Playboy: Hugh Hefner’s fantasyland for the drooling businessman

Hugh Hefner with Holly Madison, Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt.

Since Playboy’s first publication in 1953, the magazine became so central to American culture that Washington’s Library of Congress agreed to produce a braille version for the visually impaired (proving that lust, like love, truly is blind). In 1985, congress voted to stop producing the braille edition due to morality concerns and costs.

But a group of blind Playboy devotees sued and a judge ruled that the ban violated their first amendment rights under the US constitution. Models are accustomed to being touched up photographically but not by real male fingers. Playboy bunnies surely have grounds to sue for being groped by lecherous strangers?

Welcome to the weird world of Hugh Hefner.

Dirty old man or sexual revolutionary? Radical publisher or grubby pornographer? When Hefner faced obscenity charges in 1963 for publishing and distributing Playboy magazine, the jury was unable to reach a verdict. And the jury has been out on Hefner’s legacy ever since.

One thing is clear: indecency is in the eye of the beholder. While feminists deride Hef as an opportunistic misogynist, his champions describe him as “a cultural pioneer”, an advocate for free speech, civil rights and sexual freedom.

But sexual freedom for whom? Not for females, that’s for sure. From the lingerie-clad, bunny-eared, cotton-tailed nightclub waitresses to the nude centrefolds, Hefner’s empire has always reinforced the sexist stereotypes that men are the predators and women the prey. The double standards towards sexuality are enshrined in the magazine’s lingo.

A sexually active man is a swinging bachelor, a Lothario, a Romeo, a ladies’ man. But a woman with the same sexual appetites as a man is depicted as a tramp, a moll, a tart.

Hefner’s claims to have had more than 1000 lovers is an unthinkable boast for a female publisher. The man’s boxer shorts could be inducted into the Hall of Infamy. Such sexual kleptomania must have required a placement on his pillows.

Hefner’s marriage to his third wife, Crystal Harris, 60 years his junior, also would be unthinkable for a businesswoman. The world marvelled at Hef’s virility, and praised his open promotion of Viagra (giving new meaning to a standing ovation). But this age gap in reverse would reduce a woman to an object of derision.

There is no doubt that Hefner’s magazine supported racial integration, even earning praise from civil rights activist Jesse Jackson. He also championed gay rights and published agenda-setting interviews with John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr.

He even ran a controversial interview with Fidel Castro, when America was suffering from chronic Castro-enteritis. His showcasing of literary luminaries such as Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin and Margaret Atwood also managed to counterpoint the magazine’s carnality with intellectual kudos. But it was only ever window-dressing. And if you peered through the window into Hef’s world, it was exceedingly seedy.

During the mid-1980s, a photographer pal sneaked me into the Playboy mansion to watch a photo shoot. I was like an undercover under-the-covers agent. Topless bimbettes lazed in the sun around the pool like bored pedigree cats. I watched, agog, while drooling, beer-bellied businessmen volunteered to rub in their suntan lotion. (Breast implants are like TV evangelists: you know they’re fake, but you just can’t stop watching them.)

All day I skulked around the manicured gardens, resplendent with full plumaged peacocks, nearly as puffed up as the male guests. I swam into secluded pool grottos, where scantily clad couples entwined on waterproof mattresses. At night I tiptoed through the mirror-ceilinged bedrooms.

The bedroom carpets had double underlay, making them as comfy as cushions. I sprung upwards with each step as though moonwalking. Clearly Hefner’s Hollywood castle was the carpet-burn capital of the Western world.

“Bunnies” bounced about everywhere. It was a veritable hutch. My friend explained that a model’s photo shoot often took weeks of preparation. Young girls recovering from plastic surgery on eyes, thighs, breasts and buttocks nursed their wounds in the wings. (Clearly, for Playboy readers, beauty is one of the most lovely and natural things that money can buy.)

Other girls were being starved down to the required pretzel thin proportions through diet and exercise, although to me all the young women looked as though they’d served the probationary six months bulimia period.

But for all its glamorous mystique, the mansion was really nothing more than a tawdry meat market. The bunnies seemed to spend their days as half naked ornaments, being ogled by sexually famished midwest businessmen and spent their nights as human handbags, draped over visiting executives.

The photo shoot proved as fake as the girls’ hair, teeth and tans. My photographer pal explained how models had their breasts secretly taped higher and then body-painted to disguise the scaffolding, while their more intimate anatomy was slathered in silicone to make it appear more succulent and neat.

And all of this tampering was completed long before the photos were meticulously airbrushed, and these days digitally enhanced. All this focus-pocus means that every woman in the world is made to feel inadequate for not looking like women who don’t even exist. With free internet porn offering every possible perversion, Playboy magazine’s sales have plummeted from a peak of seven million in the 70s to 700,000.

To gain greater access to Facebook and Twitter, Playboy announced last year that it was banning nudity and reintroducing lingerie. But after poor sales, nudity has returned with the hashtag #nakedisnormal, which decodes as: the exploitation of naked women is normal. A naked male centrefold, now that really would be a sign of equality.

Over the next few days, there’ll no doubt be outpourings of praise for Hef, the ultimate Silver Fox. Just as long as people remember that his Playboy castle, with its Disney-esque towers and turrets, is nothing more than Fantasyland, full of fake Tinkerbells. And becoming a Playboy bunny means running the risk of catching a nasty dose of misogynistic myxomatosis.

Champion of sexual freedom? The only reason Hefner advocated free love was so he could make money out of it.

Kathy Lette’s latest novel, Best Laid Plans, is out now.