentives. All one has to do is come up with the incentives and make the procedure legal. I think Hugh Hefner understood that better than most. He never hid what he was, a wealthy, womanizing lech. He never apologized for it. If these women didn’t have a pretty good idea what they were getting into, that marks them as unbelievably, tragically naive. I just don’t believe the women are innocent victims. If they are victims, then so are the hundreds of unpaid interns who offer up their services for free just for the opportunity of getting on with a sufficiently famous or influential organization. The sexual aspect makes the subject more uncomfortable for the morally upright, but considered objectively, the pattern is the same.
I’m sure a lot of them regret signing up. A lot of us regret a lot of the choices we made when we were young. Doesn’t mean they weren’t our choices. None of us get to take them back. Can’t say I blame Crystal for continuing to profit off the man. That’s the nature of the relationship. She’s as free to sell herself as the naive little girl victimized by the lecherous old b*****d as she was to sell her body to the lecherous old b*****d in the first place. In #MeToo land, that’s a story that sells. A book filled with ‘good things’ about her lecher husband on the other hand, not so much. I suspect Hugh knew on his deathbed his dying request wouldn’t be honored, because he knew himself, he knew her, and he knew what their relationship really was.
It’s seems disingenuous to equate the choices of young women too some concept of “choice feminism” that has never existed. Female emancipation has a long history of being interpellated into capitalism, Edward Bernays did a similar thing making smoking cool for women. No feminist ever said smoking was emancipatory like no feminist ever said monetising your body based on a male vision of your sexuality is exactly what we mean by liberation.
Hefner’s bunnies weren’t exposed to any feminism before entering his mansion and I doubt they’d read any Reich. They were, however, drip fed the American dream from birth and it’s Barbie’s all the way down… Karen is just Barbie at fifty: still bitterly defending the patriarchy that justifies her self loathing. just sad the dog whistles stopped (how else do you tell if you’re pretty?).
Well said.
No mention of Don Cornelius and the twins he held hostage; or the cabin with the “important filmmakers” drugging the bunnies for pornography films. So much drugging in those days – never mind Bill Cosby, another of the Playboy regulars, Today it’s even worse.