The Feminist Mystique of Hugh Hefner By DAVE SHIFLETT Journalists lately have taken to portraying Hugh Hefner as an octogenarian whose libido requires chemical upgrades and whose mansion is stuffed with tattered mattresses and stained carpets. But he still has his admirers. These include Carrie Pitzulo, a self-described feminist, who in "Bachelors and Bunnies" casts Mr. Hefner as something of a philosopher king and underappreciated crusader for women's advancement. How dare anyone think the Bunnyboy was ever simply a guy on the make? Ms. Pitzulo, an assistant history professor at the University of West Georgia, begins by sketching Mr. Hefner's origins. He was born in 1926 into what he called a "typical Midwestern, Methodist home with a lot of repression." As a teenager, he appears to have been less repressed than enthusiastically self-obsessed. He began documenting his life in a series of scrapbooks that now numbers more than 2,000. After a girl rejected him in high school, he "reinvented" himself as "Hef," Ms. Pitzulo says, and he began dressing dapper and writing a music column in the school paper. View Full Image copyright Playboy Magazine A 1964 Playboy ad, claiming that its typical reader 'knows his way around.' Mr. Hefner married in 1949 and had two children—a son, David, and daughter, Christie, who would eventually take over his empire. He and his wife, Mildred, didn't divorce until 1959, but by then he had made it clear that standard domesticity, that hotbed of monogamy, was not for him. In 1953, the former Esquire magazine copywriter had launched Playboy, a magazine that, as Ms. Pitzulo describes it, championed as its ideal "a swinging single Lothario" who rejected marriage in favor of "self-indulgence, materialism and promiscuous bachelorhood." Oh, and there were photos of naked women. The magazine also included articles on fashion, food and gadgets such as the "Tensolator," which provided "bodybuilding isotonic tension," perhaps to make up for slow nights in the rumpus room. Mr. Hefner also wanted to appeal to men with intellectual pretensions. The Playboy man, he wrote in the inaugural issue, liked nothing more than "mixing up cocktails and an hors d' oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." Yet the rabbit logo was not meant to celebrate the cerebral nature of the insatiable hare. Ms. Pitzulo looks closely at the true stars of the show: the Playmates, especially those who appeared in the centerfold—the three-page spread that was among the most sacred item of teenage contraband. While promoted by Mr. Hefner as the "girl next door" and "not unlike the women his readers encountered every day," writes Ms. Pitzulo, these women were actually the stuff of fantasy: perfectly sculpted and without detectable blemish. Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy By Carrie Pitzulo Chicago, 240 pages, $25 In the 1960s, Playmates became the target of feminist ire. Protesters at the 1968 Miss America threw Playboys into a "freedom trashcan" and even Jennifer Jackson, the first African-American Playmate (March 1965), later called Mr. Hefner a "glorified pimp," though she added that she did like him as a person. Gloria Steinem, ever the subtle critic, dragged the Holocaust into the discussion in 1970: "A woman reading Playboy," she declared, "feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual." Far more troubling to Ms. Pitzulo than the girly pictures was the tone of early stories, such as "Miss Gold-Digger of 1953," which painted "women as conniving wenches only out for money." Another mainstay of the early years: articles belittling marriage and long-term commitment. Yet Ms. Pitzulo also detects a "budding attitude" in the magazine encouraging "sexual autonomy, expression, and pleasure for men and for women." Playboy came to support "progressive" political causes, including opposition to the Vietnam War and support for abortion rights. Eventually Mr. Hefner even stopped advocating male "flight from commitment." While "militant" feminists continued to despise the magazine, Ms. Pitzulo says, Playboy was actually working "toward feminist goals." Mr. Hefner could not agree more. "I was a feminist before there was such a thing as feminism," he told Esquire in 2002. Freeing women from sexual restraint and ensuring their access to abortion, of course, are causes hailed in barracks, frat houses and other places where nonfeminists gather, but Ms. Pitzulo is not one to make such observations. She often writes with a messianic earnestness—we're told early on that her editor considers her efforts "worthy and important." She doesn't stint on the academic jargon as she "deciphers" the deeper meaning of centerfolds in "the context of postwar America" and refers to "the feminist porn critique" and the "heterosexual project." As prose goes, this can hit you like a very cold shower. She also denounces the "religious right" and other "conservatives" with a tone suggesting she's writing universal objective truth, clearly unaware that perhaps her adversaries are not the only ones who adhere to a rigid orthodoxy. But who among us is without blemish—except the Playmates, a few of whom grace these pages, including the thoroughly stunning Linda Summers (August 1972), stretched out in the sand with a look that says, "Hey boys, soup's on." There's also an in-house ad from 1964 boasting that 43% of Playboy readers had at least three drinks a week in a bar or restaurant, thus making the magazine an excellent buy for booze merchants. It's a reminder that Mr. Hefner believed it was his philosophy attracting the commerce that kept the bunny hopping. "We do live, now, in a Playboy world," Mr. Hefner said in a 2006 interview, which might be news many places, including those where women still go around wearing sacks. Yet many standard-issue American male readers may conclude they owe Mr. Hefner a debt of thanks. They might have believed it was those guitar lessons, steak dinners and charming conversation that greased the romantic skids, but maybe it was the philosophical Lothario with the smoking jacket and deep reverence for rabbits who actually turned the key to paradise.
