The conventional markers of masculine success – a beautiful wife, a successful job, and an impressive home – left him, according to his biographer Russell Miller, “bored beyond belief”. Married to Mildred “Millie” Williams in 1949, he was already feeling the monotony of suburban life. Such a model was surely inspired by Hefner’s own restlessness. Rather than restricting masculinity to the suburban malaise of postwar America, Playboy offered a model of manhood that was intelligent, fun, and sexy and, crucially, set in opposition to marriage. Playboy dared to go beyond these expectations. To fall short of this was, as the scholar Barbara Ehrenreich notes, to be “less than grown up … the man who willingly deviated was judged to be somehow ‘less than a man’.” Women were in control of the domestic space. Wikimediaįor American men who had returned from war, being a “proper” man meant marriage, procreation, and breadwinning. The first cover of Playboy magazine in 1953. This relied on specific roles for men and women to uphold the strength of the family and, by extension, the security of the nation. The nuclear family – a mum, dad, and kids – was seen as an important barrier to communism in the years after World War II. In doing so, it challenged the idea of masculinity that had evolved around the nuclear family, and that held particular purchase in the early years of Cold War America. The first issue, which famously featured Marilyn Monroe in the centrefold, indicated the magazine’s explicit engagement with matters of sex, fun, and consumerism. He took out a mortgage and borrowed money from his mother to launch Playboy in 1953. After graduating from the University of Illinois, he began working as a copy-editor for men’s magazine Esquire, before a pay dispute motivated him to leave the magazine in 1952.įurther reading: Playboy magazine’s return to nudity is a naked bid to cover up its irrelevance Yet to do so would to overlook the significant cultural impact of both Hefner and Playboy, particularly during the 1950s under the shroud of Cold War anxieties.īorn Apin Chicago, Illinois, Hefner’s entry into the world of journalism came as a teenager writing for a military magazine during World War II. Now popularly associated with his bevy of young lovers and infamous parties at the Playboy mansion, it would be easy to dismiss Hefner as merely an enduring barrier to the fight for gender equality. As news broke today that Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy, had died aged 91, many were quick to point to the complicated legacy of both the magazine and the man behind it.
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