I was fighting for women’s liberation. The Playboy creator only pretended to.
On March 26,1970, I accepted an invitation to appear on “The Dick Cavett Show” to talk about a new movement I was involved with called Women’s Liberation. I knew that our young movement was suspicious of activists who sought media attention, so I roped my friend Sally Kempton, a talented writer, into coming with me. I don’t recall if we knew ahead of time who the principal guest that evening would be. He turned out to be Hugh Hefner.
We were slotted for 15 minutes near the end of show, after the psychologist Rollo May and before the final number by Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane. With Mr. Hefner still sitting on stage, Mr. Cavett began by asking us to define Women’s Liberation. “Hugh Hefner is my enemy,” I replied . “Women aren’t bunnies, they’re not rabbits, they’re human beings,” I added. Then, addressing Hugh Hefner directly, I said, “The day you come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end…”
Mr. Hefner called Sally and me “girls.” I told him that, as a 35 year old, I believed I qualified as a woman.
The audience loved my sassy remarks. Mr. Cavett went to a commercial break and asked Sally and me if we’d come back for an entire program. We declined and suggested other feminists he might consider. Years later Mr. Cavett said he regretted that he’d subjected his good friend Hef to our ill treatment. I was crushed to hear that, but I don’t regret anything I said on the show that night.
Hugh Hefner’s death this Wednesday at age 91 prompted fawning tributes — and not just from the men who loved Playboy and sought to emulate its founder’s lifestyle. Women have praised him, too, for being at the vanguard of the sexual revolution. I was startled to see glowing tributes posted by some of my friends. They go something like this: He shattered the sexual repression of the 1950s; he celebrated pleasure; he supported abortion rights, civil rights and free speech.
Yes, he supported abortion rights, though so did our current president at one time. Mr. Hefner’s reason was clear. The image of the playboy he promoted in his magazine was a fellow who loved his stereo equipment, his expensive liquor and his bachelor pad, and refused to be cornered into marriage just because a young lady he had bedded had the misfortune to get pregnant. As Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her 1983 book, “The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight From Commitment”: “The magazine’s real message was not eroticism but escape from the bondage of breadwinning. Sex — or Hefner’s Pepsi-clean version of it — was there to legitimize what was truly subversive about Playboy. In every issue, in every month, there was a Playmate to prove that a playboy didn’t have to be a husband to be a man.” The reason Mr. Hefner supported abortion was not from any feminist feeling; it was purely strategic.
When I was working in Times Square with Women Against Pornography in 1980, I briefly got to know Linda Boreman, better known as Linda Lovelace, the star of “Deep Throat.” She told me about her visit to Mr. Hefner’s Los Angeles mansion, where he said he’d like to see her copulate with a dog. Ms. Boreman was an unstable person, but I have no reason to disbelieve her on this one because so many women have shared similar stories. Holly Madison’s 2015 book “Down the Rabbit Hole” is an eye-popping account of her rigidly policed existence as one of Hef’s live-in girlfriends. The sex was mandatory and terrible. There was a 9 p.m. curfew. She felt so isolated that she considered suicide. I urge you to read the whole thing.
Mr. Hefner was brilliant in starting his First Amendment awards in 1979. The judges in recent years have included women like Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation, and Nadine Strossen, the former head of the A. C. L. U. Winners receive a plaque and $5,000 from the Playboy Foundation. Few people refuse the honor. I know this because I had to fight hard to get Donna Shalala to turn it down. In the old days, abortion rights groups that were offered money from Mr. Hefner’s foundation used to suffer agonies over whether they should accept it from such a tainted source. In the end they usually accepted it.
It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that Mr. Hefner came out on top — not least in the ideal of beauty he promoted relentlessly. Despite all the hard-won gains women have made in this country, untold numbers of American women go under the knife to look like playmates. Of course I’m not blaming the bunny image exclusively, but I sure think that silicone inflated D-cups of the servers in the Playboy clubs played a significant role in shaping many young women’s aspirations.
Are we really O. K. with the reality that our girls are being raised in a world that Mr. Hefner made? I’m not.
