Hugh Hefner, who died on Friday at 91, claimed to be a liberator of American sexuality. You've probably heard about Hefner's limited approaches to women: They could be frisky girls next door who, until competitive pressure from Penthouse in the 70s, were never shown in centrefolds to have pubic hair. Bunnies were told, as an undercover Gloria Steinem was, "We don't like our girls to have any background. We just want you to fit the bunny image."

Or they could be uptight prudes, feminists whom Hefner once described as "our natural enemy." Ladies, take your pick!

Hugh Hefner, who died on Friday at 91, claimed to be a liberator of American sexuality. The reality was less fun. Credit:MARK J. TERRILL

But for all the assumptions that Hef's life was every man's fantasy, he also shortchanged men. He told them the best way to be a man was to treat women implicitly as the enemy, as products to consume. It is a grim, banal, consumerist way of life that, in practice, would deny men the pleasures of being partners to women, sexually or otherwise.

Hefner launched Playboy magazine in 1954 amid a flurry of articles worrying that masculinity was in "crisis," under threat from overbearing women. Playboy, with its celebration of leisure, played into some of those critics' fears of weak postwar men, but everyone could agree women were to blame.