Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself

by Crystal Hefner

Everything had changed, but I shoved the pain down. Because I was a woman now, and that’s what women do. I didn’t know much, but I already knew that.

There would be no more adventuring. No more sunshine. No fairy-tale ending to my story.

I had once loved someone so brightly and so beautifully, and they had once loved me the same.

In college I’d learned about the “sunk cost fallacy,” which is when someone is so heavily invested in something, they don’t walk away, even if it would be better for them if they did.

Power is insidious when it masks itself as generosity. And generosity is insidious when it’s a camouflage for control. And both power and generosity are confusing when they gaslight you into believing they could be love.

Like so many girls raised in this culture, I was still looking for someone to save me, to make me feel valuable and worthy. I had left the mansion, but I hadn’t spent a minute alone. I hadn’t done any work on myself, and I made the same mistake again. I ran from one man to another, hoping it would fix all my problems.

true. I was so susceptible to being wanted, like I always had been. When someone wanted me, I suddenly felt valuable. It was an incredible feeling, like the rush of a drug—but it could drain away just as fast. It wasn’t healthy.

everyone participated in this as though it were entirely normal. As though there were nothing abhorrent about the commerce of women, about choosing them like appetizers off a menu. Just another day at the mansion for Hef. Marriage didn’t change anything in that regard, and I was fine with it.

He was a misogynist who built an empire on sexualizing women and mainstreaming stereotypes that caused irreparable damage to women’s rights and our entire culture.”

I didn’t want to do it all again—get lost in somebody else’s world, follow somebody else’s rules, prop up someone’s ego at my own expense, be somebody else’s idea of what a woman should be. I finally decided: I was done with all that. Never again.

I am not someone who needs a man to give her strength. I am not defined by my body or my looks. My worth is not determined by how many people like my bikini picture on social media.