Hefner’s Playboy did enormous disservice to women's liberation

Hugh Hefner, that dirty old man who made a fortune off displaying women’s naked bodies, is dead — and I, for one, am not mourning.

Many people credit the founder of Playboy magazine with ushering in the “sexual revolution” at a time when the word “sex” was used in hushed tones.

But what these people fail to realise is that the sexual revolution benefited mainly men.

Men no longer had to pay a prostitute or marry a woman to have sex while the so-called sexual revolution allowed men (and women) to have sex with as many partners as they wished without bearing any consequences.

PROMISCUITY

It was a licence for promiscuity and delivered many sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not against men and women exploring their own sexuality to the full; nor am I saying that sex is sinful.

On the contrary, I am saying that, by normalising the objectification of women’s bodies, Hefner and his Playboy brand — which includes clubs with “Playboy bunnies” as waitresses and a Playboy mansion, where the ageing Hefner spent most of his time frolicking with naked women half his age — did an enormous disservice to women’s liberation.

For centuries, women have been fighting to be recognised as human beings, not body parts; Hefner made sure this would not happen.

SEXUAL FANTASIES

He made a fortune out of selling sexual fantasies to adolescent boys and men by publishing airbrushed pictures of naked women in his magazine.

The women’s movement of the 1970s was a reaction to this perverted notion that women’s breasts and buttocks are for public consumption, and that pornography is a healthy way to release sexual tension.

American feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem fought hard against the commodification and objectification of women’s bodies.

They argued that, while it is important for women to be aware of their sexuality, portraying them in purely sexual terms is dehumanising.

COMMODIFICATION

They emphasised that, while puritanical notions of sex and sexuality that deprived women access to reproductive healthcare — including contraception and abortion — should be shunned, the commodification of women’s bodies must stop.

The women’s lib never quite achieved its objectives.

Now more than ever, women’s bodies are displayed everywhere — on billboards, in music videos and even on social media, where it has become abnormally common for young women to put up naked images of themselves.

Kim Kardashian, the queen of this genre of pornography, is an extremely wealthy woman because she sold this misogynistic dream to countless teenage girls whose sole ambition is to be like her.

LIBERATED WOMEN

Yet, Kardashian and her ilk are often described as “liberated women” who are free to do as they please with their bodies.

This is a very warped view of liberation.

The Egyptian writer Nawal el Saadawi believes that the commodification of women’s bodies is a product of capitalism, where everybody has a price tag and the market decides who is beautiful and who is not.

However, she acknowledges that in pre-capitalist societies, women were similarly mistreated.

CUSTOMS

Various religious customs and patriarchal traditions have sought to reduce women to their body parts — through practices such as female circumcision, seclusion and veiling.

She argues that while religion is often blamed for the oppression of women, what most people don’t understand is that women’s oppression is rooted in a class and patriarchal system, where human beings, and especially women, are enslaved to serve the economic interests of dominant males.

In her book, The Hidden Face of Eve, Saadawi says that the woman who feels she must show off her body is as oppressed as the one who feels she must cover it. (This is why the “burkini-versus-the bikini” discussion is so facile; whether you wear a bikini or a burkini, you are still a prisoner of the male gaze.)

Saadawi, who is also a medical doctor, writes: “Beauty comes, above all, from the mind, from the health of the body and the completeness of the self.

“It does not draw its existence from the size of the buttocks, or the deposits of fat beneath curves, or the layers of cosmetics that cover an underlying anxiety and lack of confidence.”

On that note, I would like to congratulate the women of Saudi Arabia for finally winning the right to drive. May they enjoy the ride.

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