1
Sex Must Be Taken Seriously
Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe â those two icons of the sexual revolution â never actually met, but they were born in the same year and laid to rest in the same place, side by side.1 In 1992, Hefner bought the crypt next door to Monroeâs in the Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles for $75,000,2 telling the Los Angeles Times: âIâm a believer in things symbolic ⌠[so] spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up.â3 At the age of ninety-one, Hefner got his wish. The long-dead Monroe had no say in the matter. But then she had never been given much say in what men did to her over the course of her short life.
Marilyn Monroe was both the first ever cover star and the first ever naked centrefold in the first ever edition of Hefnerâs Playboy magazine, published in December 1953. âEntertainment for MENâ was the promise offered on the front cover, and the magazine evidently delivered on that promise, since it was a commercial success from its very first issue.
Marilyn Monroeâs naked photos were four years old by the time of their publication. In 1949, the 23-year-old Monroe had been paid $50 for a two-hour photo shoot with pin-up photographer Tom Kelley, who had promised that heâd make her unrecognisable, and almost delivered on his promise.4 The woman curled up on a red velvet bedspread is not obviously Monroe, since her hair was a little more brunette at the time, her pained face was half hidden behind an outstretched arm, and her pale, pretty body was indistinguishable from the bodies of most of the other models in Playboy (which would not feature a black centrefold until 1965 â the eighteen-year-old recipient of this dubious honour, Jennifer Jackson, later described âHefâ as âa high-class pimpâ).5
The clothed Monroe on the cover of the magazine beckoned in readers with the promise of a âFULL COLORâ nude photo of the actress for the âfirst time in any magazineâ, and Hefner later said that her centrefold was the key reason for the publicationâs initial success. Monroe herself was humiliated by the photo shoot, which she resorted to only out of desperate need for money, signing the release documents with a fake name.6 Hefner didnât pay her to use her images and didnât seek her consent before publishing them.7 Monroe reportedly told a friend that she had ânever even received a thank-you from all those who made millions off a nude Marilyn photograph. I even had to buy a copy of the magazine to see myself in it.â8
The courses of these two lives show us in perfect vignette the nature of the sexual revolutionâs impact on men and women. Monroe and Hefner both began in obscurity and ended their lives rich and famous, having found success in the same city and at the very same historical moment. But, while Hefner lived a long, grubby life in his mansion with his playmates, Monroeâs life was cut short by misery and substance abuse. As the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin later wrote:
She grinned, she posed, she pretended, she had affairs with famous and powerful men. A friend of hers claimed that she had so many illegal abortions wrongly performed that her reproductive organs were severely injured. She died alone, possibly acting on her own behalf for the first time ⌠Her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death, and her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer: no, Marilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it.9
Monroeâs life followed a similar trajectory to that of her pin-up predecessor Bettie Page, who survived into old age but spent her final decades in a psychiatric institution. So too the pop star Britney Spears, who at the age of sixteen gyrated in a school uniform and begged viewers to âhit me baby one more timeâ. Spears has since suffered a protracted and very public nervous breakdown, just like the countless other Monroes â some of whom we will meet over the course of this book â who have been destroyed in much the same way as the original icon.
In particular, todayâs female porn performers â the most successful of whom now inhabit much the same cultural space that Monroe inhabited in her day â are far more likely than their peers to have been sexually abused as children, to have been in foster care, and to have been victims of domestic violence as adults10 â all misfortunes that Monroe suffered too.11 The libidinous public asks a lot of the women it desires. And when it all goes horribly wrong, as it usually does, this public labels these once-desired women âcrazyâ and moves on. There is never a reckoning with what sexual liberation does to those women who follow its directives most obediently.
Hugh Hefner experienced âsexual liberationâ very differently from Monroe, as men typically do, although his example is no more worthy of emulation. As a younger man, he was the true playboy â handsome, charming and envied by other men. He lived the fantasy of a particularly immature adolescent boy, hosting parties for his celebrity friends in a garish âgrottoâ and then retiring upstairs with his harem of identical twenty-something blondes. He supposedly once said that his best pick-up line was simply the sentence âHi, my name is Hugh Hefner.â12
Unlike Monroe, Hefner lived to grow old and, as he did so, lost much of his glitter. By the end of his life, he was more often publicly portrayed as a pathetic figure, and various former playmates provided the press with unflattering accounts of life in the Playboy mansion. Jill Ann Spaulding, for instance, wrote of the elderly Hefnerâs uninspiring sexual performance: âHef just lies there with his Viagra erection. Itâs just a fake erection, and each girl gets on top of him for two minutes while the girls in the background try to keep him excited. Theyâll yell things like, âFuck her daddy, fuck her daddy!ââ13
Other women spoke of soiled mattresses, a bizarre playmate uniform of matching pink flannel pyjamas, and carpets covered with dog faeces.14 It was revealed that Hefner took an obsessive and coercive attitude towards his many girlfriends, dictating how they wore their hair and make-up, keeping a detailed log of all his sexual encounters,15 and becoming angry if refused sex.16 His acolytes forgave âHefâ when he was still young and attractive, but as time went on he was revealed to be little more than a dirty old man. The glamour of the playboy â or the âfuckboyâ, in modern slang â doesnât last forever.
Hefnerâs reputation may have diminished over time, but he never experienced any guilt for the harm he perpetrated. Asked at the age of eighty-three by the New York Times if he regretted any of the âdark consequencesâ of the Playboy revolution he set in motion, Hefner was confident in his innocence: âitâs a small price to pay for personal freedom.â17 By which he meant, of course, personal freedom for men like him.
After his death in 2017, the original playboy was described again and again in the press as a âcomplex figureâ. The Huffington Post wrote of his âcontradictory feminist legacyâ,18 and the BBC asked âwas the Playboy revolution good for women?â19 One British journalist argued that Hefner had âhelped push feminism forwardsâ:
[Hefner] took a particularly progressive stance to the contraceptive pill and abortion rights, which the magazine often plugged, and kept readers up-to-date with the struggles women were facing; leading up to the legalisation of abortion in 1973, Playboy featured at least 30 different commentaries on the Roe V. Wade case and large features from doctors.20
None of these eulogists seemed to recognise that Hefnerâs commitment to decoupling reproduction from sex had nothing to do with a commitment to womenâs wellbeing. Hefner never once campaigned for anything that didnât bring him direct benefit, and, when fear of pregnancy was one of the last remaining reasons for women saying ânoâ, he had every reason to wish for a change that would widen the pool of women available to him.
Marilyn Monroe was scraped out again and again by backstreet abortionists because she died almost a decade before the Pill was made available to unmarried women in all American states. Playboy magazine existed for twenty years in a country without legalised abortion. The sexual revolution began in a society fresh from the horrors of the Second World War and enjoying a new form of affluence, but its outriders initially bore a lot of illegitimate children and suffered a lot of botched abortions. The 1966 film Alfie stars a gorgeous young Michael Caine bed-hopping around London and enjoying the libertine lifestyle promised by the swinging sixties. But his actions have consequences and, in the emotional climax of the film, Alfie cries as he is confronted with the grisly product of a backstreet abortion he has procured for one of his âbirdsâ.
The story of the sexual revolution isnât only a story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood, although it is that. It is also a story of the triumph of the playboy â a figure who is too often both forgotten and forgiven, despite his central role in this still recent history. Second-wave feminists were right to argue that women needed contraception and legalised abortion in order to give them control over their reproductive lives, and the arrival of this technology was a good and needful innovation, since it has freed so many women from the body-breaking work of unwanted childbearing. But the likes of Hefner also wanted this technology, and needed it, if they were to achieve the goal of liberating their own libidos while pretending that they were liberating women.
Sexual liberalism and its discontents
In Sophoclesâ Antigone â a play particularly attentive to the duty and suffering of women â the chorus sing that ânothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse.â The societal ...