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And this:
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Gloria Steinem's 1963 expose of Hugh Hefner's Playboy empire is here.
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Julie Bindel also has a low opinion of Hef's legacy:
“The notion that Playboy turns women into sex objects is ridiculous,” said the sadistic pimp in 2010. “Women are sex objects… It’s the attraction between the sexes that makes the world go ‘round. That’s why women wear lipstick and short skirts.”
Hefner was responsible for turning porn into an industry. As Gail Dines writes in her searing expose of the porn industry, he took it from the back street to Wall Street and, thanks in large part to him, it is now a multibillion dollar a year industry. Hefner operated in a country I live in, a country where if you film any act of humiliation or torture – and if the victim is a woman – the film is both entertainment and it is protected speech.
Hef didn't see women as human beings deserving of dignity and respect--he was more open about it than most men.
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Hef was human garbage and shouldn't be mourned at all.
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Yes, he was trash and he did a lot of damage to men and women.
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"Hugh Hefner" is synonymous with "misogyny"--or "asshole."
I like this passage:
There’s an important critique of libertarian morality to the Hefner story, too. Hefner was an advocate for freedom from all kinds of government restraint, a champion of the First Amendment and abortion rights (as every obituary has reminded us repeatedly). He was a “passionate libertarian.” Hefner also believed he was changing American morality, saying: “What it really comes down to is an attempt to establish what has been called a new morality… really think that’s what this thing called the ‘American sexual revolution’ is really all about.” (This is taken from the NYT’s charming compilation of Hefner’s “Most Memorable Interview Moments.”) Here we see exactly what happens when “freedom” is taken to be a moral philosophy in itself. Like many libertarians, Hefner wanted to be free, but he wanted to be free from government tyranny only so he could exercise a kind of unaccountable private tyranny. As with libertarianism always, “freedom to be a dick” seems to be the goal. He wanted to establish a “new morality” that would simply let him do as he pleased to women, without any ethical constraints. “Liberty,” while essential, is meaningless unless it is also coupled with a set of standards for how people should actually behave toward one another.
He was the Charles Koch of the degenerate set.
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In Hefnerism, women weren't just fucked, they were fucked over:
The trouble is, Hefner was half-right, and in a world that silences women, half-right is all a man needs to be. The denial of female sexuality is real. The insistence that female sexual pleasure doesn’t matter is of huge political significance. Yet anyone who really cared about that wouldn’t focus on telling young, large-breasted women to loosen up and open their legs.
They’d focus on issues that prevent women of all ages from having happy, healthy, fulfilling sex lives. Issues such as FGM, birth injuries, vaginismus, post-menopausal dryness, the neglect of female bodies in medical research, the misrepresentation of non-penetrative sex as “not real sex”… These are issues that relate to the interior lives of women, not just the number of holes via which one might enter them.
Of course Hefner had little time for such things. The reason why? Because, like all ageing playboys defending their right to fuck silent women, he was really the one with hang-ups about sex, the one so terrified of female sexual and reproductive power he had to sanitise it in glossy magazine shoots, reducing real, live women to airbrushed skin and compliance.
He really was anti-sex, like all pornographers and pimps. He engaged in classic projection.
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