OPINION: In an outpouring of tributes over the past 24 hours Hugh Hefner has been revered as a soft pornography pioneer and for 'celebrating' women worldwide.
He certainly celebrated his own idea of a perfect woman. He liked them docile, sexualised, and child-like - and most of all he wanted to maintain power over them.
Many women, and disappointingly few men, have pointed out this other side of Hugh Hefner. The man that saw women primarily for what they could do to please him and the man who never let go of his archaic and dehumanising view of them.
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Here's why Hugh Hefner isn't the hero some people make him out to be:
Suzanne Moore writes in The Guardian that Hefner was nothing more than a pimp who sold women to other men. "The fantasy that Hefner sold was not a fantasy of freedom for women, but for men. Women had to be strangely chaste but constantly available for the right price," she says.
"To claim that Hefner was a sexual liberationist or free speech idol is like suggesting that Roman Polanski has contributed to child protection," writes Julie Bindel for The Independent. In this piece she calls him 'sexist scum of the lowest order' and a 'woman hating sleazebag'.
Colin James writes in The Advertiser that Hugh Hefner changed the world, but he includes this admission: "Yes, by today's standards, Hefner was a sexist, chauvinistic pig who made his fortune exploiting naked women." Mr James claims since this behaviour was in another era it somehow makes it better, but the reality is Hefner lived this way until the day he died.
Would Hugh Hefner ever have been willing to wear a cotton bunny tail on his rear end? This is the question journalist Susan Brownmiller put to him on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970 and sent him into stunned silence. "Women are not bunnies, they're not rabbits, they're human beings," she told him. Hefner later said "I didn't have the language to respond to that kind of thing."
Holly Madison, who lived with Hefner and starred on the show Girls of the Playboy Mansion, fell into a deep depression while she was a Playboy bunny and says she's now a 'born-again feminist'. In her book Down the Rabbit Hole she compares living in the mansion to living in a prison. "You can play dumb as long as you want. It's not going to last, and it's not going to be fulfilling," she says.
British model Carla Howe said in 2015 that the Playboy mansion felt "more like a retirement home than a pleasure palace". She said the nurse to bunny ratio was skewed, the mansion had bedrooms that "smell damp and feel cold and unused" and the whole place was "stuck in the 1980s".
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