The ashes of Hugh Hefner, founder of the Playboy magazine empire, were buried Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 91.
The Washington Post has proclaimed him to be something of a hero, calling him a “visionary editor who created Playboy out of sheer will and his own fevered dreams.”
On the flip side, Australian journalist Shelly Horton has written a scathing piece about Hefner, describing actions that took place in the Playboy mansion that are too graphic to detail here.
As we lay Hefner to rest, it’s a temptation to get hung up on his flashy public persona, with his red-silk bathrobe and a buxom blond on each arm.
But to understand his true legacy, I think we need to look deeper.
For two decades, as a freelance journalist, I wrote articles for what was frequently called “the female Playboy” — Cosmopolitan magazine.
So I had a front-row media seat on how the sexual revolution unfolded in the beginning.
Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown admitted she admired Playboy “to the point of ridiculousness” and thought Hefner was “a bona-fide genius.”
When Brown began to redesign Cosmo as a sex-revolution magazine in the mid-1960s, Hefner bragged that he “helped her hire the right people.”
He also introduced her to his own editors who, in turn, put her in contact with the agents and writers Playboy was using.
Brown patterned her “Cosmo philosophy” and “Cosmo Girl” lifestyle after Hefner’s “Playboy philosophy” and lifestyle.
In the 1960s and 1970s, both magazines sold Americans the media fantasy that “sex without children will set you free” — and I was one of Helen’s minions.
‘Kinsey’s Pamphleteer’
As we consider Hugh Hefner’s legacy, let’s look back more closely at how it began. Hefner grew up in a conservative Methodist family.
The first issue of Playboy (which featured Marilyn Monroe on the cover) was published in December 1953, the same year Indiana University zoologist Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.
Kinsey’s science became the very foundation of the sexual revolution. Continue reading
- Sue Ellen Browder is a journalist who wrote Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement (Ignatius, 2015).