Hefner’s philosophy admittedly differed from the mainstream heterosexuality of the 1950s — but only in the sense that it was built to better privilege straight men. As Barbara Ehrenreich detailed in her book The Hearts of Men, before Playboy, bachelors were seen as losers who couldn’t get wives of their own. (They were also suspected of being gay, as the implications around the phrase “confirmed bachelor” still attest.) Hefner changed the public perception of single men, turning them into swinging (hetero) sex gods having adventures that poor henpecked married men could only dream of. This idea is still with us today — if you’ve ever seen an episode of Entourage or read a pick-up artist’s blog, you’ve reaped the benefits of Hefner’s work. But the change was never meant to make sex more fulfilling for women, or even queer men. Far from it.
[…] In the pre-Playboy variety of sexism, women were children who had to be taken care of and disciplined by their husbands. In the new, “radical” Playboy philosophy, women were sour, scolding mommies to be rebelled against or hot commodities to be acquired. This split between conservative misogyny and hip, “liberal” misogyny is still with us, and still expressed in much the same terms. But Hefner never challenged the sexism at the heart of the social order — he just wanted to remove any responsibility men might bear to the women they slept with, and make sure men’s experience of sex was consequence-free. His revolution re-arranged the surface, but left the underlying structure of patriarchy intact.