Making Sense of How Playboy Played a Role in My Sexual Abuse

For as long as I can recall I have hated Playboy. I didn’t know why, but something about the magazine, the brand, Hugh Hefner and just the whole enterprise would make me feel angry and physically ill. In retrospect, what it triggered within me were emotional and somatic flashbacks of trauma I had yet to uncover. But I didn’t have context for that yet. All I knew was that deep within every corner of my body and heart there was so much discomfort swirling that it felt like my insides were being torn apart. It wasn’t until my repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse began to resurface in my late 30s that these feelings began to make sense to me.

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As a child, I experienced sexual abuse by two different perpetrators. Playboy was literally the centerfold of each of these transgressions. My first abuser was an older childhood friend. She was a cool 14-year old-neighbor and I was an awkward, lonely 8-year-old seeking some kind of camaraderie. I aspired to be like this girl, so I’d do whatever she asked to gain her affection.

When I started having sleepovers at her house I noticed that every television in the house was always tuned in to the Playboy Channel. Whether or not her dad was home, the pornographic images were a constant bombardment upon my underdeveloped senses. And what began as innocent slumber parties soon evolved into something entirely different. This friend began fondling me while I slept, awakening me enough to notice…but leaving me frozen and stunned so that I pretended to stay asleep. Things progressed further to her emulating things she had presumably seen on TV and coercing me into simulating those things on her even though neither of us really knew what we were even doing. The last time I stayed the night there she tried to get me to perform oral sex on her and after that I decided I didn’t want to be friends anymore. The last memory I have of her is standing at her kitchen counter eating a bowl of Campbell’s clam chowder while watching naked bodies contorting on the television, desperately awaiting whoever it was to come to pick me up and take me home. To this day the smell of clam chowder turns my stomach.

My primary abuser, my step-grandfather, incorporated Playboy in a more sinister way. One of the first repressed memories I began having was of the cover of a Playboy magazine with Madonna on it. Like many kids in the 80’s, I was obsessed with Madonna. I watched her videos and sang along to her songs endlessly. Yet, there was something about the image of that magazine that made me despise Madonna…but why? As I progressed in therapy I decided to Google “Playboy Madonna Cover.” What I discovered was that the September 1984 issue was exactly the cover I remembered and I instantly recalled the rest of why I felt sick.

My step-grandfather, knowing I loved Madonna, groomed me by buying me this issue of Playboy as a “gift.” He wouldn’t give me my “gift” until I followed him into the bathroom. I naively obliged out of excited, giddy, childlike anticipation of seeing my favorite celebrity in a magazine. He sat down on the toilet and encouraged me to look through the magazine. As I flipped through the pages my childlike wonder was slowly replaced with impending dread. My little brain was being assaulted by the images of naked women just as I could feel something poking me in the back. When we finally got to the Madonna photos, the image of her lying naked in spread eagle took my breath away, and not in a good way. My idol had instantly betrayed me, morphing into something I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain but had the sensibility to be repulsed by. I began to dissociate and freeze, fixating on every detail of the bathroom from the blue towel with colorful fish on it to all the perfumes and lotions on the countertop. By the time the abuse was over, he pushed me away, snatched the magazine from me, and called me an “ungrateful little b****.” He left me in the bathroom alone, confused, hands covered in sticky filth and spirit cloaked in a thick blanket of shame.

So to say that Playboy had become a weapon of mass destruction in my life at the tender age of 8 would be an understatement. Why, then, would I subject myself to watching a show about it? Honestly, when I first saw the trailer for “Secrets Of Playboy” on A&E I swore I wouldn’t watch it. But as I began to hear more about it I realized that it was going to be an expose into the more dark side of the franchise, focusing upon allegations of abuse, misconduct, and generally characterizing Hugh Hefner and the entire organization as corrupt. In a way, I think I wanted proof that my experience of Playboy was valid, that it was every bit as destructive as I had experienced it to be and that there was some kind of explanation for why it had been weaponized against me.

According to the docuseries, Hefner billed himself as a feminist and advocate for the sexual liberation of women. He was well known for his stance against segregation and all of his clubs were in fact integrated into an era where segregation was still very much the norm. The magazine was heralded for its intellectual editorials, and I know many individuals who would proclaim that the main reason they subscribed to it was for the “articles.” Many of the women who worked at the clubs, and in particular women of color, spoke about the fact that the options for meaningful employment in those days for women were extremely limited and not particularly lucrative. Working as a bunny paid well and came with a certain sense of panache.

But in its underbelly, Playboy was about elitism. The only thing that mattered was money and prestige and the women whom Hefner purported to liberate became the waste products of a toxic lifestyle of excess and depravity. The show alleges that bunnies were exploited for sex, drugged, harassed, their weight scrupulously monitored, silenced when they tried to report misconduct, and even killed. The ambiance of the Playboy mansion and clubs is referred to by several of the women interviewed as “cult-like” and many purport having been forced to have sex with Hefner and his cronies (including animals) against their wills. He’s described as having been a “vampire,” “insatiable” and having created a “fantasy that didn’t allow for those girls to consent.” As one of the playmates put it “Playboy magazine should have a warning label on it like cigarette advertising… this philosophy can be hazardous to your health.”

The thing that stood out for me more than anything about the show is how Hefner always referred to the women as “girls” and “kids.” By infantalizing these women he was characterizing them as helpless, vulnerable, impressionable, and controllable. This makes dehumanizing them and objectifying them unobjectionable.

There has in fact been extensive analysis of how the infantalization of women paired with the simultaneous sexualization of girlhood desensitizes consumers to the victimization of women and girls. As Tavisha Sood notes in her article titled The Infantilization of Women in Mainstream Media and Society:

“Studies have shown how media exposure that consists of sexually objectified women lead to the participants being more accepting of rape myths, sexual harassment, and interpersonal violence.”

In essence, the mere presence of Playboy and its relative acceptance as “normal” or “mainstream” within our collective culture creates fertile ground for the perpetuation of and proliferation of the devaluation of women and girls, placing them directly in the path of institutionally sanctioned violence and abuse.

While there may not be a causal connection between Playboy and my sexual abuse, there is I believe contextual validity to the ways in which the franchise reinforced the acceptability of the sexualization of my body as a child by my abusers. Viewing my abuse through this lens helps me make some kind of sense of it, even if that doesn’t really change how damaging it was. It also provides me with a sturdier, more nuanced platform from which to advocate for other survivors of sexual violence. Abuse doesn’t exist in a vacuum and neither do I. We are both ultimately products of the environment within which we develop… an environment where Playboy, clam chowder, and Madonna collided to create a veritable hell on earth.