When Hugh Hefner was a lad, he couldn’t see “Scarface.” Nor could he see “Reefer Madness,” nor Douglas Fairbanks travelogues, nor anti-Nazi films. Hefner’s native Chicago was the first American city to create a film censorship board and its pursed-lipped Pecksniffs fell to their work with the fiendish glee so typical of their species.
That every red-blooded American child can now watch “Scarface” or anything else she can manage to type into the Netflix machine is undoubtedly a form of moral progress. That Hefner and Playboy played some role in destroying American film boards is equally not to be doubted, although “Hef’s” role in that revolution is distinctly debatable. (Chicago’s “Police Board,” as it was known, didn’t officially disband until 1984).
There can be no question that “Hef” inserted himself “colorfully” into American life (I lost count of a number of tweets joking about reading Hefner’s obits, but only for the articles). He defeated his critics both among the religious and the feminists, two groups disliked by large classes of Americans.
He certainly gave safe harbor to some of the late 20th century’s best writers — Alex Haley, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton — and photographers (Annie Leibovitz); he also gave a raison d’etre to the very feminists who warred against him (Gloria Steinem, famously, had been a Playboy bunny). But quick—when’s the last time anyone asked you if you’d seen any article in Playboy? Or the last time any centerfold became “controversial?”
How many even noticed when Playboy announced that it would stop featuring nudes, or, a decent interval later, that it had resumed them? That’s not all Hefner’s fault, of course, but the best that can be said of his influence was that it was rooted to a time and a place long overdue for some rethinking and that his influence was — at best — diffuse. He was a morale officer in the culture war and a junior one at that.
Meanwhile, slightly less noticed was how Playboy quietly relied on hard-core porn to sustain itself in Hefner’s long decline. I am no conservative, but one need not be to have qualms about the way “adult” films are made in this country. If you care about workers you have to be disturbed by how the porn industry treats its workers — read those accounts of syphilis outbreaks, or the credible accusations of rape, and ask whether or not there might some room for government regulation?”
There is another way in which Hefner’s influence seeped into our culture, and it’s not all that charming. Despite the posture he liked to strike as an indefatigable foe of “the squares,” Hefner had an ad man’s instincts and cunning. He commodified and packaged hedonism as surely as the most sinister Madison Avenue suit sold cigarettes, Chevys or the war in Vietnam. He sold a scalable “lifestyle” whereby an American male could — nay, must — enjoy his swinging chick with his martini and his high fidelity sound “system.” That the chick in question might have ideas, desires, or ambitions of her own was, at best, a value-added bug, not a feature.
And today, more than ever, Hefner’s legacy is visible to this country.
Take a look, if you will, at some of those Vaseline-lensed pictures of our current president in all his pre-White House, gilded “splendor.” Note the sheen on the suits, the squared set of the jaw, the orgy of tinsel and — often as not — the chick in the background. What are all these but portraits of a man who bought the Playboy lifestyle package lock, stock, and barrel?
We’ve known since Oscar Wilde, at least, that the best hedonists are hard workers and serious thinkers. Hugh Hefner may have worked hard, but it was only in the service of his own image. The portrait of the swinger didn’t age all that well in his own time—and the projection of the current image, now in command of this Republic, is positively decrepit.
Bill Myers lives and works in Washington. Email him at [email protected]. He tweets from @billcaphill. If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.
