Reviews tagging 'Animal cruelty'

Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself by Crystal Hefner

2 reviews

sassyykassie's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional sad fast-paced

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Content Warnings

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

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.

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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