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.
No, no Ive read plenty of Cosmo, and my daughter gets Cosmo Girl, and they have about 5 pages of eewww guys per issue. Yuk!
And I thought that EVERYONE knew that Playgirl was for gay guys...just eewwww.
Where are the mags for hetero girls? (Hehe, I dont expect you guys to know, just curious as to why they havent taken off like the girlie stuff)
Also, take a look at a list of interviews that Playboy has published in the 60's:
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Frank Sinatra
Jimmy Hoffa
Ayn Rand
Malcolm X
I think that Playboy qualifies as pornography, but certainly of the soft variety. But porn, nonetheless.
I once had the issue with the long John Lennon interview. I was a huge Lennon fan at the time, and would have bought it just for that.
I finally noticed the interview about 6 months after I bought the mag. :0)
Like Ron White says, once you've seen one woman naked, you want to see the rest naked too.
Hugh Hefner has done MORE to promote promiscuity, abortion, hatred between the sexes and radical feminism than anyone alive today.
On some level, religious puritans realize that the current war will doom them in much the same way the war against Naziism doomed genteel anti-Semitism. The parallels are just too uncomfortable, even if not conscously considered.
What it really was was the introduction of the home VHS machine.
Print porn is barely hanging on these days. Hefner's money comes from the cable operation. Guccione's all but bankrupt. Flynt's wildly diversified.
thankfully, we'll never know. : )
It happened a while back. I believe the guy was arrested.
Huh? Can you back that up with some evidence?
No, there have been plenty of nudes in art throughout history.
HUSTLER magazine has even better interviews now!
no actually I've seen this myself in Chicago.
Like it or not, sin began thousands of years before the 1950's - and assuredly in pornography-format.
But Hefner was the promoter - the pimp - of his and our age.
Did you EVER read the "Playboy Philosophy"? I DID - a lot, when I was young, callow and collegate.
Hugh presented women as purely sex objects, sex as an acceptable form of indoor sport between people with no commitment between the partners, and he did this quite slickly.
Women who were just entering the workplace at the time Playboy and his twisted philosphy became popular among many young males with overactive glands, found themselves the targets of guys who just wanted bed-partners instead of life partners.
The popularization of the reaction by many women to this led to the growth of radical anti-male feminism in America.
Its no accident that some of the most virulent feminazis were once Playboy "bunnies".
Hugh's latest "experiments" were with homosexuality.
If you have seen pcitures of Hugh lately, he looks a lot older than his age - if possible.
But then what do you expect from a low-life dissolute hedonist?
"What it really was was the introduction of the home VHS machine. "
Well, that came some time after Playboy. Actually, there was a brisk market in the 50s and 60s for 8mm stag movies. Since home movies were a popular thing at the time, many households had an 8mm projector.
There were a number of outlets for 8mm porn, and it was pretty popular among the young adult male set. You run across a stash of them now and then at estate sales these days. They're really, really cheap, as are the projectors.
The movies are rather crude, though, in comparison to the more heavily produced VHS porn tapes. Still...they were popular.
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