So says Mike Edison on the Huffington Post.
From the article...
Hefner supposedly pinched freely from Esquire and the lesser-known Man's World -- both former employers -- to come up with his own version of the modern men's mag.
Snootily aiming above the heads of the jocks who had beaten him to all the trim in high school, the first issue planted its stake as the handbook for indoor living -- no tromping through the woods and drinking beer in cans for the Playboy! -- and therein lied its genius, promoting cosmopolitan sophistication for the much-neglected urban male, and fabulizing a lifestyle that included actually talking to women about art and philosophy before luring them into your well-appointed boudoir.
Hefner not only legitimized the nudie magazine, he made it cool to be smart. Unfortunately, it was all a put-on -- Hefner's track record of dating the most negative-stereotype-reinforcing bimbos, almost all of them on the Playboy payroll, is the dead giveaway that he really has no respect for the elevation of the fairer sex. At the end of the day, despite a run of incredible writers and a puffed-up intellectual agenda that was often at the vanguard of left-wing progressivism (and the genius of art director Art Paul, who elevated magazine design to something resembling fine art), Playboy was all about boys and their toys.
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