Most of Kendra’s melancholy stems from her fear that her husband Hank will no longer be attracted to her, and will leave her for another woman. While these feelings are probably common among many women post-birth, postpartum depression or no, its fair to say that Kendra’s concerns are probably amplified by the environment she’d lived in at the Playboy Mansion—where she lived as one of Hef’s girlfriends from the ages of 18 to 23—in which the worth of young women is based primarily on youth and appearance. Being a part of a revolving door of said women (who temporarily serve as companions to Hef and his icky older cronies) at such a young age, Kendra may have developed a distorted view of how a relationship between a man and a woman exists in the real world. Her husband Hank admits that he doesn’t want to pretend to understand how she’s feeling, but insists that he would never have asked her to marry him if he wanted to just move on to the next woman that comes around.
Interestingly, the Playmate friends who triggered Kendra’s body-image anxiety also assuaged it. One of the women is also a mother, and made Kendra feel a little less alone when she shared that she felt the same way after she gave birth to her child. She also reminded Kendra that the Playboy world they’d become a part of had placed so much value on aesthetics, which is probably fucking with Kendra’s own personal estimation of self-worth. In the end, Kendra said that she was glad to have her friends around, because they’re “real ass people.” With all the talk about Playboy standards, I couldn’t help but think, “Well, maybe their asses are real…”
