The difference between Marilyn Monroe and the early Pamela Anderson is not that great. What's amazing is that the taste of American men and international tastes in terms of beauty have essentially stayed the same. Styles change, but our view of beauty stays the same.
I was raised in a truly typical Midwestern home with a lot of repression. My life, and the creation of Playboy, were a response to that repression.
Publishing a sophisticated men's magazine seemed to me the best possible way of fulfilling a dream I'd been nurturing ever since I was a teenager: to get laid a lot.
It's hard to really compare new love and old love.
My life has been devoted to trying to bring a little more understanding to human sexuality - not just in society, but also inside myself. The struggle has been internal as well as external. One of the reasons that I have such tremendous satisfaction at this point in my life is because I know I've made a difference. I've made a difference in a way that really matters to me. I see a lot of terrible things going on in the world, but there are some good things going on too, and I feel I've been a part of that. I really do feel I have been on the side of the angels.
After all the Puritans came to America to escape from persecution and then turned around and started persecuting other people. So I understand that conflict that we have related to play and pleasure and sexuality. And I think what has made my life worthwhile is trying to deal with some of those questions.
I always think, quite frankly that pop culture is a lot more important than a lot of people realize.
There were chunks of my life when I was married, and when I was married I never cheated. But I made up for it when I wasn't married. You have to keep your hand in.
I think that I am the luckiest cat on the planet and I'm living out my own dreams and fantasies and have been for a number of years and to remain at this stage of my life, you know, so alive and things have never been better.
I remain very much connected to my childhood... I have never been too jaded or too sophisticated.
I think our society is fragmented. Messages regarding human sexuality have always been mixed in America. We are a schizophrenic nation. We were founded initially by Puritans, who escaped repression only to establish their own. Then the founding fathers gave us the Constitution to separate church and state. But the one thing that got left out of all those laws was human sexuality.
Playboy isn't like the downscale, male bonding, beer-swilling phenomena that is being promoted now by (some men's magazines). My whole notion was the romantic connection between male and female.
Because of the nature of my life, it's difficult for people to recognize that a person can live a full life, and maybe an unorthodox life, and still be on the side of the angels.
Historically the Puritans left England to escape religious persecution, and they promptly turned around and started persecuting the people they didn't agree with - the scarlet letter A, and the stocks and the dunking board came from that. That puritanism is still there.
Playboy, very clearly, from the outset, has fought against the historical repression of women. The notion that we were anywhere else simply defies the reality.
As Ray Bradbury - a longtime contributor to Playboy - said a long time ago, a lot of people, when they're talking about the contents of the magazine, they don't see the forest. People don't see the other part of my life because they're too fascinated with the girls.
Since time immemorial, youth has set the universal standard of physical beauty, and the reason is simply that a shapely firm young face and body are more attractive sexually and aesthetically than bulges, sags and wrinkles.
Everybody marches to a different drummer.
There are many roads to Mecca.
Someone once asked, 'What's your best pickup line?' I said, 'My best pickup line is, 'Hi, my name is Hugh Hefner.''
In the '80s and '90s we started to have economic problems because society became more conservative. So we didn't have the wherewithal for expanding to other areas.
What would make it very difficult to take society back to a repressive time would be technology. The arrival of the Internet.
The notion of the single man began in the 1950's. The idea of the bachelor as a separate life was new and obscure.
After world war all we got was a lot of conformity, and conservatism and when I was in college at the university of Illinois the skirt lengths dropped instead of going up as they had during the roaring twenties and I knew that was a very bad sign, and it is symbolic and reflective of a very repressive time, and some of that was laid the feet of the cold war.
Americans are fascinated by our sexuality and frightened by it. And during the Reagan and Bush era you got an entire decade of anti-sex government. Sex is not the enemy. It is the beginning of civilization, family and tribe. Sex can be twisted and exploited, but in its most essential form, it's the best part of who we are. And it frightens us.
