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.

[cryptical]

Is having breast-implanted nitwits pretending to fawn over you because of your money your idea of happiness?

If it's not happiness, it's a burden I'd bear for humanity.

[mkjessup]

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?

Perhaps you would consider yourself as enlightened as Hugh Hefner if it were the female members of YOUR family being exploited and exposed for his bottom line? If Hugh had been pimping out your mother in his centerfold, I would be surprised if you considered it artwork.

[mkjessup]

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?

Why don't YOU believe Bundy? And how many women HAVE to be killed before you acknowledge that there could be a connection? Bundy was a world class serial killer. He had nothing to gain by his entirely voluntary testimony because he already knew he was going to be executed. Are you suggesting that he made it all up on a lark?

Why of course.

[RipSawyer]

Why of course.

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I don't know what Bundy's motivation was, obviously he was a crazed man so who knows, he may have believed it, but I don't consider him a reliable witness. I simply don't believe that the fact that someone enjoyed pornography means that that is the cause of his killing. There are plenty of people who have enjoyed pornography, and I confess to being one, who have never hurt anyone. So does pornography cause you to kill or to be peaceful? I certainly am extremely doubtful that anyone has been driven to murder by anything ever seen in Playboy. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is an old and outdated superstition.

[xenophiles]

I found a study done by the Candian Institute for Education on Family, in which they studied the effects of pornography on children... I haven't read it yet, but you can see it here:

http://www.cief.ca/research_reports/harm.htm

I thumbed through it; pages and pages of preaching to the choir, loads of sinister-sounding but really pretty meaningless statistics, and a long part in the middle explaining that it's basically impossible to show a causal connection between pornography and sexual crime.

When I can pick three random paragraphs in a "study" and find three logical errors I feel justified in chucking the whole thing.

[Revolting cat!]

If it hadn't been Hefner, it would have been somebody else. Hollywood (and French and Italian) sex bombs were happening at the same time he was getting started and needed no help from Hugh!

[xenophiles]

Happy to help:

http://www.tldm.org/news6/bundy.htm

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

1) Bundy claimed that pornography and alcohol eroded his inhibitions but were not the source of his violent urges. It's very hard to argue that he wouldn't have killed without them.

2) Charles Manson drew his inspiration from the Bible and the Beatles. See? The logic doesn't seem to work unless you apply it to something you already believe.

3) A serial killer is not a typical rapist or even a typical murderer, so even if you believe that his opinion should be taken at face value it really doesn't have any bearing on "a huge [nationwide] increase in violence against women and children".

[mountainfolk]

No mention of the Playboy channel which I always associated with Hugh Hefner whether he was the owner or not. I visited a friend whose husband was out of town and late in the evening I was flipping channels and for the first time saw the pornography on the Playboy channel. My friend said her husband watched it every night and insisted on subscribing to it. I thought then, and do now, that having that bilge coming into a home is corrosive to the marriage and the inner peace of those addicted to watching it. This couple had young daughters who would be affected by their father's escalation of sexual titillation. The marriage ended before their teens and the husband went from bad to worse. Hefner didn't invent pornography but he contributed to the miserable industry that degrades both sexes. He is as disgusting to me as he is pitiful.

[RightWingAtheist]

I've collected some back issues on the basis of the fiction and articles (really), but of course, I always look at the pictures first. One issue I have from the sixties features a profile of William F Buckley written by George Gilder The earliest issue I have is from 1988; sorry Hef, but I like real women, not tatooed, pierced, lacquered-up, surgically-modifed blow-up dolls.

[cyborg]

His girlfriends all look the same. I've seen girls who are blonde who look different but his girls are clones. I'm not into porn but I watched some documentary about Heff and the girls were VERY different back then. Wonder what changed.

[Zack Nguyen]

Haven't read that study yet. But even without giving the matter intensive study, I can easily conclude (at minimum) that porn is not a net positive for a community.

I would further argue that it is not neutral either. Sex and how it is portrayed cannot be neutral. Showing women or men naked in blatantly exaggerated (and sometimes degrading) positions of sexual arousal and gratification does not lift humanity, and is not artistic. It advances the view that permiscuous (did I spell that right?) sex is desirable, that the gift of sex is something to be displayed in the most base manner, and that women exist to fulfill that desire.

Add it up, and porn must be a net negative for a society that is invaded by it.

[Sam the Sham]

It just seems to me that there is a connection between society - or at least a significant part of the young male portion of it - viewing women purely as sex objects and sex as a recreational rather than a sacrimental and procreative intimate act between two people who really love each other - and the simultaneous or slightly later appearance of man-hating feminazis as a connection.

Of course there is. Barbara Ehrenreich's The Hearts of Men is largely unreadable but her basic insight is spot on. Sometime around 1950 labor saving appliances made it possible for men to have clean clothes, hot meals, and a clean place without having to support a wife. A new class of upscale men saw the possibilites in the new freedoms. Instead of supporting a wife they could buy the swank bachelor pad, and the hi fi stereo set to listen to Dave Brubeck and discuss existentialism.

The Thunderbird and Playboy emerged to target this new urban sophisticated single male market. Instead of singleness being equated with a dorky kind of extended adolescence it was a time to revel in hep cat, Rat Pack, double martini Jet Age freedom. Playboy liberated masculinity from Field and Stream. Single men had a lot more interesting and sophisticated things to do than go hunting and fishing all the time.

And with the emergence of no fault divorce in the early 70's men were free to trade in their middle aged wives to jump into the sexual playground. The media then was full of horror stories about 50ish women without marketable job skills who were now expected to support themselves. So if marriage offers no security anymore, if the economic value of a wife's labor is worthless, the sensible thing for a woman is to always have marketable job skills. To enter the workforce and stay there.

[Victoria Delsoul]

What a great line: The life lived in pursuit of pleasure and self-gratification leads to nothing less than self-destruction.

Hugh Hefner made his fortune exploiting women and perverting minds - and he'll be remembered for that.

[Wycowboy]

Hefner creeps me out. He always has. Yuck.

I agree, he's a creepy sumbitch.

[steve-b]

And how many women HAVE to be killed before you acknowledge that there could be a connection?

Sarah Brady called. She wants her overheated rhetoric back.

He had nothing to gain

BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Clinton had nothing to gain by cheating at golf, either, but he did anyway. Ego-boosting gestures are what narcissistic personalities do.

[mkjessup]

"Ego-boosting gestures are what narcissistic personalities do."

You are no doubt an authority on that subject.

[steve-b]

Yes, your messages are a good study resource.

[mkjessup]

Yes, your messages are a good study resource.

How unfortunate that you discard the factual, for the fantasy. Then again, Hefner made that his dubious "gift" to society. The fact is, which I have never denied, is that pornography has always been present in most societies, however until Hefner and his ilk came along, pornography existed in the shadows, a sliver of influence for those of limited intellect. After Playboy, Hustler, etc., brought pornography into the mainstream, it has become a constant presence, exposing children to things that at one time, they would never have been exposed to. Some would call that enlightenment. The wiser man calls it what it is, corruption of a child's innocence.

And before you deny it, ask yourself how it is that grade school children are now being indoctrinated so far as sexual preferences and practices, contraception and abortifacients are being made freely available, and what that equates to is the spiritual degradation of our children. You, and the pro-porn crowd, choose to exalt pornography, elevating sex to the equivalent of a major league sport, when it was never intended that way by our Creator. Laugh, mock and ridicule all you wish but the truth is, sex can be a wonderful servant, or a terrible master.

I suspect you know it as the latter.

Good luck with your addiction.

[steve-b]

Rejoice, for you have comrades in your cause!

[Antoninus]

Rejoice, for you have comrades in your cause!

Personally, if it came down to it, I'd grudgingly side with those folks against your comrades.