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SEX MUST BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY

Hugh Hefner found fame and success through founding porn magazine Playboy. Marilyn Monroe was a film star and model who became an icon of glamour and celebrity in the 1950s. They are both often seen as symbols of the sexual revolution.

What was the sexual revolution? It was a period that began in the 1960s when previous restrictive ideas around sex were relaxed or abandoned. These ideas included sex before and outside marriage being frowned upon, pornography being illegal or at least very hard to access, and so on. People became freer to do what they wanted when it came to sex. This process is often referred to as 'sexual liberation'.

Hefner and Monroe never met. They were, however, born in the same year and buried in the same place, side-by-side.1 In 1992, Hefner bought the crypt next-door to Monroe's in the Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles for $75,000.2 He told the Los Angeles Times 'I'm a believer in things symbolic . [so] spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up.'3

At the age of ninety-one, Hefner got his wish. The long-dead Monroe had no say in the matter. But then, she had never been given much say in what men did to her over the course of her short life.

Marilyn Monroe was both the first-ever cover star and the first-ever naked centrefold in the first-ever edition of Hefner's Playboy magazine, published in December 1953. 'Entertainment for MEN' was the promise offered on the front cover, and the magazine evidently kept that promise, since it sold a lot of copies.

The magazine cover beckoned readers with the promise of a 'FULL COLOR' nude photo of the actress for the 'first time in any magazine'. Hefner later said that this centrefold was the key reason for the publication's initial success. Monroe herself was humiliated by the photoshoot. The photos had been taken four years earlier. She had them taken only because she was desperate for money at the time. She signed the release documents with a fake name.4

Hefner didn't pay her to use her images and didn't seek her consent before publishing them.5 Monroe reportedly told a friend that she had 'never even received a thank-you from all those who made millions off a nude Marilyn photograph. I even had to buy a copy of the magazine to see myself in it.'6

The very different lives of Monroe and Hefner perfectly illustrate the nature of the sexual revolution's impact on men and women. Monroe and Hefner both began in obscurity and ended their lives rich and famous. They found success in the same city and at the very time in history. But while Hefner lived a long, grubby life in his mansion with his many girlfriends (or 'playmates'), Monroe died, miserable and alone, from a drug overdose, aged just thirty-six. Exploited by a series of seedy men like Hefner, her life was plagued by unhappy relationships and poor mental health.

Monroe's life followed a similar path to that of the pop star Britney Spears. In 1999, at the age of sixteen, she gyrated in a school uniform and begged viewers to 'hit me baby, one more time'. Spears has since suffered a very public nervous breakdown. She is like many others who have been destroyed in much the same way as the original icon of sexual freedom, Marilyn Monroe.

The public asks a lot of the women it desires; women like Marilyn Monroe and Britney Spears. And, when it all goes horribly wrong, as it usually does, this public labels these once-desired women 'crazy' and moves on. Difficult questions about whether 'sexual liberation' is to blame for destroying women like this are never asked.

Hugh Hefner experienced sexual liberation very differently from Monroe. As a younger man, he was the true playboy - handsome, charming, and envied by other men. He lived the fantasy of a particularly immature teenage boy. He hosted parties for his celebrity friends in a garish 'grotto' and then retired upstairs with his gang of identical twenty-something blondes. He supposedly once said that his best pick-up line was simply the sentence 'Hi, my name is Hugh Hefner.'7 He lived to a ripe old age.

Hefner certainly never experienced any guilt for the harm he perpetrated. Asked at the age of eighty-three if he regretted any of the 'dark consequences' of the Playboy revolution he set in motion, Hefner was confident in his innocence: 'it's a small price to pay for personal freedom'.8 By which he meant, of course, personal freedom for men like him.

After his death in 2017, many newspapers and websites argued that he had helped feminism because he supported things like legalising abortion and making the contraceptive pill widely available. These developments were crucial in ensuring that women could have sex without risking pregnancy. Without them, the sexual revolution could not have happened.

But Hefner did not support these things because he wanted to help women. Hefner never once campaigned for anything that didn't bring him direct benefit. Getting rid of the risk of pregnancy merely took away one of the reasons why women might refuse to have sex with him.

Before the sexual revolution, women had limited options when it came to sex. One option was to not have sex. Another was to get married and have children. The final one was to have sex without being married, but risk terrible consequences: getting pregnant and becoming a social outcast. It is true that the sexual revolution means that women have more choices now.

But there was a lot more to it than that. The invention of the Pill did free many women from unwanted childbearing. But the likes of Hefner also wanted this technology, and needed it, so they could indulge their own sexual desires. They still do so, often in ways that harm women, while pretending that they are liberating them.

The Pill

The impact of the contraceptive pill [the Pill] was vast. There have been plenty of periods in human history in which the norms around sex have been loosened, but their impact was limited because reliable contraception did not exist. Sex outside marriage risked pregnancy. So, straight men in pursuit of extramarital sex mostly had to seek out sex either with prostitutes, or with the small number of eccentric women who were willing to risk being cast out permanently from respectable society.

But the sexual revolution of the 1960s was a much bigger deal. It permanently changed things, and now we're so used to it that we barely notice. It was able to happen because of the arrival, for the first time in the history of the world, of reliable contraception and, in particular, forms of contraception that women could take charge of themselves. These included the Pill, the diaphragm, and subsequent improvements on those technologies.

They meant that, at the end of the 1960s, an entirely new creature arrived in the world: the apparently fertile young woman, whose fertility had in fact been put on hold. She changed everything.

This process clearly had its benefits, but should we see it purely as a good thing? I don't think so. This is because the sexual revolution has not, in fact, freed all of us. It has freed some of us, and at a price. Which is exactly what we should expect from such a massive change. However, the most popular story told about this revolution - the one told by political liberals and progressives - does not recognise this complexity. It sees the sexual revolution as a story only of progress.

I know this because I used to believe it. As a younger woman, I held the same political opinions as most other educated urban millennials in the West. I was a liberal feminist who believed that sexual freedom was a straightforwardly good thing with no downsides. I eventually changed my mind, in part because of my own life experiences, including a period immediately after university spent working at a rape crisis centre (more on this in the next chapter).

When I say 'liberal feminist', I mean a particular kind of feminism that has become dominant in the last generation or so. This kind of feminism prioritises freedom above everything else. For instance, when the actress and prominent liberal feminist Emma Watson was criticised in 2017 for showing her breasts on the cover of Vanity Fair, she hit back with a well-worn liberal feminist phrase: 'feminism is about giving women choice . It's about freedom.'9

For Watson and her allies, that might mean the freedom to wear revealing clothes (and sell lots of magazines in the process), or the freedom to sell sex, or make or consume porn, or pursue whatever career you like, just like the boys.

Liberal feminism promises women freedom. But female biology imposes, in reality, limits on that freedom. Women get pregnant, and being pregnant and having children is not compatible with complete freedom. When this becomes clear, liberal feminism supports trying to break those limits by using money, technology, and the bodies of poorer people. For example, it says that women should employ a full-time nanny so that they can work very long hours rather than look after their child.

I don't reject the desire for freedom. I'm not an antiliberal. Goodness knows that women have every reason to be unhappy about many of the limits placed...