Bunnies on the Fence

Newsfeeds the world over were either celebrating or criticizing the life of universal playboy Hugh Hefner over the last week. An overwhelming number of posts from celebrities, models and fans praised him while a fair few wanted to make sure that people knew they were celebrating the legacy of a man who made millions by exploiting women. He was called a genius, a pimp, a pop culture trailblazer and a sexual predator. Initially I found myself in the precarious position of sitting on the fence about who this man was, what he did and whether we should celebrate him.

So I researched. Hugh Hefner did a lot to help elevate and push the boundaries in journalism and pop culture. He started Playboy in December 1953 with the cover featuring Marilyn Monroe from her 1949 nude calendar shoot. The first issue sold over 50,000 copies. Since then Hugh Hefner has been an early supporter of the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King. He shut down playboy clubs in the South that refused entrance to African Americans, he was opposed to the Vietnam War and sent his private plane to Vietnam to rescue orphaned babies. Hugh Hefner was very vocal about many social issues and American ideologies before other public personas felt comfortable to talk about them.

Playboy magazine featured some of the world's most amazing writers including Roald Dahl, Jack Kerouac, Margaret Atwood (Yup, the noted feminist icon), Ursula Le Guin, Ian Fleming, Ray Bradbury, Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Many called him a feminist for liberating women in the 70s from having to look, dress and act in a certain upstanding way. He provided job opportunities for women who didn't want to be schoolteachers or join the work force as secretaries and assistants. Hugh was instrumental from a fashion perspective creating the enduring silhouette of the hourglass-shaped Playboy Bunny while also promoting the idea of women (and men) transforming themselves to a hyper caricaturized version of themselves. If it weren't for him, the likes of Kim Kardashian wouldn't be where she is today - and that isn't the worst offence I hold against him.

There are also many other stories, disgusting stories. From Gloria Steinem's essay A Bunny's Tale, where she went to work undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 to Holly Madison's 2015 book Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny as well as a range of essays and articles in between that expose the sinister underbelly of the world Hugh Hefner created and of the man himself.

I have a preoccupation with how we engage with the legacies of people who have "changed the world" and whether we should separate the men from the art they created. Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Roman Polanski and more recently Harvey Weinstein are all men who are problematic within this context. It's unfair to include Hugh Hefner with those group of men, I don't. But I would say it's hard to look at the legacy of a man like Hugh Hefner through a 2017 lens.