The Playboy Legacy

[Lil Red]

The Playboy Legacy
As his 80th birthday approaches, Hugh Hefner is proud of his achievements. He shouldn't be.

BY MATTHEW SCULLY
Friday, March 31, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Hugh Hefner turns 80 next Sunday, and The Mansion is once again the place to be. "A major pajama party" is planned, as he told Maclean's, along with other observances equal to the dignity of the occasion. But this milestone also has "Hef" in a reflective mood, wondering how he will be remembered and trying to sum up "the major message in my life."

The founder of Playboy, says a Reuters profile, has become "utterly obsessed with his own legacy" and lately has "filled some 1,500 leather-bound scrapbooks about his life and history to date." From the first issue of Playboy to appear on Chicago newsstands in 1953 right up to the latest clippings on his current reality show, "The Girls Next Door," no trace of Mr. Hefner's storied adventures will be lost to posterity.

Lest we forget that there was actually a "Playboy Philosophy" to go with the pictures, Mr. Hefner has also reissued, online, all 250,000 words of his early-1960s disquisition on the good life and the evils of sexual inhibition. Still endlessly indulged by reporters, he has slipped into his best bathrobe for another round of clubby interviews in which to showcase his three salaried "girlfriends" and to reminisce about the original Playboy "dream."

Always a "dreamer" and "romantic at heart," in Hef's telling of the story, he dared to challenge the repressive attitudes of his day and left America a freer, happier place. He is guilty only of living out "every man's dream," and if anyone thinks otherwise it must be envy. "I consider myself the luckiest cat on the planet," he often says--a sort of graying libertine's version of the Lou Gehrig line. Hef is also devoted these days to various charitable causes and, he eagerly notes, was recently voted American Charity Events Man of the Year.

Looking to the day when Shangri-La falls silent and dust returns to dust, he has even made arrangements for a final resting place, with that exquisite Hefner touch. It turns out that there is a tomb in Los Angeles's Westwood Memorial Park directly adjacent to that of Marilyn Monroe--the first "girl next door" to appear nude in Playboy--and no one had yet claimed it. "When I found the vault next door to Marilyn was available," he explained to the Daily Telegraph, "it seemed natural." So there, next-door to Marilyn, his permanently pajamaed remains will lie, and all who come to remember her can cast a glance at his name, too.

One might have thought that the woman, in life, had enough trouble with users and operators. But of course Hef, an exploiter to the end, doesn't see himself that way, and what's clear from all his legacy projects is that he wants to be remembered as anything other than what he is. We're to think of him as Hugh Hefner, social philosopher and cultural revolutionary. Hugh Hefner, entrepreneur and Charity Events Man of the Year. Hugh Hefner, friend of Marilyn. Hugh Hefner, luckiest cat on the planet. Anything, please, but the truth about Hugh Hefner, pornographer.

He is certainly right to believe that he has left his mark in the world. Richard Corliss in Time magazine is overstating it a bit when he writes that "porn doesn't affront contemporary community standards. It is a contemporary community standard." But he is close enough, and we have Hugh Marston Hefner, more than anyone else, to thank for the great plenitude of porn we take for granted today.

There was a dark and joyless time in America when one could actually go about daily life without ever encountering pornographic images. A child could grow up scarcely knowing that "adult entertainment" existed, much less acquainted with its many varieties. Hotel stays, in that prudish, stuffy era, had to be endured without pay-as-you-go porn, in-room and On Command. American males could not avail themselves of hundreds of millions of obscene films every year--as they do now, courtesy of even respectable corporations like Time Warner and Comcast--or take in the show at "gentlemen's clubs" when porn is not enough.

It was Mr. Hefner who put the real money in porn, a business hard to go poor in under any circumstances (except for the unfortunates given starring roles) and today a $57 billion-a-year global industry. He brought it into the central stream of culture, so that now even upscale bookstores stock Penthouse or similar offerings without a second thought. He gave porn that "classy" feel and its phony creed of "artistic" expression and protected "speech" by which far livelier fare than Playboy would soon ease into popular culture.

Playboy Enterprises itself, years ago, dropped the pretense of refinement and delicacy, following the money into hard-core cable. Soft-core, hard-core, these were all along just degrees of exploitation and self-debasement and for the procurers a purely legal and commercial calculation.

He is not the worst of America's celebrity pornographers, though being the first is no great distinction either, and but for Hef a few standards of public decency might actually have held awhile. Without his pioneering vision, we might, in our own time, rise every morning to face a world without "Girls Gone Wild" or Sex.com, without cable or Internet porn for all hours and all ages. [b]Whatever the problems of those repressed, Puritanical types that Mr. Hefner is still using as strawmen, they did somehow manage to fill their days without such things, and we could use a little more of their self-restraint and modesty.[/b]

Pornography, Hef still assures us, is an antidote to social and personal troubles rather than an obvious source of them, and his own softer brand of the stuff is in any case so innocuous as to have no harmful social consequences whatever. [b]It is not license, he tells us in a typical bit of pretentious blather, but repression that "twists the nature of sexuality. What causes all the sickness, the perversion, the rape, is a repressive society--a society that can't be open in a loving and positive way." Likewise, Playboy and all it brought were "not just for the guys. The major beneficiaries were women."[/b]

Enough to say that police investigators, in the sex-crimes units that have expanded roughly in proportion to mass-market "adult material," rarely conclude that the rapist or child predator lacked for pornographic inspiration before committing the crime. As to those "major beneficiaries" of porn, you won't find too many women these days who think that the world is better because of Playboy or the smug, selfish ethic it has always purveyed. [b]For good reason has the Playboy Foundation long been a benefactor to NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood: The Playboy Philosophy has always been for the ladies, too, all right--just so long as they remember what they're good for, don't get too sentimental and feel grateful when the playboy in their own life offers to pay for the abortion.[/b]

One hesitates to speak harshly of an old man, who somewhere along the way must have done a few worthwhile things. But as to the public legacy of Hugh Hefner, he should have no illusions. All of us have our share of faults and sins to account for. [b]But the lowest of vices and "strangest secret of hell," as G.K. Chesterton called it, is the desire to pervert others, to coax and corrupt them and drag them down with you. [/b]And any man who at the age of 80 has that to answer for is by no stretch the luckiest cat on the planet.

Mr. Scully is the author of "Dominion" and a former deputy director of speechwriting for President George W. Bush. [url="http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110008169"]Source[/url]
---------------

[ruso]

The biggest legacy of playboy is to have turned the women's in a sexual object.

[YMNolan]

he helped transform society from one evil extreme (puritanism) to another (overindulgence).

thank you Mr. Hefner for helping to find new ways for us to sin and destroy our fellow human beings.

[Lil Red]

[quote name='YMNolan' post='959406' date='Apr 24 2006, 04:31 PM']
he helped transform society from one evil extreme (puritanism) to another (overindulgence).

thank you Mr. Hefner for helping to find new ways for us to sin and destroy our fellow human beings.
[/quote]
yup

[djc08]

I know this is really not a good thing to share...but we're doing a stock thing in my economics class and we fake bought stocks and well my group bought some in playboy enterprises...but since we bought they've been going down...it's not like we really buy stuff...we just thought it was kind of funny that a bunch of highschoolers were buying stock in playboy

Edited April 25, 2006 by djc08

[Guest Rick777]

[quote name='djc08' post='959597' date='Apr 24 2006, 06:25 PM']
I know this is really not a good thing to share...but we're doing a stock thing in my economics class and we fake bought stocks and well my group bought some in playboy enterprises...but since we bought they've been going down...it's not like we really buy stuff...we just thought it was kind of funny that a bunch of highschoolers were buying stock in playboy
[/quote]

[-I---Love]

that is funny


esp. that they're going down now lol


[quote name='djc08' post='959597' date='Apr 24 2006, 07:25 PM']
I know this is really not a good thing to share...but we're doing a stock thing in my economics class and we fake bought stocks and well my group bought some in playboy enterprises...but since we bought they've been going down...it's not like we really buy stuff...we just thought it was kind of funny that a bunch of highschoolers were buying stock in playboy
[/quote]

[Lil Red]

[quote name='djc08' post='959597' date='Apr 24 2006, 07:25 PM']I know this is really not a good thing to share...but we're doing a stock thing in my economics class and we fake bought stocks and well my group bought some in playboy enterprises...but since we bought they've been going down...it's not like we really buy stuff...we just thought it was kind of funny that a bunch of highschoolers were buying stock in playboy[/quote]
why would you want to do that?

[sidemunch88]

beacuse it is fake

it is just an experement thingy

i did it also!

[Lil Red]

okay

[sidemunch88]

no i did not buy playboy stock i bought hydrogen companie stocks!

[Servant_of_Eve]

hydrogen is a lot better for the environment then playboy

[Keyser Soze]

[b]My best Rick777 impression:[/b]

Hmmmmm. What's this playboy you're talking about? Why's it so bad? And who's this Hugh Hefner fellow?

[MC IMaGiNaZUN]

Pornography is evil, plain and simple.

My school had an opinion article, which i am not entirely in agreement with, but summarizes the issue of how porn models are worshiped, and how its maliciously warping young women's self-image.

[url="http://www.thedailyaztec.com/media/storage/paper741/news/2006/04/24/Opinion/britneyization.Plagues.Sdsu-1866234.shtml?norewrite200604251819&sourcedomain=www.thedailyaztec.com"]'Britneyization' plagues SDSU[/url]

Was it just irony or a sign of the times that all last week, while millions of families prepared for Easter Sunday, the star of our campus was Alison Waite, a Playboy cover girl and recent SDSU graduate.

Everywhere I went, girls were gushing over her nude pictures and glorifying her; I think Waite had more female admirers than male ones. It's the latest example of what I like to call the "Britneyization" of America -young women all over the country worshipping and emulating pop idols, such as Britney Spears.

The first step, of course, is appearance, and while not everyone can appear nude in a magazine, they can use extra-shiny lip gloss, wear butt-length skirts, get lower-back tattoos and accessorize with a dazzling array of unimaginably goofy hats. And nothing says faith like keeping the same exact look 365 days a year.

Seriously, how can it be that on a campus of roughly 20,000 women, half of them look alike?

It's come to the point where a guy can spend the day on campus, go to Hooters for dinner and then spend the evening at a strip club, and the only way he can tell where he's at is by his notebook, the buffalo wings or the cover charge.

My friend Megan blames the body-obsession factor of this conformity on shallow men, noting that she learned in psychology class that even though in survey after survey men answer that they prefer women with average builds, they wind up dating the freakishly thin ones. However, for the dress and the make-up, Megan conceded that girls have no one to blame but themselves. She said there is a lot of competition to have designer, top-of-the-line goods because they will get called out if they're wearing the knockoffs. And today, make-up is used to "create" facial features, not simply accentuate the ones already there.

"It's all about how shiny your lips can look," Megan said. "The goal is to look like you rubbed beef fat all over your mouth and then pout. Be sure to pout."

What truly makes this problematic goes beyond looks. Our culture's entire persona has morphed into a new brand of misogyny that has been slickly repackaged by Madison Avenue into "modern feminism." The peak of the modern feminist wave was a decade ago, with the prevailing theme being empowerment of women. But now, marketing geniuses have somehow convinced women that being sex objects is empowering, so we're back to square one in terms of gender equality.

The dangerous punch line is: Women are now proud to be sex objects.

My other friend, Katie, agrees with this point.

"Women have decided that if their whole [mod]butt[/mod] sticks out of their skirt, somehow it's going to earn them respect," she said.

And anyone can see that clothing manufacturers take advantage of this trend. By placing brand names and logos on the rear of a pair of shorts, or the front of a cut-off T-shirt, a subliminal message is sent to all voyeurs: We know this is what you're staring at; you should try to date this girl and buy our brand of clothing for her this Christmas.

Or maybe guys are so dumb that we need to be told somebody's butt is hot because without written confirmation, there's no other way to know.

One thing's for sure: In the world - and in dating - women have taken on the role of predators, and it's a very competitive environment because there are so few of us studs to go around.

Katie made the observation that on every MTV "boys vs. girls"-type reality show, or on "The Apprentice," female participants have an inability to work together. They always connive and undermine each other, which inevitably prevents their task from being accomplished. Katie equated this to dating because all sense of decorum or sisterhood has gone out the window among her friends during competition over men.

If a woman sees someone she wants, she won't let any petty detail like who he's with - or sometimes even who she's with - get in the way. It makes real life much like "The Bachelor," which scares the hell out of me.

Who can afford all those roses?

There is, however, an optimistic way to look at all this: In following the prophet Britney (and don't forget her apostles Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton), modern young women may end the battle of the sexes by becoming the ultimate icons of the male ideal of female beauty. But, Spears' inspiring example is also paradoxical: As a young, attractive and ungodly successful businesswoman, she could have chosen any man on the planet for her mate. Instead, she chose a jerk who cheats on her.

Ladies, perhaps Spears is sacrificing herself for your sins.

-Michael Erler is a political science senior.

Edited April 25, 2006 by Lil Red

[Lil Red]

good article!