Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner
Ross Douthat
New York Times
Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.
Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with Quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.
The arc of his life vindicated his moral critics, conservative and feminist: What began with talk of jazz and Picasso and other signifiers of good taste ended in a sleazy decrepitude that would have been pitiable if it wasn’t still so exploitative.
Early Hef had a pipe and suit and a highbrow reference for every occasion; he even claimed to have a philosophy, that final refuge of the scoundrel. But late Hef was a lecherous, low-brow Peter Pan, playing at perpetual boyhood — ice cream for breakfast, pajamas all day — while bodyguards shooed male celebrities away from his paid harem and the skull grinned beneath his papery skin.
This late phase was prettied up by reality television’s “The Girls Next Door,” which kept the orgies offstage and relied on the girlfriends’ mix of desperation, boredom and charisma for its strange appeal. The behind-the-scenes accounts were rather grimmer: depression and drugs, “dirty hallway carpets and the curtains that smell like dog piss,” the chance to wait while Hef “picked the dog poo off the carpet — and then ask for our allowance.”
Needless to say the obituaries for Hefner, even if they acknowledge the seaminess, have been full of encomia for his great deeds:
Showing posts with label Pornography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pornography. Show all posts
Wednesday, 8 November 2017
Friday, 6 October 2017
The Worldview of Playboy
The Playboy Philosophy
By William F. Buckley Jr.
National Review Online
Editor’s note: This is William F. Buckley Jr.’s On the Right column of October 1, 1966. It also appeared in his essay collection The Jeweler’s Eye, published by Putnam in 1968.
I bring the news, which I had from Hugh Hefner’s own lips, that the last issue of Playboy magazine sold 4,000,000 copies and ran $2,000,000 worth of advertisements, a phenomenal achievement; indeed, it is just possible that Mr. Hefner is making more money from Playboy and related enterprises than any other publisher in the country, at least from a single magazine.
Mr. Hefner’s Playboy is most widely known for the raciness of its prose and the total exposure of the female form. It is more than that, Mr. Hefner insists — and many agree, including professors and ministers and sociologists. It is a movement of sorts, and its bible is an apparently endless series, published monthly by Mr. Hefner, entitled “The Playboy Philosophy,” the key insight of which is that “a man’s morality, like his religion, is a personal affair best left to his own conscience.” The phrase sounds harmless enough, and the tendency is to cluck-cluck one’s agreement to it.
The trouble with Hefner’s law is that society is composed of nothing more than a great number of individuals, and if each man’s morality is defined merely to suit himself, then everyone will endure the consequences of the individual’s autonomously defined ethics. Mr. Hefner’s philosophy notwithstanding, there is such a thing as the public morality, and that morality has throughout civilized history been primarily sustained by religion.
The so-called sexual revolution, of which Playboy is the slickest harbinger, asks in effect that sanctions be removed against what used to be known as “illicit sexual behavior.”
Buckley on the philosophy behind Hugh Hefner’s sexual revolution and the magazine that started it all
By William F. Buckley Jr.
National Review Online
Editor’s note: This is William F. Buckley Jr.’s On the Right column of October 1, 1966. It also appeared in his essay collection The Jeweler’s Eye, published by Putnam in 1968.
I bring the news, which I had from Hugh Hefner’s own lips, that the last issue of Playboy magazine sold 4,000,000 copies and ran $2,000,000 worth of advertisements, a phenomenal achievement; indeed, it is just possible that Mr. Hefner is making more money from Playboy and related enterprises than any other publisher in the country, at least from a single magazine.
Mr. Hefner’s Playboy is most widely known for the raciness of its prose and the total exposure of the female form. It is more than that, Mr. Hefner insists — and many agree, including professors and ministers and sociologists. It is a movement of sorts, and its bible is an apparently endless series, published monthly by Mr. Hefner, entitled “The Playboy Philosophy,” the key insight of which is that “a man’s morality, like his religion, is a personal affair best left to his own conscience.” The phrase sounds harmless enough, and the tendency is to cluck-cluck one’s agreement to it.
The trouble with Hefner’s law is that society is composed of nothing more than a great number of individuals, and if each man’s morality is defined merely to suit himself, then everyone will endure the consequences of the individual’s autonomously defined ethics. Mr. Hefner’s philosophy notwithstanding, there is such a thing as the public morality, and that morality has throughout civilized history been primarily sustained by religion.
The so-called sexual revolution, of which Playboy is the slickest harbinger, asks in effect that sanctions be removed against what used to be known as “illicit sexual behavior.”
Thursday, 5 October 2017
Integrating Into the Void
Hugh Hefner's Legacy of Despair
National Review Online
Hugh Hefner didn’t invent pornography, and it would no doubt be thriving today even if he hadn’t founded Playboy magazine those many years ago. After all, man is fallen, and somebody would have filled that depraved niche in American life. Hefner, however, played his part, and the part he played was immensely destructive to our nation’s cultural, moral, and spiritual fabric. Hefner mainstreamed porn, he put it in millions of homes, and he even glamorized it — recasting one of America’s most pathetic industries as the playground of the sophisticated rich. He then grew to a ripe old age, consorting with women young enough to be his granddaughters. He was America’s most famous dirty old man.
And now he’s dead. May God have mercy on his soul.
It’s hard to calculate the damage he did, but the cultural rubble is all around us. My generation is perhaps the first to grow up with easily accessible porn. Every one of us knew whose father had a Playboy subscription (only the scary pervs subscribed to Penthouse or Hustler), and their kids knew exactly where dad kept his stash. They’d sneak out old issues, bring them to school, and pass them around. Before teens could rent porn on tape, they could see porn on the page, and once they saw it, they were hooked.
The effects have lasted a lifetime.
The bitter fruit of Hefner’s life’s work has helped poison American families.
David FrenchNational Review Online
Hugh Hefner didn’t invent pornography, and it would no doubt be thriving today even if he hadn’t founded Playboy magazine those many years ago. After all, man is fallen, and somebody would have filled that depraved niche in American life. Hefner, however, played his part, and the part he played was immensely destructive to our nation’s cultural, moral, and spiritual fabric. Hefner mainstreamed porn, he put it in millions of homes, and he even glamorized it — recasting one of America’s most pathetic industries as the playground of the sophisticated rich. He then grew to a ripe old age, consorting with women young enough to be his granddaughters. He was America’s most famous dirty old man.
And now he’s dead. May God have mercy on his soul.
It’s hard to calculate the damage he did, but the cultural rubble is all around us. My generation is perhaps the first to grow up with easily accessible porn. Every one of us knew whose father had a Playboy subscription (only the scary pervs subscribed to Penthouse or Hustler), and their kids knew exactly where dad kept his stash. They’d sneak out old issues, bring them to school, and pass them around. Before teens could rent porn on tape, they could see porn on the page, and once they saw it, they were hooked.
The effects have lasted a lifetime.
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Douglas Wilson's Letter From America
Foxy News
By Douglas Wilson
Minister, Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho
First Published in The Washington Post
Inconsistency is part of the price we pay for living in a screwed-up world, and so we naturally want to distinguish the person who fails to fully live up to his own standards, which would be pretty much everybody, and the out-and-out hypocrite, that unctuous televangelist right out of central casting. And so we do make the distinction, but at the end of the day, we should still recognize that this is just distinguishing little hypocrisies from foundational hypocrisies. None of it is what we would call virtuous.
Once we have made this obvious distinction, one of the things we need to do is realize that we often mistake foundational hypocrisies for more garden variety hypocrisies. It is flattering to the self to do this, and so the results we usually get are not that surprising. It was not for nothing that the old cynic Ambrose Bierce defined a Christian as one who believed the New Testament to be a divinely inspired book, admirably suited for the spiritual needs of his neighbor. And nowhere is this issue of inconsistencies more glaring than with the issue of politics and pornography.
More is going on here than simple inconsistency on a personal level. Preaching against porn while consuming it avidly is certainly inconsistent, and is what theologians in another old-timey era used to call "a sin"--a theological category that perhaps needs to be rehabilitated. But I want to consider this issue at another level--we need to start thinking about the politics of porn.
Chesterton once said that "free love" was the first and most obvious bribe that could be offered to a slave. Huxley, in his Brave New World, saw the potent mix of sex and soma. And when the prophet Balaam was unable to curse the people of Israel, he was nevertheless able to offer some tawdry counsel to the king of Moab on the side--with the result that the Moabite women took a stroll through the Israelite camp in their halter tops and tight jeans (Num. 25:1). The end result was not just a large number of Israelite men being personally inconsistent in their very own private lives. The end result was a cultural and political disaster for Israel--the debacle at Baal-Peor (Num. 25:9). In short, there were political repercussions as a result of this very political tactic. The account in Numbers is oblique on the point, but the New Testament clearly credits Balaam with giving the King of Moab a political consultation service, a crash course in sexual tactics (2 Pet. 2:15; Jude 11; Rev. 2:14).
Fast forward to the present. A number of evangelicals are up in arms about President Obama himself, and Obamacare, and Obama-other-things, and Obama-anything-else, and are warning us in dire tones about the impending slavery that is involved in all this "socialism." And--full disclosure here--I am economically pretty conservative myself, just slightly to the left of King Arthur, so I am not pointing out this part of it to differ with any of it. But what I am noticing in this discussion is a striking public tolerance for right-wing skankyness. When I am cruising around for my Internet news, I am far more likely to run into Moabite women at Fox News than anywhere else.
I was recently was scrolling down a related "conservative" web site (Fox Nation), and near the bottom came upon a photo that plainly notified us all that Pamela Anderson is a member of a race, the human race, that is indeed mammalian. One of my initial thoughts was that it must be really nice to be able to go through life with absolutely no fear of drowning. The Fox News site is not quite as bad as that, but is pretty clearly keeping Balaam on retainer as well. While writing this, I conducted a brief, unscientific survey, and the Fox News site was busy displaying six large breasts with one naked Kardashian thrown in, MSNBC, that noted liberal outlet, had nothing objectionable at all, CNN, bane of the republic, also had none. Surely it should be possible to access fair and balanced news without running into women who think they are supposed to be a sale at Macy's--with 40 percent off.
What then? On the assumption that what we are willing to associate with in public is just a fraction of what we are willing to associate with in private, one of my basic concerns about evangelical involvement in politics in the age of Obama (measured in this discussion by their general friendliness to Foxy News) is that they are not nearly as hostile to "slavery" as some of the rhetoric might seem to indicate. I know that politics is supposed to make strange bedfellows, but "strange bedfellows" was always supposed to be a metaphor, wasn't it?
A man cannot sell himself into slavery in his private life, and then turn around and successfully take a stand as a free man in the public square. At least, that is how the thinking used to go among conservatives. If sexual indulgence is one of the more obvious bribes that can be offered to a slave, how does it change anything if a person takes the bribe in private? And if that bribe is taken in private, over time, indications of that reality will start to show up in public, in the sorts of ways I have been discussing.
Which means that if a man is on the take in this way, he can go to a Tea Party and hoick up a hand-made "live free or die" placard all he wants to. He is also attending other demonstrations late at night--and at those other demonstrations, he is saying with every click of the mouse that what he really wishes for is that his grandchildren could be slaves. And the way things are going, he may just get his wish.
Douglas Wilson is the minister of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and a senior fellow of theology at New St. Andrews College. He has written numerous books, including "Five Cities That Ruled the World, Heaven Misplaced, and Reforming Marriage."
By Douglas Wilson
Minister, Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho
First Published in The Washington Post
Inconsistency is part of the price we pay for living in a screwed-up world, and so we naturally want to distinguish the person who fails to fully live up to his own standards, which would be pretty much everybody, and the out-and-out hypocrite, that unctuous televangelist right out of central casting. And so we do make the distinction, but at the end of the day, we should still recognize that this is just distinguishing little hypocrisies from foundational hypocrisies. None of it is what we would call virtuous.
Once we have made this obvious distinction, one of the things we need to do is realize that we often mistake foundational hypocrisies for more garden variety hypocrisies. It is flattering to the self to do this, and so the results we usually get are not that surprising. It was not for nothing that the old cynic Ambrose Bierce defined a Christian as one who believed the New Testament to be a divinely inspired book, admirably suited for the spiritual needs of his neighbor. And nowhere is this issue of inconsistencies more glaring than with the issue of politics and pornography.
More is going on here than simple inconsistency on a personal level. Preaching against porn while consuming it avidly is certainly inconsistent, and is what theologians in another old-timey era used to call "a sin"--a theological category that perhaps needs to be rehabilitated. But I want to consider this issue at another level--we need to start thinking about the politics of porn.
Chesterton once said that "free love" was the first and most obvious bribe that could be offered to a slave. Huxley, in his Brave New World, saw the potent mix of sex and soma. And when the prophet Balaam was unable to curse the people of Israel, he was nevertheless able to offer some tawdry counsel to the king of Moab on the side--with the result that the Moabite women took a stroll through the Israelite camp in their halter tops and tight jeans (Num. 25:1). The end result was not just a large number of Israelite men being personally inconsistent in their very own private lives. The end result was a cultural and political disaster for Israel--the debacle at Baal-Peor (Num. 25:9). In short, there were political repercussions as a result of this very political tactic. The account in Numbers is oblique on the point, but the New Testament clearly credits Balaam with giving the King of Moab a political consultation service, a crash course in sexual tactics (2 Pet. 2:15; Jude 11; Rev. 2:14).
Fast forward to the present. A number of evangelicals are up in arms about President Obama himself, and Obamacare, and Obama-other-things, and Obama-anything-else, and are warning us in dire tones about the impending slavery that is involved in all this "socialism." And--full disclosure here--I am economically pretty conservative myself, just slightly to the left of King Arthur, so I am not pointing out this part of it to differ with any of it. But what I am noticing in this discussion is a striking public tolerance for right-wing skankyness. When I am cruising around for my Internet news, I am far more likely to run into Moabite women at Fox News than anywhere else.
I was recently was scrolling down a related "conservative" web site (Fox Nation), and near the bottom came upon a photo that plainly notified us all that Pamela Anderson is a member of a race, the human race, that is indeed mammalian. One of my initial thoughts was that it must be really nice to be able to go through life with absolutely no fear of drowning. The Fox News site is not quite as bad as that, but is pretty clearly keeping Balaam on retainer as well. While writing this, I conducted a brief, unscientific survey, and the Fox News site was busy displaying six large breasts with one naked Kardashian thrown in, MSNBC, that noted liberal outlet, had nothing objectionable at all, CNN, bane of the republic, also had none. Surely it should be possible to access fair and balanced news without running into women who think they are supposed to be a sale at Macy's--with 40 percent off.
What then? On the assumption that what we are willing to associate with in public is just a fraction of what we are willing to associate with in private, one of my basic concerns about evangelical involvement in politics in the age of Obama (measured in this discussion by their general friendliness to Foxy News) is that they are not nearly as hostile to "slavery" as some of the rhetoric might seem to indicate. I know that politics is supposed to make strange bedfellows, but "strange bedfellows" was always supposed to be a metaphor, wasn't it?
A man cannot sell himself into slavery in his private life, and then turn around and successfully take a stand as a free man in the public square. At least, that is how the thinking used to go among conservatives. If sexual indulgence is one of the more obvious bribes that can be offered to a slave, how does it change anything if a person takes the bribe in private? And if that bribe is taken in private, over time, indications of that reality will start to show up in public, in the sorts of ways I have been discussing.
Which means that if a man is on the take in this way, he can go to a Tea Party and hoick up a hand-made "live free or die" placard all he wants to. He is also attending other demonstrations late at night--and at those other demonstrations, he is saying with every click of the mouse that what he really wishes for is that his grandchildren could be slaves. And the way things are going, he may just get his wish.
Douglas Wilson is the minister of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and a senior fellow of theology at New St. Andrews College. He has written numerous books, including "Five Cities That Ruled the World, Heaven Misplaced, and Reforming Marriage."
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