Hugh Hefner, 82, and his official three new girlfriends, 19 year-old twin sisters Karissa and Kristina Shannon, and 22 year-old San Diego State coed Crystal Harris, sat down for an interview with E!. Throughout the interview, the Playboy patriarch had his arms across all three of the young women’s laps, rubbing and caressing a knee on each side.

Despite the age difference, Hef and his last girlfriend triangle kind of made sense to me, probably because we had a chance to get used to Holly, Bridget and Kendra and they stuck around for years. They had strong, likable personalities and you could see they genuinely cared for Hef. These girls just seem too young and opportunistic and the creepiness factor is about ten fold considering that Hef is probably getting busy with all three of them instead of just Holly. Plus they’re kind of boring. Crystal is nice and seems like the “smarter” one, but she’s the only one who talked and she’s not that interesting. The twins just sat there smiling and laughing too loudly at points.

On why he got new girlfriends
Well, the old ones all left

On how he met the twins
They were already scheduled to be playmates and I had met them, and I heard a rumor that they were interested in being girlfriends. So I dropped them a note and said if they were serious… we would talk about it. They showed up about two weeks after I hit that speedbump and knew that I was going to be separating from Holly.

On the twins felony record
They arrived with a reputation supposedly of bad girls from Florida. If they were bad girls they wouldn’t be here. They’re very nice girls.

Crystal on how she learned she was becoming a girlfriend
Hef asked me to be a girlfriend after we were hanging out for a little over a month. I didn’t hesitate, I just got all my stuff and moved on in.

On meeting co-ed Crystal
I met her at a Halloween party.

Crystal on sharing Hef
It works out pretty well, we all bring different aspects to the relationship… they’re the party ones, I’m the sturdier [one].

Crystal on meeting the last girlfriends
I met Bridget and Kendra, but I never met Holly… I really like Kendra, and her fiance’s really nice.

On if Holly ever had a chance to marry him
If the time frame had been different, she had a very good chance… It has to do with timing. I’ve been married twice, those were not the happiest times of my lives.

[Transcribed from Hefner’s interview with E!, video above]

The most telling part of this interview comes at the end when Hef explains that he lost his last girlfriends because they started to grow and branch out in their careers. It makes sense that he’d pick much younger women because they’re more dependent on him and will presumably stick around for a while.

On the biggest difference between these women and his last set of girlfriends
Well they’re younger, and remember the other relationships… I was at 7 or 8 years, so we’d been together a long time. The girls had become celebrities. The girls had their own particular interests and career aspirations and I think the pursuit of all that kind of separated us in terms of where the relationships were to begin with.

This is the beginning again. There’s nothing more exciting than the beginning of a romantic relationship, and this is the best.

In November, a picture came out of Hefner making out with an unknown blond woman at his Halloween party. It’s either one of the twins or Crystal, it’s hard to tell. Either way, it doesn’t seem like it’s all for show and there’s definitely some kind of “romance” involved.

Overall I got the impression that the Girls Next Door 2.0 are younger, blander replacements that make Hef happy by serving as eye candy and doing their duties in the bedroom. It’s kind of what everyone assumed about the last women at first, but the public warmed up to them, partly because we weren’t confronted with the sex factor and could kind of push that to the back of our minds once we got to know them through the show. We’ll have to see if these younger women are capable of winning people over, but maybe they don’t have to and people will watch the new Girls Next Door just because it’s an 82 year-old guy doing the deed with women young enough to be his great granddaughters. That’s interesting in a trainwreck way, even if the women are not.