The only thing Hugh Hefner liberated was the zip on his trousers
Rather than a genius, Hefner was a bloke who saw women as mere bodies to be used and sold
THE world is paying tribute to Hugh Hefner as a genius liberator of women during the sexual revolution – yet nothing could be further from the truth.
The only thing he liberated was the zip on his trousers.
Hugh wasn’t about feminism and nor did he celebrate our sexuality.
Playboy saw women as commodities – mere bodies to be used and sold.
So he was clever to sell millions of magazines?
What sort of genius does it take to know that men will pay to look at pictures of attractive naked women? Any teenage boy could tell you that from the privacy of his own bedroom.
He was a merchant of sleaze who used women – and they used him.
Without his money, his mansion or his silk pyjamas, he would be seen only as a seedy reprobate who paid for sex with young girls.
And how young they were.
He went to bed with girls old enough to be his daughter, his granddaughter and even his great-granddaughter.
While a handsome, dashing man in his youth, Hugh later became a tragic figure, popping Viagra to keep up with the women he paid to be scantily clad and at his beck and call.
No, Hugh Hefner’s main achievement was not selling millions of magazines but igniting a rampage of pornification throughout western society.
He is responsible for every billboard featuring a naked woman, every reality TV show featuring scantily clad twenty-somethings having sex on our screens before the watershed and every business meeting held in a lap-dancing club.
His true legacy is to show how, with enough greed and cynicism, you can build an enormous fortune from one of the oldest maxims in the world: sex sells.
Yet the highest price has been paid by all the women who didn’t take his dollars to wear bunny ears, but instead have to live with the consequences of the society he helped to create.
A society where women are seen as things to look at, to touch, to have sex with and not as real valuable human beings.
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