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Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner
NY Times ^ | 30 Sep 2017 | Ross Douthat

Posted on 09/30/2017 9:11:16 PM PDT by Rummyfan

Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.

Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.

The arc of his life vindicated his moral critics, conservative and feminist: What began with talk of jazz and Picasso and other signifiers of good taste ended in a sleazy decrepitude that would have been pitiable if it wasn’t still so exploitative.

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: goodriddance; hefner
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To: Mrs. Don-o

There are plenty of idiots and perverts teaching out there that make news but exactly WHAT about reasonable sex education is not scientific? This is what they told me and all my peers:

1) You can get horrifying and deadly diseases by having sex with infected people. And sometimes you may not know they are infected by looking at them. Showed us pictures of said diseases. Explained to us that condoms do not protect you 100% from these disease.

2) If you have unprotected sex, the female will most likely get pregnant. ALL birth control methods can fail and they gave us the exact percentages. Ladies, if you don’t want a baby or risky abortion surgery, DON’T have sex.

HOW is that any worse than saying people will go burn in a lake of fire for eternity because a God they have never seen told some men thousands of years ago to write a book? And that book specifically prohibits it because God said so!

Sorry, people no longer buy it...


81 posted on 10/01/2017 8:50:15 AM PDT by varyouga
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To: varyouga
Howcome, in your estimation, "Porn is merely an inevitable result of ancient human nature"... but the impulse to seek the Almighty and discover His divine law (whether expressed as supernatural revelation or the observed truths of Natural Law) is put down as a noble but somehow less-successful program.

Yet the religious impulse, the desire to live in harmony with the Tao or the Divine Lawgiver, is also a constant in human behavior in all centuries and all inhabited continents, and in today's world is dramatically growing --- in most places, if one does not focus myopically on the declining societies of the sterile West.

No society that maximizes male promiscuity (and porn is largely paraphernalia for male promiscuity) and minimizes marriage, develops even to the functional tribal level, which is based on identifiable kinship and, therefore, stable wedlock in one form or another. Promiscuity lacks survival value, and its resurgence --- and the disappearance of marriage --- signals civilization's decline. Not to barbarism, which still preserves kinship, but to utter dissolution.

It's happening in deformed and non-formed families now, and the cities where their deformed or non-formed progeny crowd and clamor.

Evidence? Look around you.

82 posted on 10/01/2017 9:45:21 AM PDT by Mrs. Don-o (Stone cold sober, as a matter of fact.)
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To: Bonemaker

” Does hedonism bring happiness?”

Like anything else...yes, in moderation.


I think his point wasn’t “fun” or “momentary ecstasy” but deep happiness. The way he described it, fun was what you feel doing it, and happiness is what you feel after. Lots of hedonism probably makes you feel a little sick after (too much drink, food, or sex with your best friend’s wife, etc).

The moderation part makes it not hedonism. We want joy. We want moments of extreme fun and ecstasy. But you don’t want a permanent orgasm; it’s like being paralyzed and has more in common with pain than pleasure. We want general happiness in our life, and constraining our urges brings us more general contentment than acting like squirrels following instincts would.


83 posted on 10/01/2017 9:56:55 AM PDT by Yaelle (Socialism, faithfully implemented, delivers anguish and devastation. - President Trump)
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To: Rummyfan

Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion by Izabella St James
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/5972961/Bunny-Tales-Behind-Closed-Doors-at-the-Playboy-Mansion-by-Izabella-St-James-review.html

Playboy mansion? More like a squalid prison: Former Playmates tell of ‘grubby’ world inside Hugh Hefner’s empire
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1342643/Hugh-Hefners-Playboy-mansion-like-squalid-prison-say-Playmates.html


84 posted on 10/01/2017 10:48:55 AM PDT by minnesota_bound
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To: Rummyfan
My two cents on Hefner is this.

Porno magazines had been around for time before Playboy. What Hefner did was to make it a more classy operation and infuse it with interesting articles and interviews, make it more mainstream.

Along the way Hefner got caught up in Progressive Politics and certainly had a hand in the whole Free Love movement in the 1960’s along with women's rights to a degree. Except he was a shameless exploiter of women for carnal and pleasure's sake. Almost a Oxymoron for what he claimed he was doing.

He lead the way for the worst behind him like Larry Flynt and Bob Guccione, who went a lot further than he did with publishing pornography.

In a way Hefner helped lead the way down a very slippery Moral and Ethical slope that was at great odds with the Judeo-Christian principles so many of us grew up with.

I suspect at his very core Hefner was a very unhappy man and was never satisfied on any level, especially emotionally, with all the women he had. Sadly Hefner became a caricature of himself trying to continually relive the glory days of Playboy back in the 1960’s.

85 posted on 10/01/2017 11:10:50 AM PDT by Captain Peter Blood
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To: Mrs. Don-o

“... but the impulse to seek the Almighty and discover His divine law (whether expressed as supernatural revelation or the observed truths of Natural Law) is put down as a noble but somehow less-successful program.”

Thats a noble intent but unfortunately sex is a bigger and more immediate drive than spirituality. Like food, it is integral to our species survival. 99% of people would sin or hurt another if it means not starving to death. All those ancestors who didnt prioritize sex, no longer have living relatives.

While the Universe is a divine plane, we exist here and now as animals. That fact must be fully embraced and celebrated for us to be succesful here. Not hidden with lies and kept in a corner at the barrel of a gun


86 posted on 10/01/2017 11:11:09 AM PDT by varyouga
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To: Rummyfan
Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, . . ."

As well as creating a fantasy world where gullible Joe Sixpacks could, for a price**, enter and pretend to be "just like them".

**

87 posted on 10/01/2017 12:04:49 PM PDT by Oatka
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To: varyouga
I'm frankly dubious about what you're presenting as a tenet of evolutionary sociobiology. Even within that paradigm, just as there's no selection pressure favoring homosexuality, so there's no selection pressure for porn (which gets men to waste their genetic material) especially when, in some cultural patterns, it's so oriented toward prepubescent girls (Japanese) or catamites (Hellenic?)

No selection pressure for Bacha Bazi either: so what's driving those Pashtuns?

If she's looking for survival, Mother Nature would have us decisively wired for monogamy. Matrimony: Mother Gift. We don't survive or thrive as mere seed-scatterers, after all; but more to the point, neither do our "seeds."

All this is rather far afield from the original thoughts about Hugh Hefner's contribution to the cultural rot. And that's what it is, rot.

I don't know what's hot in women's porn (I admit I haven't been exposed to it: my choice) but I'll tell you one thing: I find selfish horndogs a sexual depressant. Even if they dig jazz and Picasso.

88 posted on 10/01/2017 1:33:25 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o (Stone cold sober, as a matter of fact.)
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To: varyouga
Vaginal intercourse causes babies, and sexually-transmitted disease are to be avoided: those are the main topics of sex ed? Don't kid yourself. That could be taught in 20 minutes, not spread across the whole K-12 scope-and-sequence chart.

Sex ed is about worldview change.

Nowadays it's getting into "safer" anal intercourse for middle-schoolers.

When were you a youthful beneficiary of the sex ed program, anyway? 1955?

89 posted on 10/01/2017 1:38:23 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o (Stone cold sober, as a matter of fact.)
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To: Rummyfan
Ross is right, but Hefner did shape the world we live in now.

Today's world isn't wholly the bright, hedonistic side that Hef's supporters celebrate or wholly the dark, creepy, seedy side that Douthat deplores.

It's a mixture of both.

I suspect even Ross Douthat would have trouble fitting into 1940s/1950s America.

Plus Ross can be very condescending. This is from one of his articles he links to:

If you watched “The Girls Next Door,” the TV show about Hefner’s ménage, you noticed that the Playboy mystique was emphatically not a joke in the lower middle class environs that produced his centerfolds and their most adoring fans. Like Trumpism, Hefnerian values have prospered in the blue-collar vacuum created by religion’s retreat, community’s unraveling.

C'mon, really? America might have found the girls on Hef's show pretty, but everybody knew Hef and the show were laughable, didn't we?

90 posted on 10/01/2017 1:48:44 PM PDT by x
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To: Jimmy Valentine
Condemning him for his misdeeds isn't self righteous indignation -- but your stupid remarks are. And Cotton Mather's campaign to pursue imaginary witchcraft activity led to the deaths of at least three of my multi-great aunts, so **** off.

91 posted on 10/01/2017 2:22:06 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (www.tapatalk.com/groups/godsgravesglyphs/, forum.darwincentral.org, www.gopbriefingroom.com)
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To: varyouga
Telling people “God wrote these rules. You will burn” isn’t going to work in a modern scientific society and we need a much better approach to educate people on sex It is you that is out of step, my FRiend, both with the majority on this forum and with the will of your Creator. You WILL bow your knee to Jesus Christ-- now, or in the hereafter. And without the benefit of his sacrifice, we all will burn for our sins and crimes, just like Hefner is doubtless burning now, unless he made a deathbed confession. Which I doubt.
92 posted on 10/01/2017 3:26:06 PM PDT by backwoods-engineer (Trump won; we got Gorsuch and a bit of the MAGA agenda. But now the Swamp is back in control.)
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To: fr_freak

Once Hefner divorced his first wife and fully embraced the “Playboy” philosophy and lifestyle, why did he get married two more times, and have more children with the second wife? It goes without saying that he was a very mixed up man.


93 posted on 10/01/2017 3:35:49 PM PDT by Cecily
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To: backwoods-engineer

“You WILL bow your knee to Jesus Christ— now, or in the hereafter. And without the benefit of his sacrifice, we all will burn for our sins and crimes, just like Hefner is doubtless burning now”

Yea, submit to this religion or you’ll be burned alive for eternity. What a way to improve the human condition and win over hearts and minds...


94 posted on 10/01/2017 3:38:22 PM PDT by varyouga
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To: varyouga; Mrs. Don-o

“People were having sex in every different way since the beginning of time.”

You have no way of knowing this. As it has been said, there are three kinds of people in the world: 1) those who see the humor in extrapolated data

But, seriously, trying to guess the correct version of history based on projecting our personal experiences (like a lot of people do with political outcomes), is a lot like normalcy bias. But rather than projecting personal experiences forward, it projects them backward.

Many civilizations have reached pinnacles of achievement only to later collapse for various reasons. This has happened to cities, nations, and empires.

“Societal collapse is a result of people not adapting to inevitable change.”

When collapse comes as a result of sexual deviancy, the destructive “change” is often something that can not be adapted to. Some of the change is in what sexual behavior is accepted by society. But the results may be the same down through history in the same way that the result of jumping from a cliff does not change.

Societies prosper and flourish when there is a commitment by individuals and society as a whole to monogamy. No harm is caused by this. But a great deal of harm comes from rejecting it. We are seeing some of this right now.

Here are some of the destructive effects of rejecting this fundamental law of nature, which may manifest in individuals and communities:

1) sexual obsession - sex is an important part of life, but it is not the only important thing. Sex obsession can interfere with the ability to do productive work, contribute charitably to the needy, build strong friendships and relationships which are not based on receiving sexual gratification. It can cause other health issues.

2) As Mrs. Don-o pointed out, one of the serious consequences of breaking universal laws in the area of sexual fidelity is sexually transmitted disease.

3) Increase in sexual activity that is harmful to others. This includes spreading STDs to innocent victims, sexual abuse of children, rape, human trafficking, and all of the many criminal activities connected with these things.

4) Emotional and psychological damage. The neurotransmitters involved in sex produce an effect intended to create a lifelong bond. Sex and lust that creates this emotional bond with a person where the relationship is temporary or discarded in a trivial way, results in shame, guilt, and depression. These things often fuel addictions to more destructive sexual activities as well as chemical dependency.

5) Stirring up lust through pornography and illicit sexual relationships results in unrealistic and selfish expectations, blocked goals (due to the unrealistic expectations), anger and depression (due to the blocked goals), as well as violence and self-destructive behaviors (due to the anger and depression).

6) Sexual behavior that harms others physically and psychologically results in scarred and damaged people who become a burden on society. Children who are severely damaged by the betrayal of trust by those who are supposed to protect them often act out the painful emotions (including suppressed emotions) with violence and other psychotic behavior. Generally, sex abuse can create pathological behaviors in the next generation.

“The ‘revolution’ is unprescendented in recorded history because people for the first time had a scientific understanding of what happens to their body AND the means to control it.”

That’s not true. Birth control has been understood for thousands of years. And abortion and infanticide have existed for nearly as long. Further, even animals often act in similar ways. Males of some species will kill their offspring to cause the females to be more sexually available.

“we need a much better approach to educate people on sex”

The “education” that needs to happen is for people to learn the consequences of sexual deviancy, how to help people who are controlled by sexual deviancy and addiction, and how to protect children from being exposed to or seduced into self-destructive sexual deviancy.


95 posted on 10/01/2017 3:44:40 PM PDT by unlearner (You will never come to know that which you do not know until you first know that you do not know it.)
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To: unlearner

Well said.


96 posted on 10/01/2017 4:45:14 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o (Stone cold sober, as a matter of fact.)
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To: wardaddy

So do you have a problem with voicing their opinion on Hefner if it is not a positive eulogy??


97 posted on 10/01/2017 4:57:20 PM PDT by Freedom56v2 (Freeper formerly known as bushwon ;))
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To: wardaddy

Scold Republic.

I love it.

“Leavingt no pearl unclutched.”


98 posted on 10/01/2017 5:02:17 PM PDT by sparklite2 (I'm less interested in the rights I have than the liberties I can take.)
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To: varyouga; backwoods-engineer
“You WILL bow your knee to Jesus Christ— now, or in the hereafter. And without the benefit of his sacrifice, we all will burn for our sins and crimes, just like Hefner is doubtless burning now”

Yea, submit to this religion or you’ll be burned alive for eternity. What a way to improve the human condition and win over hearts and minds...

For your own good and eternal safety, heed the Holy Spirit when He speaks to you about Christ and your need to make a decision for him.

99 posted on 10/01/2017 5:03:46 PM PDT by thecodont
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To: varyouga

I’ve read some of your posts.
I’ll subscribe to your newsletter. LOL


100 posted on 10/01/2017 5:06:10 PM PDT by sparklite2 (I'm less interested in the rights I have than the liberties I can take.)
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