Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself

by Crystal Hefner

I didn’t know then that I could rescue myself. I didn’t always know I needed to be rescued, but I knew I was trapped.

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.

at thirteen, I learned that the best way to survive in the world was to be appealing to men.

Parents were supposed to be guardrails, weren’t they? In place to keep you from driving off the road.

I was desperate to be considered worthy: worthy of love and of taking up space, which I never believed I could grant myself.

True empowerment was a joke. I learned early that being a woman meant submitting. It meant keeping myself small. Safety meant being tucked beneath the shadow of a man’s authority. It meant living up to the standards of what was required of me, so I wouldn’t be abandoned, cast aside, left alone with my aimlessness and grief and self-doubt.

Just be “myself”? I had no idea who that was.

Years later, I would regret all of this: the surgery, the liposuction (turns out I needed that fat), the implants. But at the time, I had no idea how ill it would make me, that my body would reject the mold I was forcing it into.

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.

Going along because there’s no choice and saying “yes” are two very different things.

I desperately wanted to have more female friends, but they broke my heart and my trust as much as men did.

Crystal Harris didn’t know how to stand up for herself. And Crystal Hefner didn’t know herself well enough to know what she really wanted or needed to fight for.

Hugh Hefner, in the end, was just an old man in a bed, dying.

I read recently that women live longer, healthier lives the more close female friendships they have, and that makes sense to me now.

I don’t have to have it all figured out, and sometimes you only know who you are by what you are not any longer.

What do you have to do to get in the mansion? You have to lose yourself, Mackenzie, you have to give up everything about you that makes you unique and special. You have to give up your mind and your opinions and any belief in choosing your own future. But mostly you have to get really, really small. So small you don’t leave a trace. So small you don’t cast a shadow. So small and so quiet that even if you are screaming you can’t hear it.

When Playboy announced Hef’s death, they posted a black-andwhite picture of him, his hands folded reverently in front of him. At the bottom of the picture they put a quote from him. “Life is too short to be living somebody else’s dream.” I’d heard him say that before, but never to any women. Certainly never to the women he called his girlfriends. His babies. His beauties. He certainly never said it to me, his wife. But as I walked out of Iron Mountain and started the drive to my new home, I thought it might be the best advice I’d ever heard.