How Hugh Hefner Commercialized Sex
In 1953, Hugh Hefner was living out a stereotypical version of the American Dream. At the age of 27, he had a job (as a cartoonist and copywriter), a wife, and a baby daughter. As Elizabeth Fraterrigo notes in her 2009 book Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America, Hefner’s home life was so picture-perfect that it was photographed for a two-page story in the Chicago Daily News. In one image, Hefner sits on the floor of a tidy, modern living room holding baby Christie, while his wife, Millie, watches from the couch, holding a magazine.
By the end of that year, the scene of domestic contentment had been upended. In fact, it was a lie to begin with—Hefner hated his hardscrabble life as a hired creative, his wife had confessed before their wedding that she’d cheated on him, and Hefner, who had married at the, featuring unlicensed nude photos of Marilyn Monroe. The magazine sold out its 50,000-plus copies, and Hefner’s vision of a new kind of American dream entered the culture: one where nude women—wholesome, unthreatening, uncomplicated—were part and parcel with the trappings of a modern masculine lifestyle.
