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| English: Hugh Hefner on the Red Carpet for a Wounded Warrior Project benefit event at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, CA on May 16, 2009. - Photo by Glenn Francis of www.PacificProDigital.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Hugh Hefner has died, and already a slew of rosy obituaries are surfacing from those who knew him, those who idealized his Playboy Mansion life, and those who want to pay tribute to his impact on the American sexual revolution. These obituaries laud Hefner for his outspoken support of civil rights and his role in liberating American culture from its sexual conservatism. But now is as opportune a moment as any to consider his outdated, misogynist views of women, and the damage he's done to the cause of feminism as well as the case against him as a sexual predator.
New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat gives Hef both barrels.
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.
Reaction to the reaction?
The case could even be made—Hefner himself certainly wanted to make it—that, by sponsoring a broadly libertarian view of culture, Hefner and Playboy played a pivotal role in bringing an end to imprisoning ideas of gentility. In one of those carom shots of which cultural history is full, by announcing feminine sexuality as a good thing for the girl next door—however comically self-interested the announcer’s motive—Hefner may indeed have played an unintentional role in the assertion of female sexuality and autonomy. After all, he reminded many women of what they didn’t like about the way they were portrayed, and that they might have something to say about it.
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