Does the late Hugh Hefner (Playboy) deserve the excoriating editorials in the NYT?
This weekend there were two really, really negative editorials and one positive one about Hugh Hefner. The two negative ones were by the regular NYT Ross Dothan; the other was by Susan Brownmiller.
Brownmiller quotes Barbara Ehrenreich: “The magazine’s real message was not eroticism but escape from the bondage of breadwinning. Sex — or Hefner’s Pepsi-clean version of it — was there to legitimize what was truly subversive about Playboy. In every issue, in every month, there was a Playmate to prove that a playboy didn’t have to be a husband to be a man.” The reason Mr. Hefner supported abortion was not from any feminist feeling; it was purely strategic.
Amber Batura, in another article about how Hefner "invented the modern man", says
I think Amber Batura is right. Playboy magazine was one of several critical influences on culture in the 1950s-1970s. For millions of people, it was a positive influence. Not for everybody, though. Brownmiller told Hefner "You are my enemy" on the Dick Cavett show in 1970. Dothan even blames Hefner for syphilis--quite an achievement.
Playboy: Good or Bad?
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.RD
Brownmiller quotes Barbara Ehrenreich: “The magazine’s real message was not eroticism but escape from the bondage of breadwinning. Sex — or Hefner’s Pepsi-clean version of it — was there to legitimize what was truly subversive about Playboy. In every issue, in every month, there was a Playmate to prove that a playboy didn’t have to be a husband to be a man.” The reason Mr. Hefner supported abortion was not from any feminist feeling; it was purely strategic.
Amber Batura, in another article about how Hefner "invented the modern man", says
The masculine ideal of the era was narrowly defined: aloof, outdoorsy, a breadwinner, “manly.” Showing too much of an interest in culture, fine food or travel was anathema. Mr. Hefner felt trapped by conformity and designed a magazine that promoted a very different idea of what made an individual a “man” through its features and advice on clothing, food, alcohol selections, art, music and literature. Though it quickly became a cliché, many male readers really did “read it for the articles,” telling surveys that they enjoyed features on the ideal bachelor pad even more than the centerfold.
I think Amber Batura is right. Playboy magazine was one of several critical influences on culture in the 1950s-1970s. For millions of people, it was a positive influence. Not for everybody, though. Brownmiller told Hefner "You are my enemy" on the Dick Cavett show in 1970. Dothan even blames Hefner for syphilis--quite an achievement.
Playboy: Good or Bad?
Comments (17)
Surely you are not saying that working class men didn't masturbate to Playboy centerfolds?
Hustler was the working man's porn rag I thought?
[quote=Tim Black]
...Hefner, above all, was committed to the liberties of all; not just the lifestyle of would-be playboys, but also those fighting for civil rights, those who were still falling foul of repressive laws, those who desired liberty but found it being shamefully restricted. So at his Playboy clubs during the 1960s, you could hear black comedians perform when most other comedy clubs were still segregated. (Indeed, he even gave $25,000 to one of those comedians, Dick Gregory, to use as a reward for information regarding the murder of three young civil-rights activists in Mississippi, as a result of which convictions were successfully brought against several KKK members.) You could find Hefner in the 1970s, his hands deep in his pockets, funding Jesse Jackson’s civil-rights group, the Rainbow PUSH coalition; and you could find him supporting the comedian Lenny Bruce when many others had abandoned him because of his obscenity convictions. In the words of Hefner’s daughter, Christie, he couldn’t bear to see anyone ‘persecuted or prosecuted for his words and his ideas’.
In the 1980s, he enshrined his commitment to freedom of expression by founding the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Awards. The diversity of the recipients testifies to Hefner’s awareness that fundamental freedoms have to be universal. The list includes women and men, right-wingers and left wingers, Muslims and atheists, and even a pair of magicians in Penn and Teller. It shows that Hefner was willing to support anyone who made the case for greater freedom of thought and speech, from campaigners against government spying in the name of counterterrorism to those who sought to end blacklisting in the television industry.
[/quote]
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/lets-hear-it-for-the-hef/#.WdIAWk2CzCI
Great reading, at least for those sinners like myself who still enjoy the "high minded sentiments" of liberty.
I was joking about the classist nature of your comment. All publishing caters to class--upper, middle, lower, prole--and so does the porn industry (in which I wouldn't include Playboy). Hefner's
business was up-market nightclub entertainment--at least that's my impression. Playboy was sold in the front of newsstands, not under the counter, in back, or in the brown paper bag format.
The retail venues where people used to buy books and magazines, from the New Yorker to hardcore porn, have gone the way of much other retail, but there were several grades of refinement available. Playboy, Hustler, Penthouse, and Screw, etc.
I'm not quite sure who Al Goldstein aimed Screw at, but its aesthetic was decidedly downmarket. If there is such a thing as irreverent porn, Screw was it. Everything that Playboy wasn't.
Looks like most of my high school reading material :) . Anyway, my general thought on this is that Hefner's death is a matter for him and his family. The rest is about selling newspapers, and editorials cherry picking from his life to further their own agenda and settle their own scores either personal or political. Right now, there's not much more to it than voyeurism, ironically, considering the subject. It would probably take years more of research to come up with anything very interesting or enlightening about his personality that is actually verifiably true. And by that time there will probably be few people who care enough to listen.
It was a 'gateway drug'.