Hefner ran American nudie magazine. That’s it.

There was always something dead about Hugh Hefner. With his actual expiry at age 91, the peculiar external man has finally matched up with his heartless core, his ethos of human packaging, his creation of a sexual dreamscape so ludicrous that it made generations of men miserable trying to recreate it.

Hefner ran an American nudie magazine. That’s it.

A master marketer in the wretched 1950s, he sold naked women — I am told that previously, women had only been naked beneath their clothes — as a package deal. Perfectly ordinary men were advised to become wealthy and rent a “bachelor pad” with a circular bed, “hi-fi” and a plaque on the front door that read “If you don’t swing, don’t ring” in Latin.

Then it got unusual. Hefner wore pyjamas all day with a satin-lapelled dressing gown and a sea captain’s white cap. He smoked a pipe. It was a statement, one supposes, but of what?

For someone with only one outfit, he had a massive closet, with 70 pairs of pyjamas and dozens of robes, slippers and hats, along with a library of thousands of black-bound scrapbooks of his life, a record for posterity but again, of what?

Human beings have done the old in-out forever, obviously, but when Hefner was born in 1926, it was fraught, just as it is now, though in a different way. He saw sex, he had sex, as does everyone. But the experience affected him strangely and made the pursuit and containment of women’s bodies into the primary force of his life.

He reminds me of another man who couldn’t cope with women, the founder of Islamic extremism, Sayyid Qutb, who went the other way. As a young student from Egypt in the fall of 1949, Qutb visited Greeley, Colorado, going to a local church dance and watching men and women dancing together to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” It’s a date-rapey 1940s duet from a movie starring Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban.

Qutb was appalled by the depravity. He seemed to have something of a sexual-emotional collapse and the course of his life changed. He returned to Egypt, became a religious pest, was jailed, chatted with his fellow prisoners, inspired an early Al Qaeda and the rest is history.

Qutb was hanged in 1966. By then, back in the U.S.A., Hefner was the coolest sexual cat.

Now we live in the extremes. Thanks to a startup in Montreal, porn is free online and bulging at the edges. Simultaneously, geriatric American male politicians take their revenge on women and their bodies, passing laws regulating their Down Theres and basically doing a Qutb on them.

Male journalists call Hefner a “visionary” who helped start the sexual revolution, but this is an unreliable narration of a story with many different roots. Hefner certainly altered male expectations while forcing women to fit into them. It was a kind of tyranny for everyone, men thinking they were only as male as their women were obedient.

Women resist but they follow too, even now. Credulous brutal men still follow. Every man enraged by a woman who rejects him, every man who resents a woman’s economic success is following a pattern partly laid down by Hefner, who campaigned for female passivity.

Perfectly mediocre men were told to feel justified in expecting beautiful — and unattainable — women to desire them. The sexual revolution began when women began making their own rules.

Women’s rights ruined Hefner, who in 1969 called it a “highly irrational, emotional, kookie trend.”

Until his death, on his weekly “Manly Night” with his elderly male friends, Hefner would sing a toast. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, be of good cheer, for they are out there, and we are in here.” Sound familiar?

Marilyn Monroe posed for Playboy in 1953. She died by her own hand in 1962, a prisoner of her own beauty and the industrialization of sex. Hefner will now be placed in a crypt next to hers that he bought decades ago, intruding on the privacy of the ravishing woman he helped destroy.

Even in death, he won’t leave women alone.