Hefner hated women
“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.
He caused immeasurable damage by turning porn – and therefore the buying and selling of women’s bodies – into a legitimate business. Hefner hated women and referred to them as “dogs”.
But he was sex positive.
“These chicks [feminists] are our natural enemy. It is time to do battle with them,” wrote Hefner in a secret memo leaked to feminists by secretaries at Playboy. “It is time we do battle with them… What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart.”
Because how dare women claim to be human beings just as men are?
As I was writing this, a flagship news programme asked if I would take part this evening in an item in Hefner’s legacy. “We’re looking to discuss whether he was a force for good or bad. Did Hefner revolutionise feminine sexuality, or encourage the degradation of women by constructing them merely as objects of desire?”
Well that’s an incredibly easy question to answer.
It’s
amazingdisgusting that anyone at all thought that it was a good idea to formulate the first part of the question. Are there no depths to which the media will not sink in order to add ‘balance‘?It would be fair to say that Hefner and Playboy occasionally did some women some good simply by stumbling into the right action the wrong way (for instance, they were pro-choice, for reasons that had little to do with women’s rights to autonomy). But it was never out of a sense of benevolence or social justice, and failing to recognize that is a major oversight.
This story is potentially of interest, contrasting the actual lives of female porn stars with that of the nale profiteers: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/09/jon_ronson_s_podcast_series_the_butterfly_effect_reviewed.html
I’m stunned that absolutely anybody could think Hefner’s work has the remotest thing to do with feminine (sic) sexuality…
Playboy is to human sexuality as McDonald’s is to cuisine.
Omar, great line. Yours? Can I quote?
Of course somebody is bound to give the same lame response that a colleague at work gave the other day when I commented that Trump hated blacks, gays, women etc. His response was basically “Oh, I don’t know about women. He really likes them. Har har etc.”
According to one specific meaning of the word “like”, you might also say that a cannibal “likes” people. I think we can all agree that that’s not the meaning that counts.
Yes, my response to claims of that kind of “liking” is to say yes as in liking a sandwich when you’re hungry.
Rob @#6:
Be my guest.
;-)
Ophelia@8 & Bjarte@7
Great, now I’m craving human sandwiches.
Honestly I think Hefner didn’t hate women, I think he genuinely believed what he was doing was a good thing, and I think the results were mixed.
I don’t think porn did the world any more harm than the general fashion industry, and the objectification of women isn’t really any better in any society that censors porn.
I mean look at the Middle East – it goes precisely the other way, and women are taught to dress in black sacks with videos comparing them to unwrapped sweets. Saudi is known for punishing rape victims for crying out loud.
That said, the genre is a repository of every negative thing about modern society and sexuality. For the most part porn trades on the forbidden, and a lot of stuff is forbidden for the precise reason that it is a bad idea.
With regards to Hefner, that’s all part of his legacy, but then so is the fact that he was in the forefront fighting for abortion rights.
I don’t think it is fair to say he was the ultimate enemy. The thing with porn is that while it may promote ideas around sexuality that are harmful, one is free to ignore the ideas. One is free to not agree with porn, or just not look at it.
If one is to go for the ultimate enemy of women, I think the religious right fit the bill a whole lot more. They want to undermine sex education, they want to do away with the right to an abortion, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they weren’t the ones on the other side of the marital rape argument.
There is no freedom to ignore the law.
On a personal level, Hefner was disgusting, Susan Moore’s piece captures it fairly well:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/28/hugh-hefner-pimp-sue-playboy-mansion
I mean it is pretty damn clear the man was not a friend to women’s lib, and trying to paint him as one is just plain wrong, but there was some good in that mixed scumbag. Guys like Pat Robertson on the other hand…
Let’s leave “Dear Muslima” type reasoning to the Dawk and his ilk, shall we? The objectification/commodification of women that constitutes the porn industry’s one and only feature doesn’t have to be the only/worst problem in the world to be a problem in its own right, and the population of the world is not split into “the ultimate enemy of women” and non-enemies. Interestingly the religious right and the producers/consumers of pornography both share a common view of women’s bodies as sandwiches. The only difference is that the latter think that’s awesome because it means that men can get something to eat.
Bjarte Foshaug
That’s the headline to the linked article though:
“Hugh Hefner was the ultimate enemy of women – no feminist anywhere will shed a tear at his death”
I’m not arguing that he’s an ally, just that “ultimate enemy” is overstating things a bit.
Bruce Gorton
Fair enough.
Bruce
Actually “fair enough” is too weak a response. I apologize. The headline didn’t register with me. It should have, and I’m sorry. I guess I’m just a little too primed to see “Dear Muslima” arguments and mansplaining everywhere these days…
Bruce:
All societies censor porn, to some extent. That probably ought to tell us something, although I’m not sure what. Similarly, all societies have porn anyway, regardless of the extent to which it is censored. I think this just teaches us that the harder it is to gain access to porn, the more hoops people are prepared to jump through and the greater the (social, legal etc) risks they’re prepared to take to get it.
This suggests two things: there’s a clear appetite for porn and mainstreaming it or otherwise doesn’t mean it isn’t available and tells us nothing in itself about the content or the way porn objectifies women.
But this doesn’t tell us anything useful for the purposes of this discussion. The fact remains that porn isn’t and has never been about consenting adults doing what consenting adults do under the conditions of equality we here might wish to prevail in the bedroom, car, elevator or washing-machine repair scenario.
If porn produced by cultures with more censorious attitudes toward porn is either more or less objectifying of women then there’d be something to discuss. I’ve no idea whether this is the case but I seriously doubt it. Then we’d have to look at how women are objectified in those two hypothetical regions and somehow measure them and try to explain them. BUT before we drew any kind of conclusion…..
… there’s a lot more going on there than the (in ‘polite society’ at least) suppression of porn. What’s cause and what’s effect is complicated and studies about porn proliferation and consumption are probably really hard to conduct, especially given the enormously diverse population of what we rather ignorantly call “the middle east”.
My feeling is that porn has probably done more harm to women than the fashion industry but that the two reinforce each other. It’s horrific that lots of women are all but forced by man-declared convention into the kind of clothes and makeup that objectify them (either as an overt sex object for any man’s use or a hidden one as a literal commodity to be traded by men for – ultimately – their use). But it seems clear to me that propagating ideas about what women should look like without their clothes and what they should be expected to do to please men without their clothes is *way* more harmful. I strongly suspect the attitudes it conveys is a significant basis of the fashion industry.
Fashions change more often than porn. What the butler saw is not much different to what all of us saw the last time we looked at porn, at least in terms of who is being catered for, who is being exploited and the means of achieving that. I suspect there’s a complicated relationship between porn and fashion that it would be useful to uncouple and I’m sure many people have worked on this. But I’m struggling to conclude that porn isn’t more harmful than fashion, especially in the medium to long term.
Oh, and:
So is the US. So is the UK. Not in such as a brutal way as you mean but the main difference is in the punishment, not the attitude.
Just like I was able to ignore all the subtle and not-so-subtle messages my mother gave me as a child that my only role as a woman is to be a wife and mother? You might think so, since I am a wife, mother, AND SCIENTIST, but…it took years of therapy to get to that point, and even now I struggle against the messages that still insist on being in my brain, shards of glass that she planted there years before that affect how I deal with the male colleagues.
Young men also don’t seem able to ignore those ideas, judging from the conversations I’ve had with young men who think they are progressive, feminist, and just so woke, but still manage to put women into similar boxes as other men, regard them as sex objects much the same way as other men (they might just regard them as sex objects made sexier by being in lab coats or army uniforms). Our brains are not as much under our control as we think they are, and messages sent out all the time begin to give us a sense of what is “normal”.
‘one is free to ignore the ideas’
That’s not really how it works, though, is it? There are lots of ideas I’m completely free to ignore–and lots of ideas I don’t even know about, many of which I wasn’t even aware of until recently. But the fact that other people believe them affects my life, whatever I choose to ignore.