Hugh Hefner and Playboy’s Future

With a new documentary out about him, Hugh Hefner talks about his concerns about Playboy’s future and why women can sell their bodies if they want to.

Since Playboy first hit newsstands in 1953, few commentators have remained neutral on either the magazine or Hugh Hefner, its founder and editor in chief. Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife hailed Hefner as an avatar of the sexual revolution while Gloria Steinem's peculiar analogy—"a woman reading Playboy feels like a Jew reading a Nazi manual"—became one of the most infamous aphorisms of '70s feminism.

In recent years, as the rage of unreconstructed "anti-pornography" feminists and evangelical preachers has found other outlets, critics of Playboy tend to have more subtle objections that are often more aesthetic than moral. "In Hefnerland," Martin Amis' 1985 essay (anthologized in The Moronic Inferno) set the tone by sneering at the "commercialized unreality with which Playboy glosses everything it does." Many commentators merely dismiss the bunny empire for being quaint in an age where Internet porn is a click away. And liberals and leftists with no particular objection to soft-core porn mock Playboy's quintessentially American tendency to link sexual freedom to consumerism and upward mobility.

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Richard Porton

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