Dressed in a beige skirt suit (no bunny tail), Christie Hefner, chairman and CEO of Playboy Enterprises, daughter of Hugh, and the country's 80th most powerful woman according to Forbes magazine, declares herself to be both a feminist and an activist.She is preparing to announce the 2007 winners of the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards but remains mum on dropping any specific names. Previous winners have included famed First-Amendment lawyers; the comedian Bill Maher; a high school student who successfully defended her right to form a gay/straight alliance at her Texas school; and the AP reporter who sued for the release of thousands of pages of Guantánamo Bay tribunal transcripts that revealed evidence of prisoner abuse.Never afraid of being outspoken, Hefner, 54, explains that her politics developed while coming of age during Vietnam and Watergate. Though she ascended to the Playboy presidency at age 29, she was originally "very suspicious of all business. It was business that was prosecuting the war and dirtying the environment. Business was the establishment."But Hefner now leverages her multimillion dollar business-built on naked ladies and bunny-emblazoned products-to take high-visibility positions on controversial issues, a tradition begun by her father decades ago. The company filed an amicus brief in Roe v. Wade, was the only corporate sponsor of Masters and Johnson's groundbreaking sexuality research, and has come out strongly in favor of gay marriage. Both the company and the Playboy Foundation provide large-scale support for civil liberties, sexual health, reproductive freedom, gay rights, and women's rights.
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To say you're not a feminist is virtually the same thing as saying you're a racist. |