Feminists hack Playboy's 'Party Schools' page, make it about rape

Back in December, an anti-rape activist group called FORCE lit the Internet on fire with its Victoria's Secret Consent campaign, which featured women modeling PINK-style undergarments emblazoned with words and phrases meant to raise rape awareness.

Now, some folks online are speculating that FORCE is the, um, force behind the recent hack at Playboy that replaced their annual Party Schools package with anti-rape words and images, including a fake Q&A with the magazine's founder, Hugh Hefner.

Over at Jezebel, Kate Dries takes a look at Playboy's pseudo-feminist history and expands on the notion that, while raising rape awareness and taking a stand to help promote the burgeoning anti-rape movement (especially online), the hack also clouds part of the positive history of Playboy, making the company out to be more disparaging to women than, perhaps, is reasonable.

If you've got the time, you should take a look at the finished Playboy package after FORCE (or whomever else) worked their magic and spend a few minutes with Dries' examination of the whole ordeal over at Jezebel.

Playboy has had and will always have a mixed legacy, and recently they've learned (just as many other less controversial companies have learned) that sometimes doing the right thing is marketable and profitable. What's interesting is how they've tried to figure out how to fold Hefner into marketing that mixed legacy; for a long time, he was viewed by people outside and inside the company as the thing that was holding them back. Now he seems integral to their representation of Playboy as a company that has always stood up for women, has always had great content and has always been sophisticated – even when there are years in there that prove otherwise. [Jezebel]