Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner | Hacker News Reader

Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner

nytimes.com

41 pointsFirebrand33 comments

>But in every way that mattered he made those changes worse, our culture coarser and crueler and more sterile

I know that this is a political and personal, but hope this article and topic does not get shunned as yet another politically incorrect crime of thought.

There is something about culture that is at least approaching a resemblance to science: it is inescapable that cultures evolved alongside people over thousands of years as not just individuals, but groups competed for resources to survive. Therefore, our cultures--including ethics and morals--are not just incidental to random variables, but the product of the competition and very bluntly the deaths of untold numbers of people.

Since The Enlightenment and subsequent developments in Western ideology such as The Age of Reason, major aspects of status quo Western culture such as god-fearing Christianity have been tossed out as unreasonable. But there is maybe something to be careful about here. We are not as rational as we believe. Even scientists, even the greatest scientist ever, Newton, was a devoted Christian who spent countless hours studying and publishing secret messages in the Bible.

I'm not saying we should be Christians, but perhaps there were certain aspects of organized religion that were productive and the baby is now being thrown out with the bath water. If we are not rational, perhaps there is value in, for the time being, balancing logical reasoning with traditional culture. Right now it feels liberalism has us rethinking and reshaping everything.

For me personally, I am not afraid to say porn was an unredeemable and destructive vice in my life. It cultivated low self confidence in myself, and objectified and over-sexuaized women in my mind. I am glad to be away from that now.

I don't think it is government's role to restrict personal liberties either: if it works for you and everyone else involved, that's none of my business. But culture could help guide us with this kind of thing.

After seeing some recent Bill Nye and Adam Savage productions, this growing theme of sexualizing children's minds in particular is why I want to start a conversation. See NSFW: https://m.imgur.com/26YWvus

Two thoughts immediately cross my mind. 1. You are not European, but more likely American. And 2. You didn't get the raw uncensored version of history.

Show me a temple, a Playboy mansion or a church. And I'll show you a place whose sole purpose is sexual abuse.

In Europe we've had to deconstruct organised religion not because it was so different from the Playboy Mansion, but because it was the same. A scam of power to enable sexual abuse.

When Bill Clinton had sex with a young intern the question some people had was 'why would he jepordize his career for sex with a young girl?'. Whereas the honest question would be the reverse: 'why would he have ambition to become president if he couldn't?'

The understanding of just how we are repressed by our own evolution is not making things worse -- just less hidden.

We no longer sell a 12 year to an adult for ownership/sexual-abuse/marriage in a legal contract overseen by the Church.

The world is actually a better place now. Not because everything is okidoki right now, but because the power structures of the past were not as glamorous or sinfree as you may seem to think. At the height of Christianity in the Roman empire having a little boy to abuse was the default.

Seriously, Hugh Heffner, although not very interesting isn't anywhere near the perversion of organized religion.

Im an athestic/agnostic American. I think you are missing the gist of what the GP is saying. Abuses aside (which will happen in any institution with humans and power assymmetry), the aspirations of these beliefs were motivational, socially constructive foundations for mass culture. To immediately dismiss all of why they were so powerful and prevalent in the first place could have unpredicted negative consequence.

I think there's something to both sides here. I often think this is the fundamental issue that America faces: does it want to be the country it was for the last 400 years, or the country it told itself it was?

AFAICT most of American politics is explainable through that prism.

I feel like part of the issue is there's not an either/or or a before/after. There's not the past and then progress, it's a long continual climb. There's also not the country the US told itself it was and then the country it was; the US for the entirety of its history was both a progressive, positive force for good in the world and ahead of other countries in some aspects, while being backwards and evil in others.

For example, in 1945 while the US was helping Europe to liberate itself from the Nazis, segregation and Jim Crow laws were still in effect back home. So we have a very difficult task of trying to sort through the past and figure out what "American" qualities are good and worth keeping, and which are negative and worth throwing away.

Progress isn't inherently good, we've got this dichotomy in the US where some people are like fuck it let's just throw everything at the wall and we'll assume that's for the better vs things are pretty good so we shouldn't do anything at all. Both are tribal and not really realistic.

Europe is mostly free of control by religious organisations. Even Ireland is shaking off the shackles.

Compare Europe (mostly atheist) with the US (mostly religious) to discover the consequences of dismissing religion in society.

This is overstating it. In Europe you still have state sponsored churches which were shunned from the earliest days of the US (at least partially). The church attendance rate in some parts of Europe is still very high. Poland is 60%, Ireland is 50%, Italy is 30%. Those rates are very comparable to the most religious states in the US (Poland tops all but Utah).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_attendance

You also don't realize how a lot of church attendance in the US is mostly cultural/social. Not to mention, Europe isn't without flaw, so it's hard to "compare" anything objectively.

Echoing the person you are responding to: the OP's original point is more about the abandonment of some guiding framework for morality, not necessarily about religious institutions.

Sorry, I meant to say Western Europe, where Ireland is an outlier. And church attendance is VERY generational - the vast majority of attendees are over 50.

Western European morals and philosophy are no longer influenced or controlled by religious considerations. I wish I could say the same for Australia.

While Western Europe is far from perfect, it's also not a morality-free wasteland of depravation and selfishness. This is what happens if you abandon religious moral guidance: nothing.

First off, just a bit of a nitpick, but as I understand it the Evangelical/pentecostal side of Christianity is doing pretty well, or at least it's not suffering from its members literally dying off (far from it, in fact). That was also my experience from about five to ten years ago.

Second, I'd argue it's way to early to conclude that abandoning religious moral guidance is a success. At most it's an (unprecedented?) experiment that so far seems to work.

Hi. Thanks for responsing, but I think you are misunderstanding me, and jumping to conclusions. You're responding to an argument about the relative value and crimes of the church vs the playboy mansion.

Another of your arguments is about culture during a specific time, geographically particular place. It was also only relevant to certain social classes in the Roman Empire. Then you took that and compared it to Western culture of today. However, I have made no such argument!?

Please read my comment again. Those were not my arguments.

I think that's an egregiously one-sided view of 'the church', and I'm saying that as an ex-religious person with both a friend and family that have suffered severely from sexual abuse (church in the former case).

There's a lot to criticize about churches, but having lived and breathed church life until my mid-twenties, there's also a lot to admire. A lot that I would argue we have not found a good replacement for in our secular environments, which sort of pains me to admit because I'd rather not find some vaguely liberal church environment one day.

That said, I don't mourn the fact that the power of the church has waned significantly. I think church, or at least Christianity, works best in an underdog position.

"young girl" and "young intern" are odd ways to describe a 21 year old.

The beneficial aspects of organised religion are overshadowed by the abuses they enable. It continues to segregate based on race, sex, culture, sexual orientation, not to forget other religions. It restricted knowledge to those deemed acceptable, until inventions like the printing press enabled dissemination of knowledge far and wide.

If you want to see a modern example of the effects of organised religion (more to the point, theocracy), you don't have to look any further than the Iranian Revolution in the 1970s. Iran went from a secular, pro-science society to one ruled purely through fear induced by the dominant religion.

I have always tried to maintain a dialogue with people, no matter their way of thinking. However, in recent times I've come to realise that unless you subscribe to a person's religion, any respect they give you is false. They think, by definition, that you are going to a different place to them in an afterlife that nobody truly knows exists. It doesn't become apparent until you come into conflict with the tenets of their belief (sexual orientation being a current one) - then watch them try to politely tell you wrong.

The truth is organised religion is more a burden than a boon, and the quicker we move past it as a species, the quicker we can move on to things that actually matter.

As a separate anecdote, I've been watching porn since I was 11, but have had a healthy monogamous relationship with my now wife for 11 years now.

Anecdotally I can say the same, but I think it's important to keep in mind that it can take at least a full generation to see the effects of changes like this.

Traditional religious may be feeling a decline, but religion as a trait, the unquestioning faith and zeal, has not gone anywhere. For examples, look at the modern political movements.

I completely agree with this, and it is an under-rated and under-investigated idea.

This is the main reason I'm often bothered by lack of nuance and sometimes outright 'religious' anti-religious sentiment I find in 'rational' circles.

Dismissing religion as some kind of overpowered source of evil, even in the unlikely case that this might be true, strikes me as a waste of some very valuable lessons in human behavior.

Picking out one thread from here: I'm one of those extremists who believes hard drugs should be legalised. I also believe they can be extremely damaging and would not want to be friends with a habitual meth user.

And, in all honesty, pornography's like that too. I find it hard to say it should be illegal, but it's not good for you. Not even in small controlled doses.

And yes, I drink alcohol.

Women I talked to said that he indeed normalise stuff that was considered immoral or perverse.

But on the cost of objectification of women.

Most of the people who profited were men.

The objectification is so ingrained that even people who do pornography on their own do mostly the "sexy women with some guy" stuff. Even stuff with domina's is mostly focused on the women being sexy and some dude.

Sexy dudes are mostly a thing in gay porn, that's why women often watch it.

Also, pornographic literature isn't valued the same as pornography. People are saying that every one watches porn and it's okay, but it's considered strange vor funny when people, especially women, read this stuff.

You know, right after I heard he died I googled "Hugh Hefner" (literally, just that) and saw dozens of nice things being said about him from people in articles and tweets- he launched my career, he was always super nice, etc. Here he's calling for aid/donations: https://twitter.com/hughhefner/status/910213546977439746?ref...

And then you juxtapose it with pieces like this, and you have to wonder: Is it possible to speak this well, or this ill, of almost anyone?

They say Hugh Hefner had no love for women... perhaps he just loved them too much.

EDIT: Downvoting merely for disagreement? Not classy.

I would just say that like any celebrity, there is Hugh Hefner the celebrity pimp and Hugh Hefner the man. In public, he literally was the Playboy brand. He had to be seen living this “man of leisure” lifestyle that looks so tacky today, but he provided an alternate version of healthy sexuality at a time when American couples often slept in separate beds.

He had to be that character in public; he was sellin a lifestyle and this article roasts his public persona. Rightfully so; he was 92 years old and when the revolution he started in his 30s became part of the patriarchy, and so did he. For his time, he was pretty progressive — but his time is long over.

From all accounts the private Hugh Hefner was a generous man who didn’t really live up to the stories of how wild he was (not that he was going to correct anyone!) He maintained good relationships with most of his many exes after they broke up, and was a real father figure to a lot of these girls long after they stopped working for him (despite how creepy that is with the sexual aspect). He was an early public supporter of gay rights; long before it was popular.

But he’s one of those guys whose time is over. I’m glad for his contributions to society, they were a link in the chain of progressivism that brought us to we’re we are. But I’m also glad his time is over, because we as a society have moved on.

This seems like a lot more balanced assessment of the guy than the original article, which seems almost entirely fueled by toxic vitriol

The world is never black-and-white. It’s unfair to judge a man on how we interpret him at the end of his life. He came from a time when “consent” wasn’t really a concept a lot of men understood. He more than anyone helped to normalize human sexuality as a natural part of life in the US.

I felt compelled to make two points faced with a piece like this:

1. You may agree or disagree with Douthat's premise but the general tone of the article is almost hysterical and has the quality of a freshmen Op Ed piece in a college daily. You may care less about Hefner but personally I see this as part of a pattern of extremism in expression that has taken hold of the NYT recently, I cancelled my longstanding membership a couple of months ago.

2. If you want to form a balanced opinion about Playboy's role (and Hefner's, by proxy since he was so influential) for good or ill in affecting women's liberation movement and general culture, in addition to reading opiniated OpEds like (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/opinion/sunday/hugh-hefne...) also consult the other side, one book I would recommend *The Century of Sex" by James Petersen (https://www.amazon.com/Century-Sex-Playboys-Revolution-1900-...). For example, the storefront that Susan Brownmiller opened in Times Square in 1979 to educate women about pornography. The radical stance of one wing of the feminism movement against pornography is well-known (e.g. see https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/10/the-space-in-b...).

Articles by fedora-tipping allies gracing us with their superior moral values while providing biting commentary on current pop-culture events is exactly why i visit Hacker News.

Lotta truth in that article.

The author smeared Hef with the same brush used to dabble a little on Cosby, Trump and Clinton. You've got to admire that-- fair and balanced.

I suppose respect for the deceased has gone out of style.

If one wants to be respected after death, lead such a life. Otherwise, one should expect this stuff to be written after one's death. I don't see any reason to gloss over things just because someone has died. I wouldn't bring this sort of thing up at his funeral, however, but that isn't out of respect for the deceased - since they aren't alive to take offense or anything. It is more being kind to the friends and family that is there. I'm gonna guess a few were glad he was dead, just wouldn't admit it.

I only agree with a few points in the article myself, but I understand how such a viewpoint can be written. Folks said such things before he died as well. Only seems natural to have this now.

The way I see it, one's comments about another immediately after his passing are as much a reflection of one's own character as they are an opinion about the deceased.

Sure. I have no respect for someone just because they happen to have died, and am honest about it. Dead folks can't take offense, and I think the family members and friends should have the frame of mind to be honest about he deceased life. That's it.

It isn't like the respect is universal. A mass murder dies? It's quite alright to bring up his/her crimes. Serial rapist? Sure, it'll be brought up. Open racism? Yup, it'll probably be reported. Few complain. (I do not believe Hugh was on the level of these folks. Man wasn't perfect, though).

Indeed, it's a shame that this op-ed wasn't written while he was alive so he could read it himself. But then it would never have received so much attention.

100. It would be a very bad idea to call for a Speaker for the Dead for Hefner.

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