Hugh Hefner, the infamous founder of the pornographic magazine Playboy died at the Playboy mansion yesterday at the age of 91 after a long career promoting sexual license, the LGBT, and other forms of immorality:
Hugh Hefner, who created Playboy magazine and spun it into a media and entertainment-industry giant — all the while, as its very public avatar, squiring attractive young women (and sometimes marrying them) well into his 80s — died on Wednesday at his home, the Playboy Mansion, in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles. He was 91.
His death was announced by Playboy Enterprises.
Hefner the man and Playboy the brand were inseparable. Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American priggishness and wider social intolerance. Both were derided over the years — as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative and finally as anachronistic. But Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from the moment he emerged in the early 1950s. His timing was perfect.
He was compared to Jay Gatsby, Citizen Kane and Walt Disney, but Mr. Hefner was his own production. He repeatedly likened his life to a romantic movie; it starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and smoking jacket hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating people.
The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27, a new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept with.
He had only recently moved out of his parents’ house and left his job at Children’s Activities magazine. But in an editorial in Playboy’s inaugural issue, the young publisher purveyed another life:
“We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”
This scene projected an era’s “premium boys’ style,” Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia University and the author of “The Sixties,” said in an interview. “It’s part of an ensemble with the James Bond movies, John F. Kennedy, swinging, the guy who is young, vigorous, indifferent to the bonds of social responsibility.”
Mr. Hefner was reviled, first by guardians of the 1950s social order — J. Edgar Hoover among them — and later by feminists. But Playboy’s circulation reached one million by 1960 and peaked at about seven million in the 1970s.
Long after other publishers made the nude “Playmate” centerfold look more sugary than daring, Playboy remained the most successful men’s magazine in the world. Mr. Hefner’s company branched into movie, cable and digital production, sold its own line of clothing and jewelry, and opened clubs, resorts and casinos.
The brand faded over the years, its flagship magazine’s circulation declining to less than a million.
Mr. Hefner remained editor in chief even after agreeing to the magazine’s startling (and, as it turned out, short-lived) decision in 2015 to stop publishing nude photographs. In 2016, he handed over creative control of Playboy to his son Cooper Hefner. Playboy Enterprises’ chief executive, Scott Flanders, acknowledged that the internet had overrun the magazine’s province.
“You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free,” he said. “And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”
The magazine’s website, Playboy.com, had already been revamped as a “safe for work” site. Playboy was no longer illicit. (Early this year, the magazine brought back nudes.)
Mr. Hefner began excoriating American puritanism at a time when doctors refused contraceptives to single women and the Hollywood production code dictated separate beds for married couples. As the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, an early Playboy contributor, saw the 1950s, “People wore tight little gray flannel suits and went to their tight little jobs.”
“You couldn’t talk politically,” Mr. Feiffer said in the 1992 documentary “Hugh Hefner: Once Upon a Time.” “You couldn’t use obscenities. What Playboy represented was the beginning of a break from all that.”
Playboy was born more in fun than in anger. Mr. Hefner’s first publisher’s message, written at his kitchen table in Chicago, announced, “We don’t expect to solve any world problems or prove any great moral truths.” (source)
So what did Hugh Hefner really create?
Hefner’s competition, the infamous pornographer Alvin “Al” Goldstein and publisher of Screw magazine famously and honestly stated what Hefner believed but in a more direct, less sophistical way. He said that pornography has nothing to do with freedom, but rather about license. As he admitted, porn is simply an advantageous pressure point by which to cause a revolution in society by destroying the current moral and social foundation and replacing it with one based on license. Since any foundation based on license is subject to the will of man to determine right and wrong and to distinguish between good and evil based on what is deemed to be true at the moment, morality is reduced to a matter of the will that is accepted at the current time. Since “do what thou wilt” becomes the philosophy of the law, and since this is the foundation philosophy of all satanism and unjust rebellion, one must necessarily conclude that pornography is a gateway to rebellion against God and to establish satanism in its place, bringing man from true freedom in Christ to bondage by his own hand and secured in the errors of his own fallen desires.
The struggle between God and the demons is lived out in the world in the struggle between right and wrong. Since pornography involves the preternatural exploitation and manipulation of deep human emotions and the soul, as ultimately the desire for pleasure one seeks through pornography is really a search for unity and peace with God but through the flesh instead of the spirit, the state of pornography in any society is a reflection of the health of that society. Certainly even if pornography were banned in a society there would still be people who would make it, buy it illegally, and watch it, and there would be even people who engage in very deviant practices, for one cannot absolutely control every person at every minute. However, what matters is a general social concensus and perception as well as consideration for what a “majority” of people would or might think to be normal or engage in. Again, this is not to say “majority rules” or that “might makes right” in justifying pornography of any type, but rather used as a metric of the moral state of the society. In the paraphrased words of a wise history professor and now friend, ‘watch the pornography industry, because the pornography industry reflects the current and projects the future trends of society.’
Taking to heart the words of this professor and friend, consider the 1972 pornography film “Deep Throat“. This film was considered highly controversial during its time, because it depicted a woman fellating various men (not all at once, in separate scenes) and swallowing their semen. It was so controversial that it actually was taken to court in New York, Memphis and other municipalities of charges of obscenity as well as in the UK.
That was 45 years ago.
As a metric to see how much things have changed and in such a short time, anal sex between heterosexual couples on film was once classified as “extreme pornography” and “obscene.” Now, it is so common that porn stars admit that anal sex is considered a standard part of all pornography produced today, and in particular “rough anal.” Indeed, it is one of the most common porn searches on the Internet according to PornHub, the heaviest trafficked porn website on the Internet that is also known for producing very interesting statistical breakdowns of its consumers:
“Anal” appears in both men and women’s lists of the top 15 porn search terms. While both are perverse, take particular note of the women’s searches- “extreme gangbang,” “threesome,” “big black dick”. This compares with men, who while they are searching for certain “fetish” types (“ebony,” “milf,” and “teen”), there is not a particular emphasis on things involving complete self degradation.
This is not just statistics of “normal” pornography (two people having sex) that you are looking at. This is the public acceptance of extreme perversity that at the time that Deep Throat was produced would possibly land the prostitutes in the film as well as the pimps who filmed in jail for a long time. It would also rightly earn these people, especially the women, near complete social ostracism on account of their behavior because of what is happening in these films, which many times involve pornographic actors engaging in actual anal rape, vomiting into the mouths of these women, making them lick the anuses of the performers and sometimes even eat feces, peeing in their mouths, and outright punching and making them bleed before masturbating into the wounds and making derogatory comments.
A scene from a film by Ghetto Gaggers, one of the most infamous online pornographic websites. Based in New Jersey, the site specialized in everything mentioned above- the complete degradation (in this case of black women by white men, but there are other sites that do the same in other ways- it just happens this site is the best known in the USA) of the women in it of the worst sort, including physical abuse, actual rape on camera, drinking spit/vomit/urine, feces eating, and other horrible things.
Yet how come if the women know this is going to happen to them, why do they keep going by choice?
This is the real scandal- it is not the abuse of the women, but the fact that the women are actively seeking out in order to willingly participate in the worst forms of pornography– coprophilia, emetophilia, group sex- on their own. And the people of the society laud them and say THEY HAVE A RIGHT TO DO THIS AND WE MUST PROTECT THEM.
If this is not the extreme decline of a society, I do not know what is.
However, how did we get in 45 years from oral sex and swallowing semen from being regarded as obscene and a prosecutable offense to now having literal vomit and feces porn be something that is not just regarded as normal, but something that people defend as FREEDUMB OF SPEECH?
It was men like Hugh Hefner. Not just him- he was one of a number- but he was certainly a major influence in the formation of all the filth above.
Hugh Hefner did not publicly engage in, as far as I understand, the following behaviors. However, he did certainly do some of this in private. As far as his public “work” is considered, he helped along with Al Goldstein, Larry Flynt, and now men such as Fabian Thylmann to break down the moral code of society in order that behaviors like that described above might be able to be propagated. On cannot blame him for “everything,” just like how no one part of a machine can be attributed to the complete functioning or non-functioning of that machine, as it takes a collaborative effort. Nevertheless, he played a willing part in creating, maintaining, and spreading the functioning of the pornographic machine that has poisioned American society and the world.
Fabian Thylmann. What Hefner did decades ago is what Thylmann is doing today. The founder of PornHub, the German citizen has made hundreds of millions of dollars by propagating the worst kinds of pornography for free across the world through the Internet.
There is no difference between Thylmann and Hefner, philosophically speaking. The seed that Hefner planted, watered, and grew is what Thylmann is now pruning, growing, and propagating from seed and cuttings (to use gardeners terms). The essence of the evil itself has not changed, just the faces doing it and the means and ends by which it can be propagated.
Hefner was responsible, by his own admission, for the spread of the LGBT and its ideas. Indeed, all pornography is inherently homosexual because it strips the genitive nature of sex out completely and reduces it to the sole pursuit of pleasure. However, Hefner specifically regarded himself as a champion of the LGBT, he promoted LGBT causes, and even admitted to engaging in homosexual activities himself since at least the 1970s.
Make no mistake, I do not blame Hefner for all of the problems either. The fact is that if people did not consume Hefner’s filth, he would have no market. The people are equally to blame, and this ties in with the decline of religion and the rise of secularism. In one sense, one can argue that Hefner simply was a reflection of what American society was already becoming, and that he simply supplied a product to a market willing to buy it. This cannot be understated as well- the individuals of the society who make up the consumers are to blame for consuming it, since nobody made them buy his products and that just because people are doing something in large numbers does not make it right. However, those men who do promote the degradation of society, regardless of whether it is considered popular or not at the time, must be called out on their deeds.
Evil deeds do not just happen overnight. Indeed, even mushrooms that “pop up” on logs all came from spores that blew through the wind from another mushroom and having found fertile ground to settle on, took root and grew.
The situation of America’s obsession with porn and filth did not happen overnight. Like a plant, it grew slowly, starting very small. What we see today is when like a weed allowed to grow unchecked in garden, the blossoming of pornography and all of the filth it brings into its natural and horrifying fruits. A fruit, mind you, from a tree whose seeds Hefner carefully planted, watered, protected, and grew over a long time, and then defended.
A Christmas Carol starring English actor George C. Scott. This is the scene where Scrooge and Marley converse. As Marley notes beginning at 5:45, the chain he wears was built “link by link and yard by yard.”
So is also the situation with pornography today. The chains of this evil on our society were built my men like Hefner, link by link and yard by yard.
We are just seeing the full chain.
As the story noted, Hefner “excoriated” the “puritanical” life of most Americans. He rejected “morality” and pushed for license instead, embodying the “do what thou wilt” attitude.
And where did it take America? On a macro social level, it facilitate the rise of no-fault divorce, the destruction of families, the rise of the LGBT, the promotion of pedophilia and child molestation and a generation of broken, sad, miserable people confused about life and many of them seeking pleasure in debased forms of sex trying to fill the empty void that God once filled and were told to reject in the name of freedom.
And this is what it creates. A generation of people masturbating to videos of people drinking vomit and eating feces on their computers.
I dare not say more about Hefner’s end.