As this century progresses, scholars are going to give a lot of thought as to which philosophers had the greatest influence on the 20th Century.
Was it Karl Marx, whose “scientific” reading of history and modern definition of communism sparked so much conflict and political change?
Was it Nietzsche, whose theory of the super-man and declaration that “God is dead” unintentionally provided the underpinnings for the rise of Nazism in Germany?
Was it Jean Paul Sartre, whose existentialism gave us all a word to use to that makes our conversation sound intellectual –even if we don’t quite know what it means? *
Or was it Hugh M. “Call me ‘Hef’” Hefner?
Aside from Hefner’s genius in figuring out that it is the publishers, not the writers, who make all the money in the literary field, it was his philosophy that has changed society most profoundly, deeply and permanently.
Hefner went to great lengths to produce a product –Playboy-- that was many cuts above the near-pornographic “men’s magazines” of his day (the 1950’s) and infinitely classier than the raw hardcore stuff your local variety store owner kept under the counter for his “special” customers.
Hef dressed up Playboy with fiction from top writers and cutting-edge articles on music, art, clothing, theatre, cinema, hi-fi, and all the other accoutrements of the good life. The magazine discussed issues such as racial prejudice, the hypocrisy of modern advertising (while maxing out its ad pages) and modern politics. It offered celebrity interviews, satire, humor and even poetry.
There was so much substantial and serious content in the magazine that you could almost believe it when your friend, when admitting he read Playboy, claimed, “I only read it for the articles about jazz and men’s fashion.”
It was a hell of a lot of cover that Hef provided for the individual who wanted to look at girlie pictures without the stigma attached to the traditional men’s magazines. Hef had recreated Esquire, but with a tad less drapery on the girls.
With a liberal slant that gave the magazine a bit of political cover, and quality content to offset the girlie pictures, Playboy achieved a kind of legitimacy. And being a legitimate way to look at semi-naked women, the magazine took off like a rocket, its wild success admittedly surprising Hefner and all others involved. Playboy and its readers acquired a sort of semi-respectability in the first 15 years of publication that gave Hefner a lot of influence on popular culture.
In Playboy, Hef was selling an outlook on life and on women, all protests to the contrary. Readers were encouraged to see themselves as hip, well informed and sophisticated. A desirable woman was defined as the girl next door –the compliant one with the big breasts, that is.
It was in the change in attitudes about sex that Hefner’s magazine demonstrated the most influence –with the help of modern feminism. Hefner was smart enough not to equate feminism with man-hating in the pages of Playboy, a mistake some men made when the movement gathered strength in the late 1960’s and through the 1070’s. In fact, the rejection of women being forced to conform to traditional roles and stereotypes, the insistence on women’s total personal freedom, meshed perfectly with the consequences-free lifestyle that Playboy illustrated for men.
And in a world of no consequences, where anything “consenting adults” do whatever they want to, women became disposable, as did relationships and responsibility. Sex, which had been a kind of seal binding a relationship, was now just another part of dating recreation, like dinner, drinking and dancing.
Then, in the 1970’s, the door Hefner cracked open was kicked in.
If Hefner’s magazine had been the thin entering wedge for classy pornography, it served the same purpose for enterprises that Hef did not choose to undertake. At first, Playboy was cloned. The British magazine Penthouse, which could be described as a slightly rougher imitation of Playboy, appeared in an American version. Gallery (where I freelanced as a music and book reviewer and who still owe me $1,400) soon followed: a low-rent version of Playboy that didn’t bother to airbrush out the bruises or the cellulite on the legs of their models. Then came Hustler.
To say, as publisher Larry Flynt remarked recently, that Hustler “pushed the envelope of taste,” is something of an understatement. Flynt reveled in what he could get away with. Let Hefner have the artsy, good-taste end of the business: Flynt wanted the rest of the market that Hef was careful not to cater to. Not everyone who bought Playboy was a young, hip, upscale exec who carefully read the articles on jazz and fashion. A lot of the readership was guys who wanted to buy explicit pictures of naked women without feeling like perverts doing so. And, until Hustler, Playboy and its clones were all they had. For the not-necessarily-young, un-hip, working-class Joes, Hustler was an exact fit in content and taste –and, thanks to the legitimacy Hefner achieved for Playboy, Hustler was just as publicly purchasable without the buyer feeling like a deviant. Flynt became a wealthy man.
Now it was Flynt, not Hefner, on the cutting edge, daring to do more and show more, challenging government, law enforcement and organized religion on
free speech and obscenity. Flynt conferred on the more straight laced (!) Hefner a sort of establishment respectability by comparison.
By the 1990s events had long been out of Hefner’s power to influence. With the coming of the Internet a man could see anything –absolutely anything!-- he liked for a few bucks or for nothing at all, in the comfort of his own home, without the embarrassment of having to purchase the material in public, and even if owning the material was in defiance of the law. Thanks to the Internet, the whole world is awash in pornography that every day profoundly influences and defines how millions of men think of women.
To borrow a thought from the late Daniel Moynahan, pornography is dumbing deviance down --for both genders. It is certainly one of the engines behind the sexualization of children, and the fragility –or disposability, if you will-- of modern relationships. Women are arguably more objectified than they were before the feminist revolution. Men are used to thinking of virtually any sexual behavior as permitted, as legitimate. Women are used by men more viciously now than in the Bad Old Days before the Sixties, for now they lack even the protection of society’s hypocrisy, much less its religion and traditional mores. Too many women are faced with choosing a life of anger, solitude or victimhood. Or they can embrace deviance –which is now the norm.
Without Hef, the publisher turned philosopher, it might never have happened.
* The word is “existential.”
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