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 don't you rattle me off a list of the magazines which "published interviews with substantive public figures unaccompanied by nude pictures" that were around in the 1950s and still exist today?"
Harper's
Atlantic Monthly
New Yorker
I could go on, but those are just off the top of my head.
Pardon me, I'm on a small laptop keyboard. I mean "en deshabille", of course.
Please add me to your ping list, Mr. Silverback.
I found a study done by the Candian Institute for Education on Family, in which they studied the effects of pornography on children which led to deviant sexual behavior for them in adulthood. I haven't read it yet, but you can see it here:
http://www.cief.ca/research_reports/harm.htm
Pornography is quite harmful to a community, in my view. Just like cocaine or heroin, not everyone who takes it turns to destructive behavior. But porn and deviancy do seem to be connected quite a bit.
Hugh Hefner did not birth the porn industry. But it would be fair to say that he brought it to the mainstream, that he made it acceptable and even glorified it.
I don't see where I did celebrate it, but to equate Hugh Hefner with Osama bin Laden in terms of destruction of the west is a little too melodramatic for me. :)
"I'll bet for each of them, there are a dozen that have gone under."
No doubt there are, as have many other magazines of various types. You made the point that a magazine that didn't have naked women in it but included serious articles and interviews wouldn't survive.
I gave you three prominent examples, off the top of my head. To find more would require enough research to see which serious magazines today were being published in the early 1950s. Trust me...there are plenty. You were incorrect in your supposition, simply based on the three publications I named.
Yes, many magazines have folded. That's business.
I think that acceptance of what you describe is cyclical. Late 60s and 70s were pretty liberal, and the 80s went conservative. Nineties (that's me...) went pretty liberal (sometimes I felt like a lone voice at college). The generation coming up in school now is comparatively conservative, from what I've seen.
I *also* think, that liberalism and conservativism constantly get redefined. For instance, a stance for or against gay marriage in this day and age is pretty much a well-defined point - conservatives (generally) are against it, libs (generally) are for it. In the 60s, the discussion would never even have occurred.
So, does this mean that we're all slouching towards Gomorrah? Not necessarily, IMHO. Society is also progressing in a positive manner - see Civil Rights legislation, greater inclusion of women in the workplace, and so forth. Not withstanding the looney 1% that are constant fodder for discussion here - the ardent feminazis, the Jesse Jacksons, and so forth - I think that society as a whole is *mostly* progressing for the better. Crime is down, divorce rates are down, violent crime is way down.
Unfortunately, illegitimacy rates are way up - that concerns me for the coming generations because society is built upon individual families. It remains to be seen what the ultimate effect of a 'fatherless' society will be, but I can't imagine that it will be good, unless there's a huge backlash (I'm seeing that in the workplace more and more in the past few years...Dads making time for their kids, rather than working the ridculous hours of the late 90s.) I guess that we'll find out.
/random rant off. thx for listening.
The keys are smaller and so is the screen. I make mistakes that way. :(
This is a weird story.
Well, yeah. 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.
Tittilation was almost always an unintended consequence of the piece.
The purpose of nudes in porn is to tittilate and appeal to the pruient interest, inspiring masturbation.
Art and porn really don't have much in common. Well, except pretty naked ladies. :)
. . . says a publisher of fantasy novels!
If he's an "icon", so is Larry Flynt.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh, come on now, compared to Hustler, Playboy looks like a sunday school text.
You haven't seen "Olympia", then. Or "Dejeuner sur L'Herbe", among others that caused a morality ruckus in their time. They're classics NOW, but they weren't born that way.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.