HUGH HEFNER, 1926-2017by Daniel PennyHugh Hefner, millionaire libertine, child of sexually repressed

HUGH HEFNER, 1926-2017by Daniel PennyHugh Hefner, millionaire libertine, child of sexually repressed Methodists, and father of a generation of men’s magazines, has died at 91. With the golden age of Playboy long gone by the time I would have been old enough to sweatily peruse its pages, my own feelings about Hefner have centered around a mixture of bemused indifference and the kind of awe one feels toward a grizzled old tree that’s been struck by lightning, yet remains standing. For me, he was always a fossil, a cartoon, and a skeezy brand ambassador—rather than a living person, or an agent of profound change in American sex culture.Much has been written about Hefner’s dubious philosophies regarding women, but less I think, about the influence he has had over millions of men, who imagined his persona as the Mount Olympus of bachelorhood toward which we should all strive. Though Playboy of the past few decades was more Hollywood, Florida than Hollywood, California, it began as a fantasy that was hip, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated—as opposed to the macho pulp of lad mags like Men’s Adventure, Man’s Life and Stag with headlines like “Weasels Ripped My Flesh.” As a young Hefner wrote in Playboy’s first editorial in 1953, “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.” Nevermind that when he wrote these lines, Hefner was living with his first wife, the first woman he’d slept with, and publishing his magazine with the help of his mother, who had loaned him a substantial $1000 to get it off the ground. “I was the boy who dreamed the dream” would eventually become Hefner’s refrain, and dream he did.The particular figure that Hefner dreamt up has perhaps died along with him, or at least devolved into kitschy caricature, like the gravel-voiced “Most Interesting Man in the World,” who hawks Dos Equis between sword fights and yacht excursions. It was from Hefner’s loins that this type sprung: one part James Bond, two parts Ivy League prodigal son, and a dash of contrarianism for spice. His party guests spanned the intellectual and cultural spectrum of his time: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., Mick Jagger—and he greeted them all in slippers and a robe. What other man has turned a constant uniform of pajamas into a sign of success rather than a symptom of alcoholic depression?When I look through men’s magazines and see guys who are supposedly living “the dream” today, I instead find blowhards, technocrats, and goons—more interested in bragging to attractive female journalists about how much they paid for a Picasso, rather than discussing the artwork on their wall. But perhaps those differences are purely generational: were he a millennial like myself, I imagine Hefner would have preferred smoking a vape to a pipe, and instead of building a media empire, he would probably have dropped out of college to found a VR-sex app. Ultimately, Hefner was very much a man of his time—an early defender of free speech and abortion rights, and also a sexist pig, obsessed with an idealized vision of female beauty. For better or worse, his tastes and obsessions guided the inner lives of his readers, who are themselves are getting on in years. Hefner may now be buried next to Marilyn Monroe in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, but he will manage to live on every time a curious boy exhumes his dad’s old Playboys and gives them a browse—for the articles, of course. -- source link

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