In the world of celebrity, if being able to go by one name means success, what is being able to go by one syllable? At any rate, 'Hef' has died at the ripe age of ninety-one. I think it'll take a while to process exactly what his overall effect on society was. My favorite snarky assessment, which I can't seem to find on the t00bz, of his career is that 'he brought masturbation out of the bathroom and put it in the newsstands.
Obviously, Hugh Hefner didn't invent pornography, but he did 'class it up' by placing it tastefully in a magazine featuring articles and fiction by a host of luminaries. Hell, I bought an issue of Playboy six years ago for an article about narcotrafficking. In an interview I recently heard on the radio, the impetus behind Playboy was repackaging men's lifestyle magazines, which generally focused on hunting, fishing, and fighting off inexplicably hostile animals for the urban sophisticate. Hefner himself held a lot of progressive views, even putting up $25K for a reward for information leading to the arrest of killers of slain civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.
Despite Hefner's progressive bona fides, there's still the nagging feeling that his fortune was based on the exploitation of young women. Was Playboy's depiction of women in various states of undress liberating or demeaning, or both or neither? The prudes of the time sure got their dander up, but did women benefit? Hefner obviously was a product of his time, a time during which sexism was rampant, but was the freedom he offered really a liberation? I don't describe myself as a feminist, because I feel that it's a label that has to be bestowed by others, and I honestly don't have a good handle on how erotica should be considered (for instance, a friend of mine who is an alternative model told me that she got over her body dysmorphia by posing without clothes- sorry folks, no pics!). I will defer to my great-and-good friend Vacuumslayer to explore the less savory aspects of Hef's legacy. I agree with her that Hefner, who seemed to have been prematurely weaned, pushed an airbrushed image of pulchritude which is unrealistic and unhealthy and has fed into a Beauty Industrial Complex. Personally, though, while I can see how someone could derive benefits from posing nude, I can't imagine that any of you would be happy to discover naked pictures of your mother:
At any rate, I can't help but feel that Hugh Hefner remained in the public eye about forty years too long- after his heyday of the 1960s, he seemed to devolve into a parody of himself, ending up as an elderly cartoon lecher canoodling with girls young enough to be his granddaughters... not that I'm knocking it. I can't say that I, like the vast majority of straight men, have never had an occasional fantasy about such a life, but few of us have that combination of wealth and arrested adolescence that we attempt to live such a life, and most of us recognize the sleaziness of the fantasy.
Yeah, Hefner was a complicated fellow, and his legacy is pretty hard to unravel- I'm having a hard time even sorting out my attitude toward the guy. That being said, I can't help that our current president fancies himself a 'playboy' in the model of Hefner, but lacking any of the redeeming qualitites.
I find the arguments about his contribution to - or against - women's rights to be another dumb game we play with 20/20 hindsight.
ReplyDeleteAs you yourself say, he was a product of his times. He couldn't do things that couldn't be done - you have to crawl before you can walk. The things he did and produced in the 60s and 70s would be ridiculous now, just as Mark Twain's language in Tom Sawyer would be considered unacceptably racist today. When examining a historical figure's impact, to use anything but the contemporary standards of that figure's life is unfair, and utterly useless in trying to understand where they fit in the historical timeline.
Hefner had a lot to do with a lot of things we take for granted today. When he began, sex was for men only - the idea that women might enjoy sex was scandalous. He worked within the context of his time to normalize sex for Americans that previously had been locked in the same kind of puritanical terror that you find today in places like Saudi Arabia.
Did he help empower women? Certainly he did. He gave them options, allowed them to see their own bodies as beautiful, and paid them well. Did he exploit women? Certainly he did. But if you think about 'liberation', broadly writ, as a huge boulder poised on the side of a mountain, somebody or something had to start it rolling. And the women's rights movement could not have advanced without the normalization of sex and nudity.
Much would come later, and be done by serious people for serious reasons. But millions of men discovered that it was alright for women to live their own lives their way, and they further discovered that strong women were more interesting and exciting than a woman in a grey dress washing dishes in the kitchen...