Ever since Hugh Hefner breathed life into Playboy magazine back in 1953, it’s built itself quite the complicated legacy.
On one hand, it carries a reputation of being nothing more than smut that objectifies women. But on the other hand, the magazine was also strangely progressive about politics and societal views while paving the way for modern ideas about how people look at sex.
If the word” contradiction” was defined in the form of a magazine, the result would probably look like a Playboy mag.
For all the emphasis people place on the nakedness present in Playboy, there was a lot of focus on sex-positive views. The magazine pushed forward the then-revolutionary idea that people should embrace sex as a great thing rather than repress it while also promoting mutual respect between partners and loving relationships.
The publication was also weirdly pro-feminist and pro-LGBTQI as it held very forward-thinking views that were well ahead of the time, such as advocating for abortion rights in 1963, advocating for marriage equality, and being an early advocate for gay inclusiveness.
Playboy was also a big supporter of the civil rights movement back in the 1950s. The magazine published important interviews with civil rights icons like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, published articles written by black journalists about black artists (like Miles Davis), and reshaped views on black women, such as having Jennifer Jackson become the first Playmate of the Month in 1965 and Darine Stern becoming the first black woman to appear on the cover solo in 1971.
Hefner himself also played a part in the civil rights movement, having helped organise the Playboy Jazz Festival in which all the proceeds went to NAACP, as well as making sure that no racist Playboy Clubs operated under his watch.
Throw in magazine’s willingness to publish stories, interviews, and articles from people of a wide-range of disciplines and suddenly the joke that people read Playboy “for the articles” doesn’t seem that ridiculous.
Now that’s not to say that Hefner shaped the magazine in this way out of good faith. There may be pro-feminist undertones in the publication but it was shaped purely from Hefner’s own self-serving views, which can be summed up as the “desire of a straight man”.
This has in turn led to well-reasoned criticism from feminists like Gloria Steinem and feminist circles, a lot of whom argued that Hefner was chauvinistic and did it all for self gains, as well as allegations from Hefner’s ex-partners that he was an awful human being in private.
But while we can rightfully criticise all the awful ways Playboy and Hugh Hefner treated women and the dubious motivations behind the late mogul’s actions, we also can’t forget all the positive stuff that came out of what he did at the end of the day.