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Reviews tagging 'Rape'
Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself by Crystal Hefner
12 reviews
sassyykassie's review against another edition
Graphic: Sexual content, Body shaming, Chronic illness, Rape, Abortion, Adult/minor relationship, Animal death, Animal cruelty, Cancer, Death of parent, Death, Drug use, Eating disorder, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Medical content, Sexual violence, Terminal illness, and Toxic relationship
bmpicc's review against another edition
3.0
So many people do not deserve the pedestal we put them on...
Graphic: Rape, Body shaming, Misogyny, Sexual assault, and Abortion
liesthemoontells's review
4.5
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.
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
elliott_the_clementine's review
Graphic: Sexual violence, Sexual harassment, Medical content, Medical trauma, Sexual assault, Toxic friendship, Toxic relationship, Domestic abuse, Sexism, and Addiction
Moderate: Body shaming, Drug abuse, Rape, Eating disorder, and Drug use
bunceyyy's review
2.0
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.
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
kloughlin's review against another edition
3.5
Graphic: Sexual content
Moderate: Death of parent, Death, Cancer, Grief, and Toxic relationship
Minor: Abortion, Body shaming, Drug use, and Rape
growintogardens's review against another edition
3.0
Graphic: Sexual content, Misogyny, and Toxic relationship
Moderate: Sexual assault, Bullying, and Rape
daphnehumming's review against another edition
3.75
Graphic: Death, Abortion, and Death of parent
Moderate: Rape, Addiction, and War
Minor: Animal death
rachreads925's review against another edition
3.5
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
cjamison0151's review against another edition
3.0
Graphic: Sexual violence, Rape, and Sexual assault