In an interview, Hugh Hefner spared women the dignity of full personhood by declaring them sex objects for male gratification and the reproductive function. Hefner explains:
“The notion that Playboy turns women into sex objects is ridiculous. Women are sex objects. If women weren’t sex objects, there wouldn’t be another generation. It’s the attraction between the sexes that makes the world go ’round. That’s why women wear lipstick and short skirts.”
So all the years I spent in graduate school were for nothing.
Got it, ladies? Throw on the slap and the hoochie mama clothes and get busy arousing men.
Urgh, this man, this man turns my stomach.
And yet… going by the picture he seems strangely attractive to women. I’m going to go out in my dressing gown today and see what happens.
Arlene, I read an excerpt from Kendra featured on one of the entertainment blogs where she talked about an assembly line of women who took turns on top of that man. It sounded like the most dehumanising type of sex.
He is a scumbag.
Patrick, lots of women are easily fooled.
I love the way Ol’ Hef seems to think that women are automatically the objects of desire rather than the desirers. He doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp of how human sexuality works. Probably because he’s been living in a creepy fantasy land for 50 years.
Okay – just to report back. The dressing gown thing doesn’t work. In fact it’s a BAD IDEA (I live near a school). Therefore, it must be his delightful views that make him such a babe magnet.
I applaud your courage, Patrick, in your social scientific experimentation endeavours but the laws of attraction state that the dressing gown look only works for The Hef and no one else.
Ha! Patrick that’s a classic.
One of my deep dark shames is that I have watched many episodes of Girls of the Playboy Mansion.
It was fascinating – the programme was presented mostly in a curiously chaste way, and the three young women (Holly, Kendra, Bridget) were referred to as ‘girlfriends’ in a sort of high school way. They all had their own rooms (strangely reminiscent of a teenage girl’s room in all cases) and then ‘Hef’ had his own room. They’d call him nicknames like ‘Puffin’ and it was clear they would do anything to please him.
He seems to live a very sheltered life where everything he wants and desires is given to him.
What I found most telling about him is that when he goes to restaurants he has his chef bring food that has to be cooked ‘just so’ by the restaurant chef. (It was something like a pork chop and potatoes so it wasn’t like he was on a special diet or had allergies.) It was a sign that he likes things to be the way HE wants them and he’s the same when it comes to women.
The women who pose for Playboy see it as a very empowering thing. Yet he is the one who has all of the power, of course. What disturbs me is the Playboy-themed jewellery, bags, watches, pencil cases, etc that are aimed at young girls. We used to sell the jewellery in a shop I worked in and it was always young teen girls who went for them. Disturbing.
There is an opinion out there that he has ‘liberated’ women. He may have made American culture more sexually liberal, but that is not the same, as we know, as liberating women.
It’s a two-way street. Hugh is a creepy old weirdo, and “his” ladies are creepy, cynical moneygrubbers. Let ‘em at it.
The Hef (to give him his full title) has liberated women in the same way as Bush liberated Iraq.
i.e. not at all.
I’m with Lisa on this one. Is that rancid old crow-man worth the breath? Or the bimbos who play raunchy-rancid alongside him. As me old Ma says: “water meets its own level”.
Often quoted but still apt. Mrs Merton’s question to Debbie McGee: “So what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”
“His dressing gown!” she responded, as I remember it.
well he clearly ain’t a sex object.
Anna, I know, he doesn’t even take the line that most pornographers do about it being empowerful or part of a woman’s pleasure. He doesn’t see women as sexual agents, just as recepticles.
Patrick, hah. Careful now.
JJ, seems more like his money and power draw women in than the jacket.
Aoife, I can remember watching a Party at the Playboy Mansion or some similarly named show with my mother and younger sister when I was around 10 years old. It does get treated like “wholesome” fare for the family. Everyone has their guilty pleasures, so I’d never fault you for watching the new series.
Lisa, the Playboy women are sex workers, a group we should refrain from getting all judgey about. Girls are raised to believe this is aspirational. Since they’re the ones being exploited and have no power aside from their fleeting youth/beauty they are hardly on par with a parasite like Hefner.
Eoin, spot on.
June, those women deserve pity more than scorn. I can’t blame women for raunch culture.
Patrick, thanks for the quotes.
Poethead, you said it.
I was never raised to be aspirational about passing myself off as a brainless waxwork. Anyway, I don’t for a second believe that the Playboy girls are being unconsciously exploited, at least not in the sense that many other sex workers are exploited. The Playboy girls often end up celebrities in their own rights – Kendra, Holly, Bridget are all personalities I’m well aware of, despite not having watched their show. We’re encouraged to think of them as cute, girl-next-door types … the overtly sexual side is damped down, if anything! Bubbly, wholesome cutesiness sells more than sex, it seems, because you can’t go after the money in women’s pockets with raunchy photoshoots … even Jordan would rather think of herself as role model than topless model.
I digress. All of these women are adults, making informed choices. None doubt their looks will wither and die eventually. All know Hef will replace them as they age. All plan to have their money made by then.
He may hold most of the power, but certainly, these girls are far from powerless.
Lisa, Hefner’s not making some rogue statement about women when he says they’re only sex objects. He’s channeling what culture thinks about them. He calls women the sex class and *whoa* he’s not a Spinster Aunt in Texas.
There’s no acceptable scale to use in measuring or defining exploitation. Just because the Playboy women are not from the third world and trafficked into sex work does not mean that they are powerful.
I think you were blessed with great parents who taught you to set your sights higher than what culture expects. Many women are no so lucky. There are a million surface rewards for embracing the Playboy Bunny and manifestations of raunch culture. Also there are few avenues for women for social mobility outside of trading on their looks, a choice which is wholeheartedly encouraged. Also keep in mind that many of those women at Playboy are really young when they get involved. Why be so harsh to other women when they’re only responding to social norms for them?
I’ll reserve my disdain for the folks who profit from and perpetuate the industry.
Megan, I think ‘pity’ is a dreadful thing to offer anyone. I don’t feel for those women simply because they’re women. I think it’s a braindead mutual arrangement and if the bunny blondes are willing to queue up in cinema-line fashion to straddle his rancid cock, well then there you go. It’s hardly one of life’s more lofty mysteries. I feel nothing at all about it.
June, ‘pity’ is a synonym for empathy, mercy, shared feeling. It’s human and humanises us.
Ladies, ladies. Cant’ we all just, you know, get along?
*runs, fast.
Megan. I feel no pity for those women. I truly couldn’t care less about Heffner and his human zoo.
I agree with June, its a bit of a sad mutually beneficial arrangement. They get a lot out of it – money, fame, clothes, parties. I wouldn’t be willing to swap what i perceive as my dignity for those things, but i’m a different person.
I feel sorry for Hefner at times, he’s 80 something years old and instead of spending time with his kids or family (i think one of his daughters is well in her 50s), he’s spending it with teenage or twenty something women who are just in it for what they can get. I wonder if a women was paying men to be with her in a similar way would we feel sorry for her?
I’ve spent the entire day in my dressing-gown and, alas, the subjects of *my* social experiment (UPS man; elderly neighbour) found it all-too-resistible. No human zoo for me.
I’m not convinced that women are always passive victims in raunch culture. I know several highly-educated women from comfortable backgrounds who, despite all the options available to them, are now working as Burlesque models. A big “WTF??” to that.
Playboy has been an institution for more than 50 years. The number of women connected to the company who have gained significant fame or wealth is a very small number. And look what happened to the most famous of them all, Anna Nicole Smith. She was a mess of addictions and surgery and dead in her 30s. That’s not power, folks.
Neither is being complicit with your role in the sex class. It can bring you money in the short term, but much of that gets rolled over into surgery, enhancements and often drug addiction. For every Kendra there are a thousand nameless naked girls. And what those Playboy girls were paid for the show was not a great deal of money.
It’s not a question of passive victims or empowered strategists. Women can’t win the game because the rules are stacked against them. They don’t own the porn industry (of which burlesque is a part) and the window for how long they can work in it for high pay is pretty darn short.
I completely agree, Megan – I don’t think women working in the porn industry could ever be described as empowered strategists. My point was just that it’s difficult to see how raunch culture can be eliminated when even women with limitless opportunities are willing to participate in its proliferation.
Personally I feel like I’ve come to the conclusion that just because i find something morally offensive and grotesque such as working in the sex industry, whether that be porn, or prostitution doesn’t mean that different opinions on it aren’t valid. I can’t think of anything worse than having sex with a strange man for money but perhaps others think differently on the matter and who am i to say that their opinion is right and mine is wrong?
Aoife, I see what you mean. Yep, it’s frustrating when women take the lazy way out when they have the advantage to avoid the industry.
Bow, it’s a mistake to code sex work as ‘immoral’ because then you buy the magdalene/madonna worldview.
Virgins are not necessarily moral; they’re just people who don’t have sex.
Patriarchy controls women with these labels.
Rather than sex work being something women ‘want’ to do, many have no other choice to support themselves or their families.
By immoral I meant something which offends your internal view of what is personally right and wrong for you to do. I certainly don’t think sex in general is immoral.
I realise that many women who engage in sex work are forced into it, either by through the need for money or for other reasons. But how do you reconcile the views of women such as Belle du Jour (can’t think of her full name but she wrote an internet blog about her time as a call girl in London) who enjoyed working in the sex industry? she was well educated, finishing a PhD and i’m sure had other choices. Is it demeaning of them to say that they are a victim of our raunch culture, or that there must be other psychological or cultural reasons why they do decide to work in the sex industry?
Personal choice or what moves your moral compass is much different than saying sex work is immoral, Bow.
I earned a Ph.D. in 2007 and can hold no judgment or scorn for Brooke Magnanti’s decision to do sex work to earn her own doctorate. It’s so time consuming and difficult to find another full-time gig to pay the bills. The best scenario is earning a teaching stipend and tuition to get through the degree, but they usually pay peanuts. I know mine did. If not for my husband’s income it would have been an even more gruelling process. But I do take issue with the way her book and the series glamourised sex work. In reality women in the industry are vulnerable to violence.
Women engage in sex work because there are few jobs that pay so well for the time. Other than money, there’s not much else on offer, especially long term.
Oh my God. Odious little man. I can’t even discuss this I’m so pissed off.
Chastising people on the exact meaning of words is not helpful to debate which is what I am trying to engage in.
Some women feel that the advantages of working in the sex industry; money, perhaps power from making money from sex, outweigh the disadvantages. Perhaps the decision is right for them at the time.
Re Playboy being exploitative, Brooke Magnanti didn’t feel exploited and at least according to her version of events, no particular harm came to her so maybe its wrong to think that all those in the sex industry, including Playboy are exploited?
Nuala, I hear you. He is a turd.
Bow, I’m not trying to chastise you. Words like ‘immoral’ do the slut-shaming business that puts down women, however, so it’s worth addressing.
Women can claim they are not exploited doing sex work, but since they can’t choose the terms of their complicity with their role in the sex class, it doesn’t matter what she says about it, outside of my objection that she’s leading other girls or women to the industry with some vague promise that they will have it as easy.
Sex work isn’t full of glamour for most women.
Thing is Megan, I agree with you and if I ever met Brooke Magnanti and she started telling me what a wonderful life she had as prostitute I would make the points that you just made. Despite the fact that she says she never had a bad experience, she was never in control of the situations she found herself in. Its that lack of control that I find problematic.
But sometimes you read these articles with educated women with good experiences of sex work and I think that maybe my opinion is misinformed, maybe I’m not liberal enough in thinking about sex etc.
ah hugh hefney’s just a clown and probably only saying it to grab attention and get articles written about it to get some publicity, which he just did on this blog
Sean, he’s not a clown.
He’s a master of exploitation.
And the idea that this post or the comments which follow are ‘publicity’ for a wretched pornographer is ridiculous.
Megan, treating everyone who works in the sex industry as a victim is just as unhelpful and undifferentiated a position as treating them all as bad girls or sluts or immoral or to blame for women’s exploitation.
Some people in sex work are miserable and exploited. Some of them have no economic choices, others do but are unable to exercise that choice for other reasons. Some women find that sex works suits them very well and choose it over other options, and would laugh loudly if you tried calling them victims. The only thing that all sex workers have in common is that, unless they are actively advocating treating other women as sex objects, they’re not to blame if there are men who can’t tell the difference between someone who is consenting to a certain amount of objectification and someone who isn’t.
Mary, I have not once called sex workers victims in this post.
I said that it was *not* a case of sex workers being either passive victims or empowered strategists.
The sex industry exploits women.
That some women can parlay it to profit serves no moral, ethical or other problem for me.
It’s hardly a radical idea to say that women should be able to earn a good living at professions that carry less risk than the sex industry.
One thing I’ve noticed about glamour models and those in the mainstream sex industry is how detached they seem to be from their own emotions and sexual eroticisms.
Anyone here seen the Jordan sex tape? She’s just completely dead behind the eye’s. I think thats bound to happen when sex for you is just an assembly line of you and other women jumping on and off Hugh Hefners dick.
I do feel sorry for these women because something as great as sex has become commodified and cheap to them.
Hugh Hefner or Eminem…same huge misogyny sources.
Women are sex objects. And Men are sex objects too. Only difference is that Hugh Hefner thinks women are with expiration date, but he forgets to check his own expiration date. He expired 60 years ago (I mean, just look at him)
I don’t think problem is that women are treated like sex objects, but that men don’t think they expire, only women do.
That’s why you see so many “expired” actors in Hollywood, but rarely see expired actresses.
We are so used to seeing expired male with fresh female, that we think old men + young women is normal, but old women + young men is weird.