The Left Pummels the Playboy

Hugh Hefner was the last of the great libertines. His brand of erotica emerged in the 50s, in a society when we buttoned the collar all the way up, a statement of liberation before even the rock and roll era began to get hips gyrating on Elvis in a manner that TV wouldn't show (zooming in above his waist). Born in the 20s and sharing the same year of birth as Queen Elizabeth II, the Heff remained a prince for more than 60 years and fulfilled the fantasies of numerous men by his wealth, money and his magazine. But for many among the political left's journalist "intelligentsia" a class of individuals that by-and-large is a parody of WWE's "Right To Censor" come to life, Hugh Heffner's legacy is one of monstrous objectification. Such bastions of perpetual complaint in the UK, The Guardian and The Independent (which still manages to limp along), have railed against the Playboy magnate. Proving the prudishness from the 50s has not faded, but donned a new mask, one of pink hair and androgyny that makes modern progressives such winning, affable members of society (sarcasm, of course).

All too eager to feast on the obituary of the man as carrion ideological journalists do, regular energy vampires such as Julie Bindel surfaced to denigrate Heffner. The subheading of Bindel's diatribe reads: "To claim that Hefner was a sexual liberationist or free speech idol is like suggesting that Roman Polanski has contributed to child protection." Such callous casuistry at Polanski's crime versus a man who has published a magazine filled with naked women (WOMEN, not girls) for 64 years and counting, reeks of moral grandstanding. With figures like Polanski and Heffner, particular mythos revolves around them, a mystique of the murky underbelly of humanity, Polanski for the wrong reasons (Sharon Tate's murder at the hands of Charles Manson's "Family," his rape of a 13-year-old girl). With Hugh Heffner however, his life is a timeline through Hollywood and popular culture, a saga of glamour, stars and the decadence of what occurs off the camera, behind the walled mini-fortresses of Beverly Hills. A culture that was a chasm in difference from 1953, when the loan he accrued allowed him to publish the first Playboy - with Marilyn Monroe's 1949 calendar as the original centrefold - to his last breath, when the legacy of Norma Jean likely embarrasses the left.

Heffner famously bought the burial plot next to Marilyn Monroe, and as these two icons of a fading Tinseltown epoch wait out eternity side-by-side, the feminists that ironically baulk at sexual liberation that they claim to champion, yet cannot quantify, tear strips off the edifices of these two figures. A parable of subject and object for the ideas the left harbour towards white, cishet, male Patriarchal methods of domination, it is little wonder Bindel et al. have not likened to his burial next to Monroe as some thanatological stalking. However, they soon forget that Playboy's mix of culture interspersed with images of the female form most men enjoy, injected the female form and the male love of it into the mainstream, in the same year as Alfred Kinsey published "Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female." Kinsey's research unearthed the breadth and complexity of sexual desire in both sexes, giving accurate impressions of how deep these urges underscore civilisation in all its constituent parts. Dr Kinsey's bisexuality led to him punishing himself for the homosexual attractions he felt, due to his Methodist background (an upbringing Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Heffner shared), the austere childhoods influenced their adult lives, driving a greater knowledge and understanding of human sexual behaviour and its wider influences. Understanding that caused Heffner to champion race and gay liberation, which the Puritan progressives stay wilfully and purposely ignorant towards.

Media follows suit, as usual, all of the slurs surface such as Holly Madison, one of Heffner's former numerous girlfriends, claiming her time at the Playboy Mansion caused her to grow suicidal, going on to describe in her upcoming book infighting at Hefer's abode, likening it to locked in a fortress. Furthermore, a former member of staff in the mansion in a recently (conveniently) surfaced interview details the drug use - which at other times, the left champion decriminalising - a haunt for has-beens and Hefner as ultimately unlikeable. The source of the aide's interview? Vice obtained the document of the butler's interview with Penthouse Magazine, a rival of Playboy, so perhaps the source of the interview speaks louder than the content of it? Baseless slurs form the rather desiccated backbone of Bindel and Suzanne Moore of The Guardian, gloats that she almost got sued by Hefner for calling him a pimp, below is an excerpt of her article (structured around hearsay):

"Part of Hefner’s business acumen was to make the selling of female flesh respectable and hip, to make soft porn acceptable. Every man’s dream was to have Hefner’s lifestyle. Apparently. Every picture of him, right to the end, shows him with his lizard smirk surrounded by blonde clones. Every half-wit on Twitter is asking if Hefner will go to heaven when he already lived in it. But listen to what the women say about this heaven. Every week, But listen to what the women say about this heaven. Every week, Izabella St James recalls, they had to go to his room and “wait while he picked the dog poo off the carpet – and then ask for our allowance. A thousand dollars counted out in crisp hundred dollar bills from a safe in one of his bookcases. If any of them left the mansion and were not available for club nights where they were paraded, they didn’t get their allowance. The sheets in the mansion were stained. There was to be no bickering between girlfriends. No condoms could be used. A nurse sometimes had to be called to Hefner’s “grotto” if he’d had a fall. Nonetheless, these young women would have to perform. Hefner – repeatedly described as an icon for sexual liberation – would lie there with, I guess, an iconic erection, Viagra-ed to the eyeballs. The main girlfriend would then be called to give him oral sex. There was no protection and no testing. He didn’t care, wrote Jill Ann Spaulding. Then the other women would take turns to get on top of him for two minutes while the girls in the background enacted lesbian scenarios to keep “Daddy” excited. Is there no end to this glamour?"

Was Hefner a Saint? Certainly not! However, suddenly rumour proves sufficient to run down a man whose corpse is not even cold, just for the sheer thrill of exacerbating their joyless adherence to an ideology that stopped liberating anyone long ago. Even though the imagery of him and girlfriends may come across a little icky (which in his twilight years probably existed more for show than for any actual sexual gratification). However, Hefner lived a life of freedom, a libertine of the highest order, emancipated in a manner SJWs secretly despise and aspire to under their burlap cowls of censure.