Conformity and Challenges in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Years 383Hefner and Gaines
Virtually everyone in the U.S. knows who Hugh Hefner is. In 1953, he brought
smut to mainstream America and our culture has never been the same. While
“porn” had always existed, he gave it a touch of class. He did more than sim-
ply produce a magazine featuring beautiful women like Marilyn Monroe and
Jayne Mansfield and others naked, he also created an entire lifestyle–the play-
boy. Far fewer know who William Gaines was, and the contrast between him
and Hefner was sharp. Where Hefner was handsome, impeccably dressed, and
smooth–a playboy man if ever there was one–Gaines was heavy-set, had thick
glasses, long hair, and a big beard like Santa Claus. But he and Hefner had
something important in common–they both revolutionized American culture
with their publications, Playboy and Mad Magazine. While it would be easy to
think of these magazines as high-class porn and a comic book, they in fact
were repudiations of the conformity of American life and political critiques of
government behavior at home and abroad.
Hefner’s playboy man was someone who had more interests than simply
looking at naked women in magazines. He probably listened to jazz [Hefner
himself was a huge advocate of jazz and the arts]; he enjoyed the outdoors;
he dressed well; importantly, he was well-versed in current affairs and wanted
deep coverage of important issues like civil rights or, later, Vietnam. Hefner,
in fact, always featured an interview with an important newsmaker [Martin
Luther King, Malcolm X, and Fidel Castro were just a few of those whose
interviews were in Playboy] and was among the first publishers to write about
the violence of southern segregation and the war in Vietnam. To be a playboy,
then, meant one was also engaged in the world and was political. Playboy,
obviously, had important sexual meaning as well–it, along with the develop-
ment of an oral contraceptive pill in 1960 helped bring in the “sexual revolu-
tion.” Hefner’s magazine, like Kinsey’s report, made it clear that Americans
enjoyed sexuality, and that it was healthy to do so. Unlike old porn magazines
that arrived in a brown wrapper, Playboy did not have to be hidden, and could
be discussed in polite society. Sex, as a subject of discussion for both men and
women, was now a little less taboo, and the enjoyment of sex was desirable,
not subversive. While Hefner, like Kinsey, was attacked as a deviant or maybe
even a Communist, the truth was that he simply believed in individual free-
dom, and making lots of dollars by selling pictures of beautiful naked women.