The Funhouse Feminism of Crystal Hefner
Hugh Hefner died eight days before #MeToo. The 2017 The New York Times article that sparked the wide-ranging social justice movement ran on October 5, roughly a week after the founder of Playboy magazine passed away at home on September 27. In the eight years since, how we talk about gender, sexuality, and power has changed radically. The meaning of Hefner as a cultural symbol is different now than in 2000 or 1980 or 1960 — so different that it can be hard to even make sense of those old meanings now.
In its best moments, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself, the memoir recently released by Hefner's widow Crystal Hefner, aspires to explain how a 21-year-old wound up living with — and eventually married to — a man 60 years older than her. The book is fluent in the contemporary language of trauma, sexual politics, and mainstream feminism. Crystal Hefner quickly characterizes her relationship with Hugh Hefner as abusive. But framing the past through the lens of contemporary values is easy criticism. What is much harder — and what Crystal Hefner more obviously struggles to achieve — is taking ownership of old perspectives and credibly depicting them. The book is rich with what Crystal Hefner thinks now but offers very little of what she thought then, or what drew her to Hugh Hefner and Playboy in the first place. For modern readers, particularly younger ones, it's far easier to accept that Crystal Hefner felt exploited by life at the Playboy Mansion than to accept the very real appeal Playboy has held for many women for many decades. By dismissing that appeal with a "gaslighting" handwave, the book erases Crystal Hefner's agency and misses the chance to make sense of the wider forces that trap women in unhealthy and objectifying relationships.
Crystal Hefner delivers a succinct thesis statement in her introduction: "I drove through all the loss and grief and confusion and mistakes I had made, and wondered who I would be if I hadn't been bused to the Playboy mansion for a Halloween party one long-ago night. I was responsible for my choices, but the cost felt so much higher than I could have ever imagined at the age of twenty-one." In one deft move, Crystal Hefner takes a perfunctory version of responsibility while using the passive voice to gloss over the way she ended up at the Playboy Mansion. Though the book repeatedly depicts Crystal Hefner as a victim of her own naivety, it stops short of identifying any of the actual mistakes she claims to believe she made. There is a complicated kind of agency in how Crystal Hefner admired the Playboy girls, submitted a headshot with her application for a Halloween party invitation, or drove three hours to the bus pick-up site. But why did she do those things? The book never interrogates this.
Often, the best story is the one that appears between the lines, like unintended dramatic irony, as if Crystal Hefner is not yet fully aware of her own motivations. Inadvertently, the story explores how mothers pass values about sex, appearance, and self-worth on to their daughters, the way preoccupation with male validation is so culturally normalized, and the consequences of economic instability on women's choices.
In fact, Crystal Hefner steers the story rigidly away from discussions of money, a choice that is hardly surprising given the social stigma attached to sex work. Crystal Hefner has long been painted as a gold digger by mainstream media, but even some superficial digging reveals that financial opportunity has always been a key part of Playboy's appeal to women. Former girlfriend Holly Madison was on the verge of homelessness when she moved into the mansion. The original classified ads recruiting beautiful women to work as Bunnies in the Playboy Clubs opened with the financial proposition: "Yes, it's true! Attractive young girls can now earn $200-$300 a week at the fabulous New York Playboy Club…" In the 2022 docuseries Secrets of Playboy, former Bunny after former Bunny, often women who were financially dependent or living below the poverty line, points to that pay rate. Playboy has historically framed itself as an institution that empowers women to reclaim their sexuality, but many of the women were facing economic realities that undercut that choice.
Of course, there's nothing revelatory about the claim that the Playboy brand is exploitative. In 1963, Gloria Steinem spent eleven days undercover as a Bunny at the New York Playboy Club, an experience she documented in a two-part exposé for Show Magazine. The Playboy name was unironically synonymous with glamour then, often presented as a bastion of women's empowerment and sexual freedom. If that history seems hard to believe now, Steinem's story is more than partially responsible. Show Magazine introduced the young Steinem as "a writer who combines the hidden qualities of a Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude graduate of Smith College with the more obvious ones of an ex-dancer and beauty queen." In other words, Steinem was smart but also hot enough to get the Bunny job. Steinem's article revealed the strict appearance standards imposed on the Bunnies, as well as the rampant objectification and exploitation of the women Playboy was calling "the most envied girls in America." And if Playboy's false promises have been so well-documented for so long, then the more pressing and unanswered question becomes why, in an era of other choices — Crystal Hefner arrived at the mansion in 2008 — did she make this one?
The last decade has offered redemptive narratives for many of the women most abused by mainstream nineties misogyny: Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, Marcia Clark in The People v. O.J. Simpson, and Monica Lewinsky in The Clinton Affair. Women who suffered, at least in part, for their unlikability. Even more recently, the redemptive stories have come for a different kind of woman, one who suffers from what might be darkly described as an excess of likability: Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears, and even Princess Diana. Ridicule and dismissal are traumatic, but so are sexualization, objectification, and commodification. There is no question that women famous for being beautiful were striking a Faustian bargain. But Goethe's Faust is a parable about Faust's complicated choices, after all, not a condemnation of the devil for making a bad bargain available.
In an interview for the Secrets of Playboy docuseries, Holly Madison, High Hefner's primary girlfriend from 2001 to 2008, characterizes her love for Hugh Hefner as "Stockholm Syndrome," the infamous pop-psych attachment that captives develop toward their captors. But, in a perhaps meta twist, even Stockholm Syndrome is up for reevaluation in the wake of #MeToo. Originally used to describe the behaviour of female hostages, Stockholm Syndrome has been criticized for treating the strategy of bonding with a captor as pathological — rather than acknowledging it as practical survival. Here, much like the 2022 word of the year "gaslight," language is used to terminate a deeper conversation right at the moment of complexity.
In the 2023 documentary Pamela, a Love Story, Pamela Anderson recalls Hugh Hefner warmly, describing him as a "civil rights activist" and the only man who ever treated her with complete and total respect. Anderson has been criticized for her ambivalent relationship to feminism in recent years.
"We exploited ourselves," she said in an interview about the documentary. "We had the choice to do it, and we weren't vulnerable in that way that he was exploiting us." This assessment does likely dismiss the social forces that shaped Anderson's choices, as contemporary feminist critics have contended, but it also grants Anderson the agency to evaluate her own life experience. And she is not alone in her defence of Hugh Hefner. Shortly following his death, a group of former Playboy employees signed an open letter defending Hugh Hefner as "a person of upstanding character."
Still, Anderson does not shy away from characterizing herself as exploited in other ways — particularly by the television show Baywatch, which she feels never fairly compensated her. "The producers of 'Baywatch' made a fortune," she told Variety. "I just didn't have the representation back then. Or the know-how."
Either way, Anderson's perception of her own participation in her objectification is far more complex than the story Crystal Hefner offers. The narrative of Pamela, a Love Story, effectively captures Anderson's perspective in the nineties and demonstrates the places where her opinions have changed and where they have remained consistent.
After Hugh Hefner's death, amidst the fond media tributes, GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis issued a statement describing Hugh Hefner as "a misogynist who built an empire on sexualizing women and mainstreaming stereotypes that caused irreparable damage to women's rights and our entire culture." Crystal Hefner, it seems, was stunned by the statement. "I read [it] over and over again," she writes. "[Ellis] had said the secret thing out loud, and I was shocked." Feminist critiques of Playboy have been loud since the sixties, so if we are to take Crystal Hefner at face value when she says she considered Hugh Hefner's reputation a secret, then we are left wondering how she came to believe that. The book is never able to offer a satisfying answer to the question it so desperately begs.
Indeed, feminist criticisms of Playboy or Hugh Hefner himself are no secret. When Crystal Hefner positions herself as a speaker of new and hard truths, a reader is left wondering whether she's clueless or calculating. Here, the feminist movement gets twisted into an individual redemption arc of personal empowerment. Because Crystal Hefner can only frame herself as passive — acted upon by Hugh Hefner but also by cultural forces and her own naivety — she cannot be curious about her own participation in misogyny. The result is a book draped in the set dressing of feminism with no feminist analysis: a victim narrative masquerading as empowerment. Is that a lot to ask of a celebrity memoir? Probably. However, a memoir that refuses to think for itself risks looking a lot like a story of opportunism with no personal growth. Instead, it is simply the story of a girl who followed the cultural tide to Hugh Hefner's mansion, then back out again, trailing after the zeitgeist — and once again arriving a little too late.
Rose McMackin is a writer and editor, and writes a weekly newsletter about country music.