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by smacktoward 3906 days ago
But the "Playboy philosophy" (which was a thing Hefner, at least, took very seriously -- see http://www.brooklynrail.org/2005/07/express/the-playboy-phil...) was always explicitly about liberating men: liberating them from the constraints of things like marriage and monogamy and propriety. It was interested in liberating women only insofar as it's difficult for men to live a swinging lifestyle in a culture where all the women are either monogamously married or saving themselves for such a marriage. Swinging men can't swing unless there are swinging women around as well. But women's lib, for Playboy, was always about them being freer to offer themselves sexually to men.

Women eventually reappropriated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation) its pages to enable a kind of female liberation that was about what women wanted rather than men, but that was something organic, not something the magazine itself created.