Hugh Hefner and his fiance, British-American model and singer Crystal Harris. Photo: Reuters
Many an article in Hugh Hefner's Playboy has painted a misogynous view of marriage.
HUGH Hefner is getting married again on Saturday. Granted, it is to a woman 60 years his junior, but who would have believed that the once marriage-phobic ''Hef'' would take another walk down the aisle?
In his younger days, Hefner was the owner of a magazine that zealously warned men away from marriage, telling them over and over that women were out to ruin them financially. Indeed, while Hefner made millions selling pictures of women's bodies, he also sold the idea that women might threaten his readers' free-spending bachelor lifestyle that lured advertisers and formed the bedrock for Playboy's business model.
The first issue of Playboy ran the feature ''Miss Gold-Digger of 1953''. Bemoaning the good old days when alimony was reserved for ''little floozies'', the Playboy editors wrote: ''When a modern-day marriage ends, it doesn't matter who's to blame - it's always the guy who pays and pays and pays.'' Burt Zollo, writing in the June 1954 issue, warned Playboy readers to be wary of June (did you hear that Hef? June!), the marriage month, since ''women become more heated, more desperate, more dangerous''. Zollo advised readers to take a good look at the ''sorry, regimented husbands trudging down every woman-dominated street in this woman-dominated land''.
Many articles followed, all saying the same thing: women are economic predators, and men need to protect themselves from what Playboy called ''the womanisation of America''. If Hefner still holds this view, I hope the future Mrs Hef has a good prenup.
During his heyday, Hefner was depicted as the quintessential American rags-to-riches success story. Praised by Newsweek in January 1964 as a hardworking businessman who ''works as much as 72 hours a week'' and described as ''modern, trustworthy, clean, respectable'' by Time magazine in March 1963, Hefner has been consistently cleansed by the media of the sleaze factor often associated with pornographers.
In her book Bunny Tales, Izabella St James, an ex-''girlfriend'' of Hefner, writes about what really went on at the mansion; how Hefner would have unprotected sex with a number of women, one after the other, and irrespective of how many women he had penetrated, could only reach orgasm by masturbating to pornography. Needless to say, this is not the image that Playboy likes to project.
Hefner was the man who turned porn into an industry. He took it from the back street to Wall Street and, thanks in large part to him, it is now worth billions of dollars a year. While we have always had pornographic images, it was the launch of Playboy magazine that marked the entry of porn into mainstream US capitalism.
Advertisers, once they realised Playboy was popular with the upwardly mobile, middle-class male, flocked to buy space and - for the first time - porn became integrated with consumer culture. It promised men that if they consumed the right products, the ones being advertised in Playboy, they would get the real prize: the ''girl next door'', who looked just like the centrefold.
Playboy Enterprises has just opened a new club in London in an attempt to stay relevant in a world where mainstream porn has moved from sexist pinups to hardcore misogynist images of women being brutalised. The body-punishing porn that now dominates the internet may look very different from an issue of Playboy, but at its core all porn is a market transaction in which women's bodies and sexuality are offered to male consumers in the interest of maximising profit.
Hefner is the granddaddy of today's porn industry, and how fitting that at the weekend he will marry a woman young enough to be his granddaughter.
GUARDIAN
Gail Dines is a sociology and women's studies professor at Wheelock College, Boston.
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