The Real Heft of Hefner


There has been quite a bit of bandwidth dedicated to whom many consider the progenitor of the sexual revolution's most iconoclastic corporate emblem, Playboy. Hugh Hefner, reported to have an IQ north of 150, provided the lubricity to transubstantiate pornography from a seedy, slimey back-alley industry to mainstreamed, glamorized "sleaze"- the main freight being the objectification of women- book ended by serious journalism featuring such heralded writers as William F. Buckley and Alex Haley.

Hefner sought to philosophically deconstruct theological sanctions-repeal and replace if you will-the prudish, outdated sexual constraint promulgated by moral exegetes. The Playboy philosophy hinged upon this single edict," A man's morality, like his religion, is a personal affair best left to his own conscience."

The scientific construct for this borrowed heavily from the Kinsey Report, an ideological gateway to libertinism. Hefner sought to introduce a new morality, part Aleister Crowley's "Do What Thou Wilt" and progressive advancement of social mores emancipated from the stricture of the cultural, moral and spiritual imprint accreted from the Elizabethan Age.  This new orthodoxy, engorged with sexual iconoclasm, has been celebrated as "a pure lyric of expression of the appetite of human nature."  Hefner commiserated about the incongruity of what people said publicly about sex and sexuality and what they did privately noting that this country's appetite for the forbidden was voracious and he believed insatiable.

He transformed himself into the embodiment of the sexual renaissance man; a strange alchemy of psuedo-erudition and sartorial panache all the while engaging in an unfettered sexual appetite.  His joie de vive made him the imprimatur of this brand of hedonism he sought to repackage as  sophisticated, counter cultural and eminent. He is heralded as an iconoclast who donated to social justice and civil rights causes while simultaneously openly advocating the patrician constraints of his empire's most prized commodity-women as objects of licentiousness.

 The previous paragraphs is my version of the academic, high-brow rendering thus far of his legacy.  For regular folks,sadly, Playboy, the magazine, became a ubiquitous, right-of-passage parchment for prepubescent boys who would, on far too many occasions, discover the dirty magazine in their father's hidden stash. The Bill of Rights for the new sexual Constitution actually delivered a bill of wrongs for conceivably millions of boys whose raging hormones would be skewered by this misogynistic imprint of women and sexual intimacy.  The curating of fetishization, masturbation and promiscuity left scar tissue and a framework for addiction to pornography whose impact was so pronounced that it more than marginally altered the psycho-sexual construct by which they would develop. There would be scores of studies done to demonstrate the neurological damage of this new ethos.

Dr.Tony Evans said that," pornography use is one of the greatest indicators that a man has lost touch with his manhood."  We were indoctrinated into voyeurism and depictions of sex not only bereft of constraint but entangled with violence or Caligulan type escapades in which self-gratification was the primary focus. There is an unspoken malignancy tied to the playboy iconography.  He inculcated a passive recklessness by positing that technology ( the creation of vaccines,abortifacients) would outpace the proliferation of sexually-transmitted diseases, out of wedlock births, and abortions that followed this self-centered odyssey of indulgence. His prescience would be a partial truth.

The internet made access to copious amounts of pornographic material seamless and removed the stigma of having to leave the clandestine confines of one's home to indulge in the salacious, digital ecosystem that brought a dark web of perversion right to your desktop, laptop or phone. Ironically, this proliferation became the death knell of the revolutionary magazine that sought to mainstream the ribald as racy prose and the topography of women as the sole source stimuli for men. The collateral damage, the legacy of this sexual utopia, is far greater than the image of a centerfold burned into boys and men's memories. This contagion created pathogens that are still destroying households around the globe to this day.