Not My Bunny Ears

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Hugh Hefner was one (of many) clear embodiment of how much a guy could degrade women  around him be and still get celebrated as a progressive idol. This piece will not highlight Hefner’s work as a writer or his other positive contributions to society because, as truth holds, it is indeed possible for people to do good and bad things in their lifetime. But focusing a lens on his many problematic sexual formations, and the start of legitimizing the business of buying and selling women’s bodies, this is someone who, despite how vulgar he is in the way he has portrayed the body of woman since 1953, is remembered as a good man. Why?

Clearly, this was someone who showcased the beauty of women. This is his legacy, right? Women’s beauty, although fluid in the unlimited sense of spectrum’s humanity, was very particularly standardized under the Heffner brand. It’s not like he was showing examples of beauty in the form of colored women, disabled women, non-gender binary women, old women, or chunky women. Give me a break. They were young super models that fit the conditions of what the hetero binary-sense-of-the-word male should ejaculate to. He has “revolutionized” women’s sexuality in the worst ways possible. Because in controlling that sexuality, you control human reality.

Endless articles and stories portray women’s lives in that mansion and the rules they had to follow in order to keep him happy, in order to keep making money, to survive. From the group sex rituals, all the way down to the extra kilo you had to make sure not to gain to keep the eye satisfied. What is it about men and wanting sexuality to be so rigid? So boring? So… the same? So controlling? Sounds horrifying to me, and not what I think of when I relate an ideology to liberating the woman’s body. Hefner did not create the male gaze, but by interjecting the repeated culture of the female sex body, he has found a way to consistently show men that this is the way women should look, and forever engrave women’s predominant concern of self worth to something as superficial as your body in order to survive. Your sole existence is for man, to be looked at. Nothing else.

Banging 20-year-old women when you’re 90 is disgusting. There is nothing inspiring about the way Heffner portrayed women’s bodies asides from sex machines that looked the one way he decided would be acceptable. Let’s stop portraying these types of men as icons and start pointing at what they are actually doing: sexist instigators who have built a fortune off their beliefs that women are only good as sex objects for the hetero male that is specifically pleasing in ways acceptable to Heffner’s brand identity of “women.”

Why does this matter? Who cares?

This matters because it then ruins the hard work and accomplishments women strive to reach in order to create a better future for themselves and their daughters as whole human beings whose sole existence, if you can believe this, is not for the pleasure of dudes.