Paris Hilton couldn't believe when she saw herself on the cover of Playboy in 2005.
According to the heiress's new book Paris: The Memoir, she had turned down Hugh Hefner's offer to appear in the magazine multiple times.
"Hef really wanted me to do a Playboy cover," writes Hilton, 42. "He kept offering me more and more money, saying I wouldn't have to be totally naked, just topless. And then saying, I didn't have to be topless, just sheer. And then saying I could wear whatever lingerie I wanted. Even when he offered seven figures, I turned it down, because I knew my mom would lose her mind."
And though Hilton thought posing for Playboy "would be awesome," when she told her mother Kathy about the opportunity, the future Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star called being a Playmate "so trashy."
The "Stars Are Blind" singer also declined because she didn't want to further polarize her public perception in the wake of her leaked sex tape with now-ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon.
"I had already been branded as a slut after the sex tape," Hilton writes. "I felt like a Playboy pictorial would just cement that in people's minds."
So when a friend called and told Hilton they liked her March 2005 Playboy cover, "I was like, "Whut?" she writes. "Hef had 'honored' me with the Sex Star of the Year Award, which means they can claim it's 'news' and not a pictorial. He got a picture from an old test shoot with a woman photographer."
The move didn't sit well with Hilton or her family. "My parents were pissed, and I cried, but none of us confronted him, because you just didn't do that," the mom of newborn son Phoenix writes.
Hilton admits she never really saw herself as a sex symbol.
"The world thinks of me as a sex symbol, and I'm here for that, because symbol literally means icon," she writes. "But when people saw that sex tape, they didn't say icon, they said slut. They said whore. And they weren't shy about it."
Hilton reveals she actually "feared sex" because of the "abuse and degradation" she says she endured as a teenager in therapeutic behavior modification boarding schools.
"I hated the idea of sex," she writes. "I avoided sex until it was absolutely unavoidable. Tabloids created this narrative about me sleeping around with a hundred gorgeous guys — not the truth at all!"
Hilton realized that for her, "Sex is a thought process," meaning "it has to start in my brain, or it's not going to work."
Her husband Carter Reum gets that and "lets me know I'm worth the effort," Hilton writes.
Hilton opened up about her experience because she hopes it'll help others: "I know there's someone out there who needs to hear that they're not weird or frigid or dead inside — they're just who they are at this moment: an asexual person in a hypersexualized world."
Paris: The Memoir is out now.
