Hugh Hefner’s Legacy: The Celebrity Pornographer Turns 80

Breakpoint with Charles Colson ^ | 4/10/2006 | Charles Colson

[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.

[Skooz]

LOL!

An unfortunate choice of words, I guess.

[MplsSteve]

Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!

I just knew that some evil-inclined individual would post a pic of Helen Thomas!

My eyes are suddenly burning...

[Antoninus]

In other words, exceedingly queer. No wonder you're so anti-Playboy.

Yawn. Why don't you just switch over to one of the porn sites that you subscribe to? Your verbal masturbation on this site is tiresome.

[Antoninus]

Sexual repression: Bad.

Sexual promiscuity: Bad.

I agree with you to a point. Here's the point:

Sexual repression: Bad.

Sexual promiscuity: Worse.

As Aristotle recommended in the Nichomachean Ethics, when faced with opposite two vices, the mean is always best. But if you can't steer the exact middle, it's better to hew closer to the less destructive vice.

[steve-b]

These films must be extremely short if one can avail oneself of "hundreds of millions" of them each year.

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.

Well, that explains why porn films are so insidious. They flash by in the blink of an eye! They SUBLIMINALLY BRAINWASHING pure-minded young men and turn them into LUST-CRAZED DEGENERATES!!

[steve-b]

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.

Oh, puh-leeze. If artists had been able to separate glorification from titilation and present only the former, the effect on their patronage would have been more or less the same as the effect on Playboy's circulation if it had presented highbrow journalism without the nekkid wimmin.

[Skooz]

So, it is your opinion that art = porn because it has nekkid women?

[steve-b]

Men who embrace pornography are, psychologically speaking, saying "no" to reality and "yes" to a fantasy world. Such men can not be counted on in a time of crisis in the real world.

Yeah, that's why (for example) all those guys who first got the idea of flying into space from watching Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon collapsed in panic when flying real space capsules.

Sheesh.

[Skooz]

Sexual repression: Bad.

Sexual promiscuity: Worse.

Sexual fulfillment with a hot wife: Magnificent.

[steve-b]

I was thinking of that other actress with the weight problem who is kind of sexy, but is a total airhead.

Yeah, that really narrows it down....

[Hemingway's Ghost]

Yawn. Why don't you just switch over to one of the porn sites that you subscribe to? Your verbal masturbation on this site is tiresome.

Too bad some of us actually prefer depictions of real human women to your queer little fairy tales, eh? There's all sorts of pornography out there, friend. You might want to climb down from your tower.

[steve-b]

You made the point that a magazine that didn't have naked women in it but included serious articles and interviews wouldn't survive.

No, that wasn't my point.

Lying about what you said right here on this very thread combines stupidity and arrogance in one package. How very efficient of you.

[Military family member]

That's true, and I do not believe Hugh Hefner created that demand as this article suggests. Pornographic images go back for hundreds of years in many cultures.

[Antoninus]

Of course he's not the only one. There have always been pedophiles around.

Sure. And I'll bet the next thing your going to tell me is that there are exactly the same number of people (percentage-wise) acting out their perverse sexual fantasies with children now as there were back in the 1940s.

If you think that, I can only assume that you already own considerable acreage in the Everglades.

[Calpernia]

>>>>He changed the world forever, I think for the better

Ah yes. The celebration of the exploited woman!

Porn! Sex Tourism! Hookers and pimps! Rape and abuse!

TESTIMONY OF ROSA, AGE 14
before U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee

When I was fourteen, a man came to my parents' house in Veracruz, Mexico and asked me if I was interested in making money in the United States. He said I could make many times as much money doing the same things that I was doing in Mexico. At the time, I was working in a hotel cleaning rooms and I also helped around my house by watching my brothers and sisters. He said I would be in good hands, and would meet many other Mexican girls who had taken advantage of this great opportunity. My parents didn't want me to go, but I persuaded them.

A week later, I was smuggled into the United States through Texas to Orlando, Florida. It was then the men told me that my employment would consist of having sex with men for money. I had never had sex before, and I had never imagined selling my body.

And so my nightmare began. Because I was a virgin, the men decided to initiate me by raping me again and again, to teach me how to have sex. Over the next three months, I was taken to a different trailer every 15 days. Every night I had to sleep in the same bed in which I had been forced to service customers all day.

I couldn't do anything to stop it. I wasn't allowed to go outside without a guard. Many of the bosses had guns. I was constantly afraid. One of the bosses carried me off to a hotel one night, where he raped me. I could do nothing to stop him.

Because I was so young, I was always in demand with the customers. It was awful. Although the men were supposed to wear condoms, some didn't, so eventually I became pregnant and was forced to have an abortion. They sent me back to the brothel almost immediately.

I cannot forget what has happened. I can't put it behind me. I find it nearly impossible to trust people. I still feel shame. I was a decent girl in Mexico. I used to go to church with my family. I only wish none of this had ever happened.

[Antoninus]

You might want to climb down from your tower.

So now thinking porn is harmful and dangerous makes one an elitist? Listen, pal, I've been in the dregs where you are when I was a younger man. I know the harm it can do--I saw it ruin several of my friends. Only an idiot witnesses such things and says, "me too, please."

[Antoninus]

Lying about what you said right here on this very thread combines stupidity and arrogance in one package. How very efficient of you.

Your accusations are beyond boring. I said exactly the same thing in both posts. Here it is again for the slow-witted:

Minus the booby pictures, Playboy mostly likely would have folded up and blown away long ago.

[conserv13]

Porn! Sex Tourism! Hookers and pimps! Rape and abuse!

I don't believe Playboy or Hefner has ever promoted any of those things.

[MineralMan]

"Sure. And I'll bet the next thing your going to tell me is that there are exactly the same number of people (percentage-wise) acting out their perverse sexual fantasies with children now as there were back in the 1940s.
"

I'm not going to tell you anything of the sort. I have no data on pedophilia in the 1940s. It certainly existed, though.

As for the Everglades, I visited Everglades National Park in 1964.

[Calpernia]

I was being generalistic about the entire industry and not speaking specifically about Hefner.

But you are right, I really should have clarified that in my post.