I haven’t written as much about Hugh Hefner as I thought I had… (and below, I got assists from John Robson, quoted above, and Colby Cosh)
…the “gauche, twitchy” Hefner was only able to pull off his “Most Interesting Man in the World” pose because we collectively, for whatever reason, went along — a sort of Emperor’s New Smoking Jacket or Sexual Stockholm Syndrome.
“Society” “need” a Hefner right that very second, and he’d have to do.
Watch his excruciating TV appearances and anyone can see that he’s a ridiculous poseur, a little boy playing at being a grownup playing at being another grownup.
Here’s something I wrote about the occupational hazards faced by Playboy centerfolds:
Why such a fuss over a slain pin-up girl? Because Stratten’s death was, to express it with a rhetorical blunt instrument, exquisitely timed. Her “career” straddled that Edenic sweet spot in American sexual history that comedian Adam Carolla calls “pre-AIDS, mid-coke.” At that thin wedge of the Reagan era, Stratten’s fate was seen by some as an early warning sign of trouble in the sexual revolution paradise.
And in show business, as they always say, timing is everything. Maybe that’s why another Playmate’s far more bizarre and theatrical demise six years earlier failed to capture the culture’s imagination. (…)
Myers, a friend and neighbor who’d been on the scene, says Young’s bedroom wall was covered with “news clippings, magazine articles, everything you could think of [about the Playboy mogul]. Written across it was something like: ‘Hugh Hefner is the devil.’”
One of the great benefits of having moved from left to right is that I was suddenly gifted with words — words and phrases for things I’d struggled to articulate for most of my life.
It felt like finally having a pebble removed from my shoe.
One of those phrases was “social capital.”
Thank you to Myron Magnet and a host of other early-days socons for that…
Wiser observers than I have pointed out that when the underclass adopts the elite’s “progressive” social experiments, the results can be especially tragic. After all, the poor lack the financial resources and social capital that help the rich counterbalance or even reverse the ruination these fads inevitably wreak.
No one in my working-class family ever made $25,000 a year, let alone $25 million. They were more or less law-abiding, unintellectual, and non-ideological, with no use for “art.”
But they took their cues from the larger 1970s culture. One sunny afternoon in my father’s new girlfriend’s backyard, her neighbor passed around Polaroids of his family’s vacation to a nudist colony. The grown-ups attempted to sound sophisticated, twittering about how “normal” and “natural” such an excursion surely was. Mostly I recall the blank, bewildered look on the face of the naked prepubescent daughter in one photo, a girl around my age.
My father matter of factly left his Playboys lying around his red-shag-carpeted, cork-walled “bachelor pad” on the rare occasions he kept to his post-divorce visiting schedule. To do otherwise was to “shelter your children.” That was frowned upon by “experts.”
For precisely the same reason, my stepfather was equally adamant that I not be banished from the living room should a “not recommended for children” R-rated movie come on TV.
Interestingly, only one of those men was a perv.
Anyway, the Guardian’s clock has stopped.
Over at LifeSiteNews:
It is perhaps an irony that Hefner suffered the same adverse effects as millions of others who would become hooked on the product he helped bring into the mainstream. As I wrote in a column three years ago, Hugh Hefner actually became sexually dysfunctional, unable to perform without pornography even when he was with beautiful women:
Here’s Mark Steyn:
