Why Conservatives Should Celebrate Hugh Hefner

He was the kind of person American conservatism seeks to enable — the self-made man; the radical, pajama-clad individual; the author of his own destiny. And he idealized women as women, in a way the left no longer allows.

Ironically, when given the choice of going full-throttle into hard-core pornography, and creating the kind of content the market now demanded, or bowing to mainstream traditional standards that shunned nudity on supermarket shelves, Playboy made the more conservative choice. Even in the battle to survive commercially, there were lines Hugh Hefner would not cross. He thus took his place alongside the very conservatives he once mocked earlier.

That does not mean Hefner was a conservative. But Hefner personified the famous promise at the heart of the Declaration of Independence — that this Republic would be devoted to the “pursuit of Happiness.” He pursued that ideal in an age when the left insisted on grievance and misery. He lived an eccentric life. But in the end, he gave up the thrill of girlfriends for the love of one wife. He challenged social conventions, but he also, perhaps despite himself, affirmed the eternal truth that women are women, and there are moral limits.

Hefner’s victory came with a loss — namely, the institution that was Playboy itself. Our culture now rejects the ideal of feminine beauty that Playboy once promoted, regarding it as a form of oppression rather than liberation.

But that feminine ideal lives on — not in the pages of Playboy, but in the imaginations of millions of quietly dissenting adults in the world Hefner helped create. However he is judged, Hefner changed us all.

Re: I’m of the internet age myself, I’ve only seen screenshots of the magazine, certainly not the articles. ;d

As a full blooded man-child of the 1950s... what I most celebrate Hef for--

Was introducing me to... Barbi Benton!

Gadzooks, I had a red hot... thing for her--

For a long, long... long time--

BTW: Hefner asked the young co-ed for a date. Upon being asked, she reportedly demurred to the then-42-year-old Hefner: "I don't know, I've never dated anyone over 24 before." To which Hefner replied, "That's all right, neither have I."

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Let me remind you that Jack Abbot technically was a good writer by that definition, and that Norman Mailer specifically tried to get him released from prison, all on the basis of his writing skills. Let’s just say that when he got paroled, he ultimately ended up put back in prison for the exact same crime that landed him there in the first place, stabbing a Cuban-American waiter due to not being allowed to use the bathroom.

Something similar to the Jack Abbot situation happened in France later on via Michel Foucault: He petitioned for Roger Knobelspiess’s release from jail, claiming that being imprisoned and the conditions therein is inhuman by nature, and basically chose him due to his being a good writer. And like Abbot, he ultimately got arrested shortly after entering parole for the exact same crime that got him arrested in the first place: Namely, robbing a bank. Foucault then said in response “You are a danger to yourselves and a danger to us, if, that is…you do not wish to find yourself in the hand of a legal system that has been put to sleep by arbitrariness. You are also a historical danger. For, like a society, a justice which has to question itself can exist only if it works on itself and its institutions.”

And writing stuff has far more serious impact on everyone than simply making cabinets. The French Revolution was drafted by writers, after all, philosophes who worshipped themselves and fraudulently claimed themselves benefactors when they were truly in it for themselves. That proved to be a mistake. Writing transmits information, which people can then use to adopt certain beliefs. Cabinets just store stuff, harmless on its own, a far different entity than books, where even one book or treatise can influence someone to commit mass murder.

As far as Playboy doing that, again, the Encyclopedie did the same thing as well, and that led directly to the French Revolution, the September Massacres, and the Reign of Terror.

I wouldn’t say it’s “celebrate” as much as it is “acknowledge”.

Whatever he was or wasn’t, he was an American success story at what he set out to do.

How many of us ever make it to that level of success?

So I’ll give him a nod and wish him well on wherever we go after we leave this Earth.

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