Scan barcode
Reviews tagging 'Misogyny'
Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself by Crystal Hefner
13 reviews
bmpicc's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
fast-paced
3.0
I listened to this straight through while gardening. My takeaways: I believe her, Dr. Phil (and family) are NOT a safe space, and Hef is a terrible human who stole from Marilyn Monroe and still refuses to just let the woman rest.
So many people do not deserve the pedestal we put them on...
So many people do not deserve the pedestal we put them on...
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape, Body shaming, Misogyny, Sexual assault, and Abortion
roswell_publishing's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gaslighting, Sexual content, Toxic relationship, Misogyny, Toxic friendship, Terminal illness, Medical content, Death of parent, Emotional abuse, and Sexism
Moderate: Drug abuse, Abortion, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Body shaming, Mental illness, Grief, and Child abuse
annabunce's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
3.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Pregnancy, Misogyny, Medical trauma, Death, Death of parent, Medical content, Child abuse, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual harassment, Sexism, and Emotional abuse
stephaniellejem's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
slow-paced
3.75
I have mixed feelings about this book. I dont know how yo describe everything
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body shaming, Medical content, Adult/minor relationship, Confinement, Violence, Toxic relationship, Sexism, Misogyny, and Emotional abuse
Minor: Abortion
liesthemoontells's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.5
I listened to this as an audiobook over two days and absolutely devoured it. Crystal's ghostwriter has managed to turn her story into a tense and compelling rollercoaster of a narrative that at times had me physically cringing at the situations she endured.
Having watched a few episodes of The Girls Next Door when it first aired, I found the lives and motivations of the women at the Playboy Mansion completely alien and inexplicable. I wanted this book to provide answers as to what compels a young woman to enter into a public relationship with a man 60 years her senior. I was also hoping for an incisive and condemnatory look at Hugh Hefner's wielding of power and treatment of the women in his orbit. This book gave me exactly what I wanted.
Crystal doesn't shy away from discussing some of the more unsavoury aspects of her life in the mansion. While confronting, it didn't come across to me as exploitative, which I feared going into the book. Instead, Crystal connects these experiences to the way Hefner treated his relationships with women in smaller, more insidious ways. The book goes even further, drawing a through line between Crystal's experience of dehumanisation and abuse at the hands of Hefner and the Playboy Corporation, through to the way society manipulates and degrades women in myriad ways.
Crystal isn't a natural narrator, and at times she seemed to stumble over sections of the text, but overall it was satisfying to hear her story in her own voice.
I would have eaten up a few more chapters about Crystal's life beyond the mansion, the steps she took to reacclimatise to life outside, and the process of recontextualising her experience with Hefner in the context of the #metoo movement, but you can't have everything!
I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone and everyone who has had any interaction with the Playboy brand over the past 70 years.
Having watched a few episodes of The Girls Next Door when it first aired, I found the lives and motivations of the women at the Playboy Mansion completely alien and inexplicable. I wanted this book to provide answers as to what compels a young woman to enter into a public relationship with a man 60 years her senior. I was also hoping for an incisive and condemnatory look at Hugh Hefner's wielding of power and treatment of the women in his orbit. This book gave me exactly what I wanted.
Crystal doesn't shy away from discussing some of the more unsavoury aspects of her life in the mansion. While confronting, it didn't come across to me as exploitative, which I feared going into the book. Instead, Crystal connects these experiences to the way Hefner treated his relationships with women in smaller, more insidious ways. The book goes even further, drawing a through line between Crystal's experience of dehumanisation and abuse at the hands of Hefner and the Playboy Corporation, through to the way society manipulates and degrades women in myriad ways.
Crystal isn't a natural narrator, and at times she seemed to stumble over sections of the text, but overall it was satisfying to hear her story in her own voice.
I would have eaten up a few more chapters about Crystal's life beyond the mansion, the steps she took to reacclimatise to life outside, and the process of recontextualising her experience with Hefner in the context of the #metoo movement, but you can't have everything!
I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone and everyone who has had any interaction with the Playboy brand over the past 70 years.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Death of parent, Drug use, Infidelity, Body shaming, Bullying, Medical content, Terminal illness, Toxic relationship, Confinement, Domestic abuse, Fatphobia, Misogyny, Sexual assault, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Sexual harassment, Sexual violence, Dysphoria, Grief, Mental illness, and Chronic illness
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Panic attacks/disorders, and Animal death
Minor: Rape, Cultural appropriation, and Abortion
katie391's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Misogyny, Panic attacks/disorders, Death of parent, Sexual content, Medical content, Sexual assault, Emotional abuse, Grief, and Sexism
bunceyyy's review
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
2.0
Thanks to Ebury and NetGalley for an e-copy of this title to review.
I have very mixed feelings on this book, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to express them fully, and/or clearly. But I think that overall, my reaction can be summed up in the line “too little, too late”. It should be obvious to many - even without having read her memoir - that Crystal Harris had a difficult child/teenhood, and was coerced into an abusive relationship with a sexual predator. But whilst reading Only Say Good Things, my surprise was that Crystal herself seems to have known this, even whilst this abuse was happening. So her seeming desire to be absconded from any responsibility in perpetuating the Playboy myth (one which seriously damaged the development and experience of women such as myself, along with millions of others) - to be regarded only as a victim of Hef’s, and not a sometimes willing participant, as she was - jars with me. I’m unsure as to whether this is the fault of the ghost writer (who did a pretty middle-of-the-road job: continuity wasn’t great; there was some repetition; laughable lines include “Charing Cross Road sounded fancy, but also kind of British”…), but it doesn’t make Crystal a particularly likeable figure. She flicks frequently from decrying Hef as a cruel and emotionally-dead captor to heaping praise and gratitude on him - so much so that I’m unsure as to whether she knows even now how she feels about him. It seems like she wants to say more, but doesn’t want to risk the backlash, and I’d rather she have gone all out or not bothered at all. She says good and bad things happened during her time in the mansion, but if the bad things she mentions don’t outweigh all of the good, then she appears to be keeping a lot of stock in money. She spends a great deal of time lamenting poor decisions made, or her own lack of judgement; follows through with what she then learnt from this - before making the same mistakes again and again. There’s only so much sympathy you can feel for someone who has just spent almost an entire book bemoaning her (and society’s) obsession with placing a woman’s value solely on how she looks, to then hear that she decided to have a third surgical procedure to alter her image. As I noted at the time, her excuse of “I would go along with it [literally her marriage to Hef] because going along with things was what I did” just isn’t enough for me. The book was interesting in that you get an extremely in-depth view of what living in the mansion and being a Playmate was like (spoiler: at best boring, at worst physical and psychological torture), but that only really made me angrier that this was all then spun into a claim that Hef was some kind of sexual pioneer, and Playboy bunnies were the height of female sexual liberation. Near the end of the book, Crystal goes to the storage facility where Hef’s three thousand scrapbooks (don’t get me started) are kept, and we are told of two letters she finds immortalised and shown off in these books. The first is from a 12 year-old girl, telling Hef that her dream is to live in the mansion, and asking what one has to do to get in there; the second, “from a young man thanking Hef for teaching him how to treat women”. So forgive me - a woman who has been treated that way by a lot of men - if I think that a book which, yes, does go someway to revealing the “truth” behind Hef/Playboy doesn’t do enough when it comes from a woman who also spends much of her memoir trying to humanise and defend him.
I have very mixed feelings on this book, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to express them fully, and/or clearly. But I think that overall, my reaction can be summed up in the line “too little, too late”. It should be obvious to many - even without having read her memoir - that Crystal Harris had a difficult child/teenhood, and was coerced into an abusive relationship with a sexual predator. But whilst reading Only Say Good Things, my surprise was that Crystal herself seems to have known this, even whilst this abuse was happening. So her seeming desire to be absconded from any responsibility in perpetuating the Playboy myth (one which seriously damaged the development and experience of women such as myself, along with millions of others) - to be regarded only as a victim of Hef’s, and not a sometimes willing participant, as she was - jars with me. I’m unsure as to whether this is the fault of the ghost writer (who did a pretty middle-of-the-road job: continuity wasn’t great; there was some repetition; laughable lines include “Charing Cross Road sounded fancy, but also kind of British”…), but it doesn’t make Crystal a particularly likeable figure. She flicks frequently from decrying Hef as a cruel and emotionally-dead captor to heaping praise and gratitude on him - so much so that I’m unsure as to whether she knows even now how she feels about him. It seems like she wants to say more, but doesn’t want to risk the backlash, and I’d rather she have gone all out or not bothered at all. She says good and bad things happened during her time in the mansion, but if the bad things she mentions don’t outweigh all of the good, then she appears to be keeping a lot of stock in money. She spends a great deal of time lamenting poor decisions made, or her own lack of judgement; follows through with what she then learnt from this - before making the same mistakes again and again. There’s only so much sympathy you can feel for someone who has just spent almost an entire book bemoaning her (and society’s) obsession with placing a woman’s value solely on how she looks, to then hear that she decided to have a third surgical procedure to alter her image. As I noted at the time, her excuse of “I would go along with it [literally her marriage to Hef] because going along with things was what I did” just isn’t enough for me. The book was interesting in that you get an extremely in-depth view of what living in the mansion and being a Playmate was like (spoiler: at best boring, at worst physical and psychological torture), but that only really made me angrier that this was all then spun into a claim that Hef was some kind of sexual pioneer, and Playboy bunnies were the height of female sexual liberation. Near the end of the book, Crystal goes to the storage facility where Hef’s three thousand scrapbooks (don’t get me started) are kept, and we are told of two letters she finds immortalised and shown off in these books. The first is from a 12 year-old girl, telling Hef that her dream is to live in the mansion, and asking what one has to do to get in there; the second, “from a young man thanking Hef for teaching him how to treat women”. So forgive me - a woman who has been treated that way by a lot of men - if I think that a book which, yes, does go someway to revealing the “truth” behind Hef/Playboy doesn’t do enough when it comes from a woman who also spends much of her memoir trying to humanise and defend him.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Toxic relationship
Moderate: Death of parent, Sexual content, Sexism, Misogyny, Rape, Emotional abuse, and Sexual assault
Minor: Abortion, Panic attacks/disorders, and Body shaming
growintogardens's review against another edition
emotional
sad
medium-paced
3.0
Hefner was a monster, full stop. I will always have compassion for anyone who was hurt by him. After reading various interviews, and seeing how she has treated the other women from the playboy world, she seems very different from the woman portrayed in this book. Idk if all her stories are credible, but it's an ok book.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Misogyny, and Toxic relationship
Moderate: Sexual assault, Bullying, and Rape
rachreads925's review against another edition
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Misogyny, Body shaming, Grief, Gaslighting, Toxic relationship, Sexual content, and Death of parent
Moderate: Death, Rape, Sexual assault, Abortion, Adult/minor relationship, and Eating disorder
Minor: Suicidal thoughts
alipp's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
Hard to rate a memoir because it’s someone’s life story… but I listened to the audiobook nonstop for 2 days so it must have been pretty good.
Bits of it were definitely self indulgent but there were also a lot of parts that were super healing for me to hear as well. I’m glad that she’s healed & moved on. I didn’t know much about Crystal at all, had only seen episodes of the Girls Next Door before she was on it. Interesting to hear about how the Playboy Mansion was all a facade & none of the girls were really happy or really even friends. Also that Hef essentially didn’t emotionally connect with anyone . Messed up but I watched Girls Next Door when I was in 5th grade and it looked so fun! I wanted to be one of them.
I do think Hef was very predatory, and I may not even have all the full backstory on Playboy, but part of me thought it was unfair to talk about how bad a 80-90+ year old man was at sex. Of course the baby oil & the non-sexy vibe is pretty icky, but idk it kinda struck me as a bit low. So while I liked the book & im happy for her that she got out, I didn’t love Crystal as a narrator. Although she grew up with not heaps of money & I feel for her that she had low self worth (I can relate on both parts), by the end it came across to me that she had a limited & privileged view. It seemed like she tried to make herself look good every chance she got and I’m happy she did get to have some small ripples & changes but I wish acknowledged her privilege a bit more. Great she went on holiday & discovered she didn’t need all the material & shallow things, but will she use her money to inspire & help young women?
Bits of it were definitely self indulgent but there were also a lot of parts that were super healing for me to hear as well. I’m glad that she’s healed & moved on. I didn’t know much about Crystal at all, had only seen episodes of the Girls Next Door before she was on it. Interesting to hear about how the Playboy Mansion
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Misogyny, and Toxic relationship