OK, now you've gone and done it:
Posted on 04/11/2006 7:39:19 AM PDT by Mr. Silverback
The founder of Playboy magazine, Hugh Hefner, is worried about his legacy. In preparation for his eightieth birthday, which he celebrated yesterday, he’s been busily filling leather-bound scrapbooks—1,500 of them—about his life and work. He’s arranged to be entombed next to Marilyn Monroe, the actress who posed nude in the first edition of Playboy in 1953.
According to a Wall Street Journal article by Matthew Scully, Hefner wants to be remembered as a philanthropist, social philosopher, cultural revolutionary. In fact, Hefner wants to be remembered as anything but what he was: a smut peddler, and the exploiter of women.
As Scully puts it with biting sarcasm, “There was a dark and joyless time in America when one could actually go about daily life without ever encountering pornographic images.” And without Hefner’s pioneering vision, “American males could not avail themselves of hundreds of millions of obscene films every year—as they do now.”
The fact is Hugh Hefner did more than anyone else to turn America into a great pornographic wasteland. Kids can now download porn on cell phones and iPods. While riding in their cars, children are treated to the sight of X-rated films on the DVD screens of cars in the next lane.
There’s no longer any doubt that the pornification of America has led to a huge increase in crime against women and children, crime committed by those who consume porn that teaches that women want to be raped and degraded.
And not just women. Hugh Hefner, sitting in his mansion in his bathrobe, thinking over his life, ought to consider the effect of his life’s work on kids like Justin Berry. Berry testified before Congress last week about how he was molested by a predator he met online. Justin spent most of his teen years posing naked online for people who paid to see him perform on camera. And he is far from alone: “There are hundreds of kids in the United States who are right now wrapped up in this horror,” he told Congress.
If Hefner wants to be remembered for his good deeds, he ought to start right now funding programs to help people damaged by his twisted view of sex—programs that help men who are enslaved to sexual addiction. Instead of funding Planned Parenthood, he ought to fund crisis pregnancy centers, which help women who bought into the lie that they were “liberated” only when they became reusable sex objects. Hefner should also help women who were lured into the sex industry and exploited—including those “Playboy Bunnies” he made famous, so many of whose lives ended tragically.
And then, Hefner might fund research into cures for the dozens of sexual diseases, including AIDS, that affect millions who believed his warped worldview—that sexual repression is bad, and that sexual promiscuity is, therefore, liberation and redemption.
The picture of Hefner on his eightieth birthday sitting in his mansion in his bathrobe, in the company of “girlfriends” paid to be there, and his jars of Viagra tablets, is a pathetic, tragic one, and it exposes his true legacy. The lesson: The life lived in pursuit of pleasure and self-gratification leads to nothing less than self-destruction.
Why is that highly unlikely? I've seen cars, usually filled with teenage looking boys, with porn playing over their DVD screens.
cruise Hotlanta or any other scum-filled city: it happens.
In other words, exceedingly queer. No wonder you're so anti-Playboy.
Be that as it may, very little art, nude or not, was created for the sole purpose of inspiring male mastubatory fantasies.
I am sure the creators of those pieces viewed them as fine art and the execution of artistic expression.
These films must be extremely short if one can avail oneself of "hundreds of millions" of them each year.
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Good point! According to my calculator there are only thirty one and one half million seconds in a year! Some people have an unbounded capacity for overstatement.
"...apparently the pornographic film industry now makes more money than Hollywood."
This was a result of the privacy offered by home video. Once people could view it in their homes rather than a seedy sticky theater they yielded to their curiosity. The operative word there is privacy. The bombardment of porn from the internet is intrusive.
I liked this one, but I won't tolerate him when he's woefully misinformed on illegal immigration. I unsubscribed after his column today.
It's not so much the porn the Hef himself has peddled, as Playboy has always been and remains soft-core, but the culture he, almost single-handedly created -- the girl-next-door pornoslut.
It's ironic that today people probably really do subscribe to Playboy for the articles. The pictorials barely register on the porn scale anymore.
Sexual repression: Bad.
Sexual promiscuity: Bad.
Hefner, for his own selfishness and greed, built a spiritual concentration camp for our souls, and too many of us were more than happy to become inmates.
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MY,my, perhaps you would feel more at home in Iran or Saudi Arabia?
What I mean to say is, it is a GOOD thing that we're no longer shocked by people like those women who strip down in public to protest the war or other public policy. It's GOOD that we can't be intimidated by homosexuals in leather on parade throats. It's GOOD to have a healthy understanding of what goes on in the world. It teaches us that sex is fire, and if not properly used it burns and destroys.
Why? You never seen porn before?
Happy to help:
http://www.tldm.org/news6/bundy.htm
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I have seen this before, do you really believe that Bundy was driven to kill women by pornography? How do you explain the fact that not all women have been killed?
My grandfather had a subscription to Playboy. I think he got it from the very first issue. They were stacked on a stand-up desk sort of thing behind the bottle green easy chair in the corner of the living room next to the fireplace. We were allowed to look at them. I'm not sure why. I think they didn't want us to think that women's bodies were dirty. It's even more interesting because my Uncle was/is a fag, and lived at home all his life, except when he bought a house across the street, but at some point he apparently sold it and moved back home. Probably when Grandpa died.
Weird family on my dad's side. They didn't tell us anything.
Plenty of porn on the walls of the bordellos in Herculaneum. Ever see the cock tree?
OK, now you've gone and done it:
Oneupmanship is killing the culture. That's why the kids all have to outdo the ones that came before and they seem to keep getting more and more self-destructive.
"If you don't think this is a major problem, I would encouage you to look into the articles about that perv at the Department of Homeland Security who was recently arrested for attempting to solicit a minor. Don't for a second think that he's the only one."
"But, with rare exception, the point of the nude art was the glorification of the human form. It was created by gifted artists to uplift the spirit and inspire.
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For sure. I remember being a young teenager, and those Playboy playmates sure seemed glorious to me. They certainly uplifted something and inspired something. Must be art, I guess.
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