Change in Meaning of Hugh Hefner and Playboy : From Horatio Alger to Sexual Predator

Hugh Hefner first published Playboy in December 1953 with a relatively small investment of his own and borrowed money (Watts, 2008). Despite this modest beginning, Playboy quickly became a publishing phenomenon. The June 1956 issue touted a million copy print run. According to Esquire magazine, Hugh Hefner became “the most famous magazine editor in the history of the world” (Schudel, 2017, no page number). Playboy was most notable for its photos of nude women but also published interviews, fiction, and articles on politics, art, science, and philosophy.

What began as a magazine became an international business with one of the most widely recognized brands in the world (Wyer, 1978). It became a pioneer in confronting sexual and social norms and was a forum for promoting civil rights, free speech, and intellectual freedom. However, beginning in the 1960s with the start of the second wave of the feminist movement, Playboy also became a target of harsh criticism that it sexualized and exploited women (Pitzulo, 2011). Competition from rival publications and eventually the easy availability of pornography on the internet became an existential threat to Playboy, which ceased publication in 2020, three years after Hugh Hefner's death (Bonanos, 2020).

My thesis is that between 1953 and 2023, the defining narrative of media coverage of Hugh Hefner shifted from an entrepreneurial Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story to a salacious predator conceptualization, with several intervening shifts along the way. Reasons for the revision include Playboy's trajectory of decreasing success and shifts in the cultural perception of sex and sexuality. Chief drivers of the shift to the predator conceptualization, which is an important focus of this paper, involved the development of the Me Too movement (Chandra & Erlingsdóttir, 2020) as a manifestation of fourth-wave feminism (Sternadori, 2020) promoted via the internet (Munro, 2013).

I focus on Playboy, as opposed to other prominent men's magazines such as Hustler and Penthouse, because of the rapidity with which Playboy and Hugh Hefner fell from grace. As a corporation, Playboy made an explicit disavowal of any connection to founder Hugh Hefner or the Hefner family (Garner, 2022). According to McManaman (2023, no page number), “Today, Playboy is a very different company from the one Hefner launched nearly 70 years ago….Playboy is now in a post-Hefner era….”

Elements of the lives of other famous men's magazine editors may have saved them from the accountability experienced by the legacy of Hugh Hefner. Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse, became more of a tragic figure (Bosworth, 2005). He lost $500 million on risky investments, was saved from eviction by a benefactor who paid $24 million to his creditors, and had experimental cancer treatments that left him with trouble speaking. Guccione died in 2010 at the age of 79 of cancer (Reed, 2010), years before the Me Too movement. Although Larry Flynt, who published Hustler magazine, lived longer than Hugh Hefner and thus into the Me Too era, Flynt's New York Times obituary noted, “As the publisher of a notorious sexually explicit magazine, he found himself at the nexus of a cultural and legal war and became an unlikely free-speech hero” (McFadden, 2021, no page number). Flynt was a more sympathetic figure than Hefner because in 1978, a failed assassination attempt left paralyzed from the waist down for the remainder of his life (Reuters, 2021).

Hugh Hefner died September 27, 2017, just days before The New York Times published allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein (McManaman, 2023), which gave international focus to the Me Too movement (Kaufman, 2022). One consequence of the Me Too movement was to shift responsibility for sexual harassment from the specific individuals involved to the institutions in power. The feminist movement and the Me Too movement made it more difficult to construct an image of Hugh Hefner and Playboy that excluded exploitation. Despite the norm to avoid speaking ill of the dead (Allison & Eylon, 2005), many of Hugh Hefner's obituaries had a strongly negative tone (Johnson, in press).

It is not surprising that ideas in mass media reflect their social eras, either because mass media agrees with and amplifies what people already believe or because mass media elites use their influence to shape opinions. These directions of influence are consistent with Williams’ (1961) concept of structure of feeling, which suggests that different ways to think about or approach an idea vie to come to the surface at any one time (Buchanan, 2010). Williams (1961, p. 85) said, “the structure of feeling corresponds to the dominant social character…is not uniform throughout society; it is primarily evident in the dominant productive group.” Media power explains how elites use ownership of mass media as a way to control and create narratives to interpret phenomenon (Gitlin, 1978) and in doing so “define normal and abnormal social and political activity” (Gitlin, 1978, p. 205).

In other words, media power shapes the structure of feeling. However, the discrepancy between official policy and the popular response to that policy can also reveal the structure of feeling (Buchanan, 2010). Grassroots movements are one way in which a popular response emerges to challenge and reshape official policies (Van Til et al., 2007). In light of the concept of structure of feeling and in contrast to the traditional interpretation of the operation of media power, I suggest that the mass media representation of a mass media elite (Hugh Hefner) was shaped from below, i.e., from outside the existing media power structure by individuals who lacked conventional sources of media power. More specifically, rather than shape the structure of feeling about specific aspects of human sexuality—as he had done early in his career—Hugh Hefner's mass media representation, despite his status as a media elite, was shaped by grassroots elements of the Me Too Movement and fourth-wave feminism.

In 2006, Tarana Burke coined the term “Me, too” in a group counseling context among underresourced young Women of Color (Burke, 2022). The grassroots momentum of the Me Too movement developed a novel structure of feeling that encouraged new interpretations of consent and sexual power, which then exerted an outsized influence on reshaping conceptualizations of Hugh Hefner and Playboy. An important caveat in my argument is that a Hollywood actress (Alyssa Milano) helped popularize the existing Me Too Movement (Rosa, 2019).

According to Parry et al. (2018, p. 6), fourth-wave feminism has “less clear boundaries—folding the micropolitics of the third wave into the political, social, and economic agenda of the second wave.” Fourth-wave feminism considered intersectionality and the pornification of culture (Maclaran, 2015).

My goal with the present analysis is to examine how the personas related to entrepreneur and activist formed the initial basis for representations of Hugh Hefner and Playboy in the media. Further, I intend to examine how the predator representation emerged because of fourth-wave feminism, the Me Too movement, and feminists’ use of the internet as a tool to mobilize grassroots movements.

Methodology

Given the vast number of articles and sources about Hugh Hefner and Playboy it is impossible to conduct a comprehensive analysis of all of them. Therefore, I used purposive sampling as a research strategy (Etikan et al., 2016) to identify and focus on a small subset of key documents, which present different facets of Playboy and Hugh Hefner across his life and after. I used one key document to best frame each of the five personas in the media representation of Hugh Hefner as entrepreneur (Time, 1967), activist (Berman, 2009), paradox (Talese, 1979), tragic figure (Sales, 2001), and predator (Posner, 2017).

Key document analysis is a qualitative method of examining a particularly relevant or representative set of documents to explore a specific topic. Morgan (2022, p. 64) recently noted, “Unfortunately, the literature on documentary research is scant.” As such, I conceptualized key document analysis as analogous to the key informant technique, which assumes that key informants are expert sources of information (Marshall, 1996) and therefore more useful than a randomly selected person.

Kridel (2015) suggested that documents should be evaluated for inclusion based on criteria such as their credibility (honest and accurate), representativeness (typical and reliable), and meaning (significance and historical context of the content). I operationalized these criteria with regard to the quality of the outlet in terms of its both size and professional reputation (e.g., a major magazine, like Esquire or Time). I also considered the reputation of the person who wrote the document (e.g., Gay Talese). Finally, I considered the degree to which other people seemed to support information contained in the document. I recognize that the selective nature of the articles used may have created interpretational bias, despite my efforts to guard against doing so, both in terms of which documents I picked and how I interpreted them.

Personas in the Media Presentation of Hugh Hefner

Johnson (in press) distinguished between Hefner's role as an editor from his lifestyle choices regarding sex and sexuality, i.e., between journalist and hedonist. He noted that when writing about Hugh Hefner's contributions to journalism, journalists used the name “Hefner” but when commenting on his (often-unconventional) sexual behavior, they used the nickname “Hef.” The tongue-in-cheek statement, “I read it for the articles” is humorous because it recognizes a trade-off between journalistic integrity and hedonistic pleasure (as a variant of profit-driven pressures) (Johnson, 2021–2022).

I used Johnson's (in press) approach to break down Hugh Hefner's life and the history of Playboy into five personas along a timeline that spanned from 1953 to the present (2023). It is important to note that these personas are not completely separate and may overlap.

The entrepreneur persona covered between 1953, when Hugh Hefner founded Playboy, and 1974 when the stock dropped to less than $4 per share. The activist persona began in 1962 when Hefner published his “Playboy Philosophy,” a column that ran until May 1965, presented “a rambling editorial series focused on Hefner's world views” (Pitzulo, 2018, p. 22), and covered topics such as the First Amendment and freedom of speech and religion and the changing roles of men and women in society. One way to frame the end of the activist persona was when Playboy shifted toward the style of Maxim. Although there may have been some drift in that direction, it became overt when James Kaminsky, the founding executive editor of Maxim magazine (Tharp, 2004), replaced the long-time Playboy editorial director Arthur Kretchmer. Maxim did not feature full-frontal nudity, which made it more acceptable to retailers (Taylor, 2005); however, the tone of the magazine was less serious and more hostile toward women (Davis, 2005). In the spirit of Maxim, the articles in Playboy became shorter and more superficial and celebrities replaced playmates on the cover (Buitrago, 2010).

The paradox persona, which began in 1979, involved the observation that Hugh Hefner, society's ultimate hedonist, had a very conservative upbringing and a troubled relationship with his first wife because her revelation that she had cheated on him devastated him (Talese, 1979). The paradox persona is a liminal state that permits the transition from the most positive and traditional view of Hefner to a more negative perspective.

The tragic figure persona began as early as 1974 and involved Playboy's cultural and financial defeats and Hugh Hefner's sexual and romantic failures. A Newsweek article (Leerhsen et al., 1986) impugned his status with the title “Aging Playboy” and subtitle “with his empire in shambles and his magazine losing readers, the party is clearly over for Hugh Hefner. But at age 60, he says he has just begun to fight.” The article opened by informing readers that the original Playboy Mansion in Chicago was now a dormitory for the Art Institute of Chicago and that Hefner sold his jet so long ago that he cannot remember the type of plane it was. In a 1974 profile in People Weekly, the uncredited author described the magazine as “now 20 years old and becoming the Saturday Evening Post of skin books” (pp. 7–8). The cover of the August 1998 issue of Esquire described Hefner as “lonely and looking for love.” The issue contained a detailed story of Hugh Hefner's life after separating from his playmate/wife Kimberley Conrad.

There were isolated instances of the media presenting Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine as exploitative. Perhaps the most famous early example was Gloria Steinem (1963), who exposed what she described as an oppressive and exploitative system while working undercover as a Playboy Bunny. However, the media's presentation of Hugh Hefner as a sexual predator evolved from drawing attention to isolated incidents or specific perspectives to a more generalized harsh condemnation that reflected the changing social and cultural attitudes toward sexuality, gender, and power that Hugh Hefner and Playboy had helped to establish. The predator persona crystalized after his death in 2017, when a spate of obituaries focused on the exploitative aspects of Hugh Hefner and the Playboy lifestyle (Johnson, in press), and continues to the present.

As Entrepreneur

The entrepreneur, or Horatio Alger, persona focused on Hefner's rags-to-riches story and began with the start of the magazine in 1953. As a Time cover story in 1967 noted, “In 1953 he hocked his furniture for $600, scraped together $10,000…. The 48-page issue sold 53,991 copies; even Hef was surprised.” According to Brady (1975, p. 154), “Before he became the Horatio Alger of publishing, Hugh Hefner wanted more than anything else to be a cartoonist.” Fraterrigo (2009, p. 50) said that Life magazine described the “meteoric rise of Playboy” as a “libidinous Horatio Alger story.” Boller (1984, p. 63) wrote, “In the 1960's Hugh Hefner began replacing Horatio Alger among the young.”

As noted in the 1967 Time cover story, Paul Gebhard, who was the executive director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research at the time, said, “Hefner's genius is that he has linked sex with upward mobility.” The cover story pointed out that between 1953 and 1967, Playboy's circulation went from 70,000 to 4,000,000. The larger Playboy business operated 16 Playboy Clubs and sold $2,400,000 worth of Playboy-branded merchandise the previous year. In 1974, in a front-page story in business section of The New York Times, Farrell (1974) wrote that Hugh Hefner in “20 years parlayed a $3,600 investment, most of it borrowed, into a personal fortune now in excess of $160-million.”

Financially, Playboy's bunny ears began to droop in the early 1970s, even though from the outside the magazine and corporation still appeared successful. Playboy's troubles became apparent in the mid-1970s. According to People Weekly (1974), the magazine had a 10% drop in sales (still at a phenomenal 6.4 million but a bellwether of future declines), the Playboy Clubs had lost money for the previous five years (except for the London-based club which profited from gambling), the movie and record division had lost nearly $10 million, and a share of stock had dropped from $23.50 in 1970 to below $4 in 1974.

As Activist

An alternative role for Hugh Hefner was as an activist. A documentary about his accomplishments as an activist, called Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, featured comments from noted civil rights advocates such as Jesse Jackson and Dick Gregory (Berman, 2009). As noted in an obituary published in Ebony (TeamEBONY, 2017, no page number), Hefner was “best known as an early advocate of the sexual revolution, but the Casanova was also a powerful ally in the fight for civil rights.” According to Pitzulo (2017, no page number), Playboy was “an irresistible target over the years for its legion of critics—who said it's a sexist, objectifying rag, led by a creepy old man whose legion of ‘Bunnies’ turned bed partners never seemed to age even as he did. But what most observers have failed to remember is that Playboy was considered a progressive cultural leader in the 1960s and ‘70s.”

It is possible that “The Playboy Philosophy” column ushered in the activist phase. According to Mansnerus (2017, no page number), “The Playboy Philosophy” was “a mix of libertarian and libertine arguments that Mr. Hefner wrote in 25 installments starting in 1962….” As noted by Batura (2017, no page number), the content of Playboy “moved beyond lifestyle and entertainment as the editorial mission of the magazine evolved. By the 1960s, Playboy included hard-hitting features on important social, cultural, and political issues confronting the United States, often written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, government and military leaders, and top literary figures. The magazine took on topics like feminism, abortion, gay rights, race, economic issues, the counterculture movement and mass incarceration….”

By challenging a conservative view of sexuality, Playboy and Hugh Hefner changed American culture and, consequently, how mass media covered sex and sexuality. Paradoxically, however, this greater openness had two distal consequences. The first was to make Playboy less relevant by encouraging others (e.g., Penthouse) to make even bolder statements about sexuality. The second was to help create an environment that broadened conversations about sex enough to recognize and discuss topics such as consent and sexual harassment in the workplace. In other words, Hugh Hefner and Playboy gave voice indirectly to societal criticisms of themselves because they helped create an environment that legitimized those criticisms.

Third-wave feminism focused on developing broader, more inclusive definitions of what it meant to be a woman or operate in a variety of women's roles. This perspective included “the ideal of sexual liberation…that many believe came, by the 1980s, to prioritize gender equality over sexual autonomy and to view sexual desire as problematic” (Snyder-Hall, 2010, p. 258). From this position, Playboy's representation of women could be reconciled with a definition of feminism that embraced an empowerment framework based on women's sexuality. In a sense, then, Playboy had to wait for feminism to catch up to its view of women's sexuality by evolving from the 1960s second wave to the 1990s third wave.

As Paradox

The foundation for the paradox persona involved the contrast between Hugh Hefner's conservative upbringing and eventual lifestyle (Witchel, 1992), which serves as a liminal space between favorable and unfavorable media representations. Noted author Gay Talese's two-part profile, which appeared in Esquire (and was an important element of his 1980 bestselling book Thy Neighbor's Wife), best exemplifies this paradox. In the article, Talese (1979, p. 59) wrote, “While Hefner advocated a philosophy of sexual liberation, he was also afflicted with a madonna complex, and in the centerfold of his new magazine each month, he sought to present playmates who projected a virginal appeal….”

At the age of 22, Hugh Hefner had still not had sex. Eventually, he began to have sex with his girlfriend Mildred. However, after a while, Mildred confessed to Hefner that she was having an affair with another teacher at the high school where she worked. According to Talese (1979, p. 72), “Hefner listened with disbelief. It was as if this astounding moment was too unreal to accept….He sat behind the wheel of the parked car, feeling stunned, betrayed, very alone…..Though he did not admit it, he wanted her now more than he ever had before, being very alarmed by the competitive presence of another suitor.” They married on June 15, 1949, had a brief honeymoon, and “returned to Chicago to begin a life together that would never be as romantic as it had once been” (p. 72).

Perhaps the strongest paradoxical element of Hugh Hefner's life is that prototypic swinging bachelor married three times, twice after he invented the Playboy lifestyle. He was married 10 years to Mildred, his first wife. He was married 21 years to Kimberley Conrad. He was married five years to Crystal Harris, a union that only ended because of Hefner's death in 2017. Thus, the ultimate swinging single was married at least technically almost 40% of his life.

As Tragic Figure

In one prototypic article, Sales (2001, p. 280) quoted Hugh Hefner as saying, “When I came right off my marriage to Kimberley at the beginning of 1998…I was emotionally pretty beaten up. I had been working hard trying to keep that marriage together, and it was not anybody's fault….There wasn’t anybody else. In contrast to what anyone would think about someone who has lived my lifestyle, I made that commitment, and worked on it.”

Stories that present Hugh Hefner as a tragic figure focus on how he lost hold of his entrepreneur and activist personas and lost his luster as a hedonist. His business is floundering. He is editor-in-chief of Playboy in name only. His love life is in ruins. It was a common trope to contrast Hugh Hefner's early success in the 1950s and 1960s with later stumbles even as early as the 1970s (despite the record high circulation of the magazine).

The Newsweek article (Leerhsen et al., 1986, p. 51) challenged his persona as business genius by asking, “Hasn’t anyone told this man that the fun and games have ended? Reminded him that he owns 70 percent of a company whose stock has dropped to around $7 a share from a high, in 1978, of $30.25?” The attack on his hedonist persona came with comments by Peter Bogdanovich who wrote a book about the murder of Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten. The Newsweek article stated that Hugh Hefner was very upset by the “perceived loss of his own reputation as ‘the ultimate romantic’” (p. 54). It attacked his persona as a journalist with the comment (p. 52), “For the last decade Hefner has done little more than work on centerfold layouts, but from 1953 until the late ‘60s he frequently worked 36-h ‘days’….”

In the romantic domain, the media viewed Hugh Hefner as an emotionally deep man whose hedonistic ways—extremitized to a cartoon level by his penchant for almost identical blonde bombshell girlfriends—are to mask a deeper, more mature pain. Hugh Hefner married Kimberley Conrad in 1989, and they separated in 1998 but did not divorce until 2010 (Mansnerus, 2017).

Sexual failures accompanied Hugh Hefner's romantic failures. A common theme in commentaries about his life is his reliance on Viagra as a means of sexual performance. His “fall from grace” had expanded to include perhaps the most defining action associated with Hugh Hefner's professional and private lives. This final fact marks him as no longer able to achieve (without technological intervention) even the most basic form of hedonistic expression, i.e., sexual gratification.

A vivid contrast between two descriptions of dining at the Mansion across 27 years illustrates Hugh Hefner's fall from glory. A 1974 profile in People Weekly described a Sunday night as including a “buffet of roast beef, game hens and fine wines” (p. 9) for guests that included actors Robert Culp and Peter Lawford. In contrast, the profile in Vanity Fair reported that guests (still including Robert Culp but not Peter Lawford, who had died years earlier) are provided with a “buffet—some bland meat and fish and vegetables on trays, and spongy cakes” (Sales, 2001, p. 283).

As noted by Gopnik (2017, no page number), “in the end, the American fable his life most resembled was not ‘Gatsby’ but ‘Citizen Kane.’ By the time Hefner died, seemingly as isolated in his mansion as Kane was in his Xanadu, his empire had been vastly reduced—by both time and fashion.”

As Predator

The predator characterization, which viewed Hugh Hefner as an unthinking hedonist who failed to consider the consequences of his own actions on women (Posner, 2017), had existed for years, supported by stories and tell-all books, though almost always on the periphery of his media image. Reports published decades earlier foreshadowed some of the stories told in The Secrets of Playboy documentary (Lowry, 2022). For example, the unauthorized biography Hefner (Brady, 1974) included three reports that Hugh Hefner tried to suppress (People Weekly, 1974). They involved an alleged homosexual experience years in the past, an erotic massage delivered by ten women, and an exhibition between call girls and Hefner's dog Humphrey.

The predator persona reflects cultural shifts in how the media reinterpreted Playboy and Hugh Hefner as a function of changes in our understanding of feminism, feminist issues, and the Me Too movement. Second-wave feminists criticized Hugh Hefner for exploiting women, i.e., for gaining a benefit from them (money, fame, and sexual gratification). The transition from second-wave feminism to third-wave feminism gave Hugh Hefner and Playboy cover against allegations that they objectified women or normalized exploitation of women. Appearing nude in Playboy was not—as second-wave feminists would frame it—a form of objectification. Instead, it was an empowering behavior aligned with third-wave feminism (Reynolds, 2017; Sternadori, 2020).

Fourth-wave feminism, which emerged at the end of the twentieth century, presented as an alternative view of women's empowerment (Sternadori, 2020) that stemmed from using the internet as a tool (Munro, 2013) to address interlocking systems of power. Fourth-wave feminism used the internet to challenge Hugh Hefner and Playboy by asserting they were doing more than merely exploiting women's sex and sexuality. In addition, they were predators who consumed, damaged, and even assaulted women. Fourth-wave feminism took advantage of the rise of digital technology platforms that hosted social media sites to emphasize online resistance, such as hashtag activism (Caldeira, 2023; Yun, 2020), that could effectively challenge sexual harassment (especially as it occurred in the workplace), sexual objectification, and the meaning of sexual consent (Reynolds, 2017). Using digital technology and social media allowed for more broad-based attacks of Hugh Hefner and Playboy that raised these issues from a variety of directions.

The approach used by fourth-wave feminism made it more difficult to dismiss critics of Playboy and Hugh Hefner as sex negative radical feminists. Fourth-wave feminism permitted third wave's positive attitude toward female sexuality and sexual empowerment but challenged oppressive and exclusionary beauty standards, e.g., those exemplified by the Playboy Playmate, which could lead to body shaming (Nzombe et al., 2023). As such, it was more difficult to sideline criticisms of Hugh Hefner and Playboy by asserting they stemmed from anti-sex or anti-male positions.

Fourth-wave feminism questioned and tried to dismantle rape culture and emphasized society's responsibility to confront sexual harassment and sexual assault (Shiva & Kharazmi, 2019). Further, it foregrounded the importance of a complex and nuanced view of consent. The perspective of fourth-wave feminism argued that even if Playboy paid women to appear in in Playboy or attend Playboy-hosted events, more subtle social and structural pressures pushed them toward public consent despite private reservations.

Incidental comments in earlier profiles of Hugh Hefner take on new meaning in the wake of the Me Too movement. As noted by Zehme (1998, p. 65), in planning for Hugh Hefner's birthday party, “Dr. Saginor has stocked the pond like a champion; at least one hundred extraordinary women have been invited, mostly by him.”

One ambitious act Hugh Hefner performed, which aligned with his journalist role, was to compose a quarter of a million words called “The Playboy Philosophy.” Commentators have reinterpreted even that deed, however, in terms of the predator label. Gopnik (2017, no page number) wrote, “There was a time when his excursions into the Playboy philosophy, which was not quite as ridiculous a document as its title makes it sound, were, though never taken seriously, at least seen as significant. Now, they seem not merely quaint but predatory.”

As noted by Svetkey (2022, no page number), “And now, five years after Hefner's death in 2017 at age 91, a new mythology is springing up in its place, thanks to documentarian Alexandra Dean's scandal-digging A&E exposé. Right from the opening credits, you can tell where this is headed, with snippets of Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski partying at the mansion and sound bites of disgruntled ex-Playmates claiming that ‘Hef pulled one over on the whole world.’” The Secrets of Playboy made a number of serious charges against Hefner. For example, Susie Scott claimed that he gave her a pill—presumptively to calm her worries about being chosen Playmate of the Year—but once she became sleepy, he attempted to have sex with her while she was unconscious (Stern, 2022). As Ali (2022, no page number) noted, “the docuseries skillfully depicts America's fluctuating moral standards from era to era, and Playboy's response to those shifts.”

In an action that undermines the credibility of her own reporting, however, Dean includes the statement, “the vast majority of allegations have not been the subject of criminal investigations or charges, and they do not constitute proof of guilt” at the end of the episodes. As noted by Ali (2022, no page number), “Exactly no one will be surprised to discover that the late Hugh Hefner used and traded young women like commodities and that his mythology of Playboy as a progressive outgrowth of the sexual revolution and a bold expression of feminism was largely a charade.”

It is important to distinguish The Secrets of Playboy from the journalistic coverage of the docuseries. The episodes themselves portrayed Hugh Hefner, many of his employees, and the concept of the magazine itself in a very negative light. Journalistic coverage of the series—and other allegations made against Hugh Hefner—was more fair and balanced. As noted by Svetkey (2022, no page number), “Picking apart what's true from false in Dean's documentary is something of a Herculean task, especially when dealing with the more incendiary accusations that pop up like horror-movie jump scares….Or, for that matter, the veracity of the shadowy ‘Dateline’-like reenactments sprinkled throughout to suggest other vague shenanigans at the mansion. It's all lobbed out there with the weight of a whispered rumor.”

As noted by Ali (2022, no page number), “by mixing together allegations large and small, frightening and simply strange, public and previously unknown, ‘Secrets of Playboy’ reveals less than the sum of its parts. It may be worth viewing as a time capsule of a tarnished brand, the depravity of the porn business and the evolution of a culture. But it's a far cry from a devastating—or zeitgeist-shaking—case against Playboy's suave figurehead. The real story of Hugh Hefner is still to be told.”

Schuessler (2017) assembled comments from a number of writers—including some who had written for Playboy—that identified Hefner's accomplishments. Some authors (e.g., Rall, 2017) were highly critical of those who lambasted Hefner (e.g., Douthat, 2017). Some journalists at least implicitly addressed the claims of exploitation that involved unwilling consent. For example, according to Aurthur (2015, no page number), “After a year of being a regular at the mansion, and with both of her roommates moving out, [Holly] Madison was desperate to stay in Los Angeles, and decided she'd try to be one of the girlfriends.” The same article quoted Madison as saying, “I thought I was an adult and thought I was making my free choice. And I was.”

One reason The Secrets of Playboy (which now has a second season; Sorokach, 2023) is problematic as journalism is that because Hugh Hefner is dead, he (or his estate) cannot sue the producers of the documentary for defamation (Binder, 2002). It might be possible to argue that because of the close association between Playboy and Hugh Hefner, sullying his name interfered with his right to publicity and damaged the Playboy brand. However, because the family sold their interest in Playboy, it becomes that more difficult to argue bad publicity generated by the series harmed them financially.

The Secrets of Playboy sparked discord among Playboy alumni. Many people close to Playboy and Hugh Hefner challenged its accuracy (Thompson, 2022). As noted by Kaufman (2022, no page number), “The battle within the world of Playboy has also epitomized the emerging fault lines of a culture in which public allegations of sexual misconduct are ostensibly given more credence, but individuals remain reluctant to speak out against friends and colleagues.” Before the show aired, the current Playboy corporation distanced itself from its founder, stating in an open letter that the Hefner family was no longer associated with the business and that it supported women who had come forward with stories of abuse (Thompson, 2022).

Conclusion

It was no surprise that Hugh Hefner's death trigged a raft of obituaries, given his level of fame and accomplishment. What was surprising was the strong negative tone presented in these posthumous analyses. Although people do display a tendency to evaluate the dead more positively than the living (Allison & Eylon, 2005; Drzewiecka & Cwalina, 2020; Tsutsumida & Shiraiwa, 2014), one important qualification is that a negativity bias will be obtained for people who are viewed as immoral, i.e., dead immoral individuals will be evaluated more negatively than living immoral leaders (Allison et al., 2009). It is possible that norms against speaking ill of the dead are strongest for what could be termed “pedestrian deaths,” i.e., people who are not famous or in the public eye (Guarino, 2018).

Hugh Hefner was not a pedestrian individual. Further, the high profile choices he made (such as the period where he had multiple platinum blonde girlfriends) made him appear immoral in some people's eyes. Stories of sybaritic sexual excess situated in a period of accountability defined by the attention received by the Me Too movement may have exacerbated this tendency.

Perhaps the most thoughtful analyses recognized that the structure of feeling (Williams, 1961) about sex, sexuality, and pornography shifted around Hugh Hefner, which made his contributions to culture a double-edged sword. According to Heer (2017), he was anti-puritan but seemed less cognizant of male privilege. Stevens (2017, no page number) said, “Hef is a relic from a very different time. He's both reviled and revered—credited with lifting sexual taboos and liberating generations, blamed for exploiting women as barely clothed accessories.” In the 1950s and early 1960s, his perspective had hegemonic dominance, which is a characteristic of the structure of feeling. However, as noted by Williams (1961, p. 85), “the structure of feeling is not uniform throughout society….” In other words, society changed around Hugh Hefner in ways he could or would not understand.

An alternative interpretation of the varied but downward coverage of Hugh Hefner is that he changed over the years. In line with this possibility, as noted by Heer (2017, no page number), it is important to separate “Hefner's historical impact, which was distinct from the figure Hefner cut at the end of his life.” Svetkey (2022) concluded his analysis with the statement, “Ultimately, as with all Greek myths, it was bound to end in tragedy, with Hefner transforming himself into the worst possible thing a cultural icon could become: a parody of himself.”

While I hope that my analysis of media material about Playboy and Hugh Hefner is free of bias, I recognize the subjective nature of qualitative analysis makes it more likely that distortion may creep into the analysis. Another potential source of bias stems from the selective nature of the data I used to make my arguments. Although I picked key articles to act as informants, it is possible that my selection process was not even remotely as free from partisanship as I imagined or would have liked.

Hugh Hefner's contribution to society is a diminished legacy, tarnished by a loss of cultural relevancy even though societal attitudes toward sexuality shifted in the direction initially advocated by Hefner and Playboy. However, controversy and accusations of exploitation cast a shadow over Hugh Hefner's (and Playboy's) accomplishments because his views of sexual empowerment and liberation, anchored to a position that ultimately weighed them down, triggered unfavorable debate. It is less clear now than ever before whether Hugh Hefner and Playboy will maintain a lasting legacy in the headwind of shifting collective cultural interpretations, which will ultimately become new collective cultural memories. In a discussion of the history of the Me Too movement, Burke (2022, no page number) wrote, “Survivors introduced a world of possibility to the fight to end sexual violence. Now we are moving beyond the hashtag to build a culture predicated on consent and harm reduction. This is our moral imperative.” Shifts in the meaning ascribed to Hugh Hefner and his life's work reflect the influence of cultural factors such as the feminist movement in general and the Me Too movement in particular. However, future scholarship is required to determine how these cultural shifts operate and whether they will become permanent features of the social environment regarding sexual consent.

The shift in the media representation of Hugh Hefner from entrepreneur to predator is a shift in the narrative used to describe his life and work, which was based on the evolution in beliefs about the way sexuality should be framed. In the early years, Playboy framed a liberal attitude toward sex and sexuality as a form of self-expression and the exercise of freedom of choice for consenting adults. Subsequently, however, the feminist movement and—more recently—the Me Too movement (in conjunction with fourth-wave feminism) challenged banal endorsements of freedom of choice as a governing principle by emphasizing how sexuality can be framed in terms of power and status differences which effectively reduce the subjectively experienced consent of those who superficially appear to be consenting adults.

Both the feminist movement and the sexual revolution of the 1960s started as grassroots movements; however, over time and in concordance with their success, they became organizations institutionalized as core elements of society. The Me Too movement was also subject to criticisms that it excluded marginalized groups of survivors, such as women of color (Onwuachi-Willig, 2018) and sexual minorities (Kessler et al., 2023). At a more general level, the present findings suggest that although grassroots movements are ways to effect social change, they may also become or create institutions that subsequently inspire future grassroots movements to challenge the challengers.