Taking Up the Hugh and Cry
We've come to expect certain things from Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. A pipe. Slippers. A robe. Slickly made-over, nearly naked women hanging on his arms. Self-serving rationalizations for the hedonistic lifestyle he began promulgating during the 1950s. And the smug "look what I got away with" smirk that complements his seemingly consequence-free, free-sex ethos. After all, here's an 84-year-old man still living it up with a bevy of bunnies (it would appear) young enough to be his great-granddaughters.
One thing I never expected to hear from Hugh Hefner was him simultaneously acknowledging the significance of marriage and denouncing deception within it. But that's exactly what the skin-mag magnate recently did in an interview with the New York Post. "When you get married, you make a commitment," Hef said. "I had a lot of girlfriends, but it's not the same as cheating. I don't cheat. I am very open about what I do. … Sandra Bullock's husband looks like a real creep. I think that when you are in a relationship, you should be honest. The real immorality of infidelity is the lying."
Hefner was talking of course, about the sex scandal that has engulfed Bullock's soon-to-be ex-husband Jesse James. Hefner also brought up Tiger Woods in the interview. Presumably he's a "creep" too.
But what about Mr. Hefner? He seems to have, in his own mind, successfully absolved himself of the creep label he lobs—easily and self-righteously—at two men who can't seem to get enough sex, if the tabloids are even remotely accurate.
Is the godfather of American pornography really tsk-tsking two high-profile men living the exact lifestyle he himself pioneered? Was Hef just joking? Or could it be that the man who has done more for the cause of pornography in the history of the world simply can't see how damaging, demeaning and destructive his legacy truly is?
Because without Hefner's influence, I submit to you, the world in which Tiger Woods, Jesse James and myriad others who become addicted to self-serving sex and pornography simply doesn't exist.
History of Hugh
You don't have to spend much time looking around our culture today to notice that sexual imagery and pornography are everywhere. On the Web. In advertising. On newsstands. In commercials. In sexts. In movies. Music. TV. Even a cursory glance across the pop culture spectrum reveals a society saturated in sex and the corresponding idea that sex is one of the key components—if not the most important component—of living the good life. While many factors have contributed to the sexualization of our culture, I would argue that no single individual bears more responsibility than Hugh Hefner.
Born to Glenn and Grace Hefner in 1926, Hugh was the eldest of two sons and was raised in a strict Methodist household. It apparently was not an upbringing that captured his imagination or nurtured his heart. For those things, Hefner turned to Hollywood. "I was a very idealistic, very romantic kid in a very typically Midwestern Methodist repressed home," he said in a 2004 Slate article. "There was no show of affection of any kind, and I escaped to dreams and fantasies produced, by and large, by the music and the movies of the '30s."
Escape, dreams and fantasies. These words capture the direction Hefner's life would soon take. In 1949 he married fellow Northwestern student Mildred Williams. It wasn't long, though, before Hef began to shed the values of his traditional upbringing, replacing them with a vision of perpetual adolescence cleverly packaged as a sophisticated, emancipated version of the American dream.
After working as a promotional copywriter at Esquire magazine, Hefner decided to launch his own publication. He wanted to call it Stag Party, but another magazine already had a similar name. Taking a friend's suggestion, he decided to call it Playboy, a moniker that reflected the "enlightened" approach to living the high life he was just beginning to map out. Relying upon a $1,000 loan from his mother and an additional $8,000 from investors, Hefner published the premiere issue in December 1953. To help stoke sales, he included a nude photo of actress Marilyn Monroe that had been taken before she became a star. The first issue sold 50,000 copies.
The rest, as they say, is history. Throughout the '50s and '60s, Hef's star steadily rose—as his marriage to Mildred declined into divorce, perhaps because she had grown weary of her husband's many extramarital affairs (which she allegedly knew about). Mainstream chroniclers of the Playboy story would have us believe that the magazine's success was due to Hefner's shrewd combination of top-drawer fiction and nonfiction, his vision of the "good life" and, of course, plenty of naked women. More skeptical folks—me among them—strongly suspect it was all about the latter.
Porn's "Mad Man"
Playboy's popularity peaked in 1972, with circulation of 7.2 million copies. Since then, Hefner's culturally iconic brand has faced competition from virtually every direction. Both so-called softcore "lad" magazines, such as Maxim and FHM, and hardcore pornographic magazines started siphoning off "readers." And then the Internet officially brought porn out from behind gas station counters and into family rooms. As a result, Playboy's circulation today has fallen to about 2.5 million.
But while Hefner's brand may have peaked decades ago, the payments we're making on his vision of sexual liberation are astronomical—even by the standards of today's inflated cultural currency. In his outstanding 2003 article "Hugh Hefner's Hollow Victory" (originally published in re:generation quarterly magazine and republished at christianitytoday.com), Read Mercer Schuchardt described Hefner's cultural victory:
"[Before Playboy, pornography] was a vile business in an underground market. And because you had to show up to obtain it, participating in pornography meant publicly admitting that you were a pervert, even if only to a group of other perverts. What pornography needed to be profitable on a mass scale was to be removed from the sexual ghetto and brought into the living room. It needed someone to adopt it, domesticate it, and teach it manners. As a mythmaker on the scale of Walt Disney, Hugh Hefner did for porn what Henry Higgins did for Eliza Doolittle. As an adman, Hefner saw the need to package sexuality into aspirational categories, to tell a story about it that placed men in the narrative itself in a way that was not just acceptable but downright desirable."
In a very real sense, then, what Hefner has sought to accomplish for nearly 60 years is nothing short of redefining important moral categories. How well he has succeeded depends on your perspective. But if our culture's collective yawn when it comes to his E! reality series The Girls Next Door is any indication (it's a show in which Hef shacks up with two or three "girlfriends" who are each about one-quarter his age), Hefner has indeed contributed to a society in which absolutely anything goes.
And that brings us back to where we started.
The Real Immorality
What's most jaw-dropping about Hefner defining "the real immorality" of Jesse James' and Tiger Woods' infidelities is that he apparently believes his logic is logical … and he expects others to accept his reasoning. Hefner actually thinks he can get away with calling James and Woods "creeps" because of their lies, while hoping we don't spend too much time speculating on the role he himself played in creating the stage on which they tell them.
Playboy's persistent and pernicious depiction of women as sex objects to be used and discarded has become de rigueur in America, if not the entire Western world. And both James and Woods, at some point, bought into the false promises of no-consequence sexual "freedom" that the Pied Piper of porn has been peddling for six decades.
But there's still one more page to turn here. Has the result of that libidinous looseness led us all to the good life, as Hef has sought to define it?
The answer is largely self-evident. James and Woods, whose names we recognize—along with scores of anonymous husbands and teens and grandfathers whose sad stories we'll never hear—have swallowed Hugh Hefner's deceptively charming, poisonously packaged pornographic lie. And their resulting choices have wrought untold personal and relational devastation.
So take a long look in the mirror, Hugh. And point your moral indignation at yourself.