"Even after they had stopped modeling for Playboy and had settled down with other men to raise families of their own, Hugh Hefner still considered them his women, and in the bound volumes of his magazine he would always possess them"
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Talese lands the knife with a sentence that feels almost procedural, then reveals itself as a moral indictment. The chilling move is the contrast between ordinary life markers - “settled down,” “other men,” “raise families” - and Hefner’s stubborn grammar of ownership: “his women.” It’s not a metaphor, Talese implies, but a business model that doubles as an erotic theology. Time passes, bodies age, people leave, yet possession persists because the archive persists.
The key phrase is “bound volumes.” On its face, it’s bibliographic, even quaint: magazines turned into respectable-looking books. Subtextually, “bound” does double duty. The women are bound into a product, bound to a brand, bound into an identity that can be retrieved at will. Talese’s point isn’t simply that porn objectifies; it’s that media industrializes memory. Hefner’s power isn’t only sexual access in the moment, but the ability to freeze a version of someone and keep it available for replay, long after consent has become complicated by distance, marriage, children, and changed selves.
Context matters: Talese, a master of New Journalism, writes about power by lingering on the mundane mechanics of it. Here the mechanism is print culture itself, the pre-digital hard copy that outlives relationships and rewrites them. Hefner “would always possess them” because the magazine turns intimacy into inventory, and the collector’s shelf becomes a private empire where the past can’t talk back.
The key phrase is “bound volumes.” On its face, it’s bibliographic, even quaint: magazines turned into respectable-looking books. Subtextually, “bound” does double duty. The women are bound into a product, bound to a brand, bound into an identity that can be retrieved at will. Talese’s point isn’t simply that porn objectifies; it’s that media industrializes memory. Hefner’s power isn’t only sexual access in the moment, but the ability to freeze a version of someone and keep it available for replay, long after consent has become complicated by distance, marriage, children, and changed selves.
Context matters: Talese, a master of New Journalism, writes about power by lingering on the mundane mechanics of it. Here the mechanism is print culture itself, the pre-digital hard copy that outlives relationships and rewrites them. Hefner “would always possess them” because the magazine turns intimacy into inventory, and the collector’s shelf becomes a private empire where the past can’t talk back.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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