Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo. I just like it. Two young couples. Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and their children, 1939. Candidates for "Mommy Makeovers" featuring huge boobs so they can wear nearly no clothes? Definitely not, as I coincidentally noted earlier this exceedingly long week.. Why aren't they the standards of feminine beauty? Well, Hugh Hefner has a lot to do with that. These gals aren't stupid sterile toys, pretty clearly, which Hefner portrayed all women to be.
The long 20th Century certainly had its share of despicable people who rose to influence. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Guevara, Sanger, and many others. Those watching PBS this week got a reminder of how one American President, Richard Nixon, seemed to have a slim grasp on moral conduct in regard to obtaining and acting in his office.
Amongst those whose actions did damage in untold ways and whose legacy is wholly negative is one figure who passed into the next world two days ago. While his lifetime actions would suggest that he believed in nothing greater than his bank account, Christian charity would require prayers in hopes that some last moment or untold conversion, or some profound degree of invincible ignorance, would allow that his soul might still be saved. But that same charity does not require people to adhere to the bromide that a person must not speak ill of the dead, particularly when the world is worse off due to him.
We speak, of course, of pornographer Hugh Hefner.
Hefner is of course well known and therefore probably requires no introduction. But over time the filth that he sold and pushed contributed, but did not lead, to the decay of the American and European view of women back to the chattel status it had been liberated from with the onset of Christianity in Europe in the 1st Century. The damage his did work to women has been massive. So massive that its extent can hardly be appreciated by younger generations who now grow up in a society that has largely accepted a perverted sexual chattel view of young women and which has gone on to seeing the world the way that Hefner argued for, defined by nothing more than a person's sex drive.
Hefner's genius, if we are to term it that, lay in being able to take what already existed, the distribution of sexualized nude images of women in print, in a glamourous form. Beyond that, he managed, by doing that, to take those images away from what they clearly were, photographs of the extremely desperate and prostitutes, and rebrand them as prostituted images of the extremely busty girl next door. In this he had the odd help of massive events of the time as coincident with him reaching adult status the world found itself engaged in a massive global war and such events always lead to a decay in moral standards. The change in the photographic prostitution of willing women was therefore already underway as wartime magazines like Esquire and Yank, pitching towards American youth now in uniform but not in the gutter, presented a cleaner and less obvious prostitution of their subjects than magazines otherwise sold on the edge of the law on the edge of the tracks. An entire minor industry sprang up taking off from popular illustration styles that had been promoted in magazines like Country Gentleman and the The Saturday Evening Post of slice of life, often romanticized, images of American life but instead using the same illustration styles to portray nude or nearly nude young women with soldiers as the market. That style spread all the way to the fuselages of American (but only American) aircraft, painted by soldier artists a long ways from the public eye back home. And of course thousands were exposed to real prostitution globally.
Hefner in fact worked for a magazine that was already taking that approach just after the war when he broke away to pimp on his own. He saw, however, that what magazines like Esquire were doing somewhat on the sly could be done boldly in the open. Not that he did not meet with some opposition in the beginning, he did. And that opposition was not always from the obvious quarters. It was widespread in a society that was more decent at the time. Even the print media found his actions inappropriate. In one unusual example of that Life magazine saved the career of Marilyn Monroe when Hefner went to publish purchased nude photographs of her in 1953 (maybe its first issue). Knowing that this would ruin Monroe, Life beat Playboy to the punch and published them in a smaller version first, as art photographs. The distinction is clearly thin, but the act done in charity, something we'd not see the press do today, saved Monroe's career from early destruction.
That Monroe went on to self destruct later is something that is perhaps telling. It would be interesting to know how many of Playboy's subjects have gone down in destruction. Starting of a young life by prostituting your image, which is what the centerfold of every issue is doing, isn't a good start to things. It's known that at least one Playboy centerfold was murdered some time after she appeared in the magazine and its been said (but I don't know, and I'm not going to research it) that one of the still widely viewed subjects of decades ago committed suicide.
Those events may have nothing to do with the magazine at all, of course. But the treating of young women as nothing more than sexual objects who must put out does. The spread of unnecessary surgery that does nothing more than to try match real women's images to those airbrushed images of the exceptional that appear as "playmates" does as well. And, as things have spread to the internet, untold misery of every kind, including apparently pornography induced dysfunction of very young men, does as well (there's a lawsuit in there somewhere).
Everything about this body of work has been negative. Hefner helped contributed and was very active in promoting a view of sex that was unnatural and has lead to confusion on its very nature at its essence. The negative results have ranged from societal disaster to surgically unnecessary, as noted above. The damage has been deep and lasting and there's no sign of any correction to it coming any time soon.
Perhaps in a slight example of some justice operating in the temporal world, where we cannot and should not expect it, Playboy itself has fallen in hard times, the victim of competing purveyors of smut who often tried to take it back towards its original back alley origins, and the pornographication of the culture, which sees the nearly Playboy like portrayal of women in everything from television, to Sports Illustrated, to billboards. Not being unique, there's been no reason to buy it. The magazine has accordingly suffered. Hefner himself apparently suffered a bit as well, according to one of his recent female roommates, in requiring the use of his product in order to complete the act it celebrates, something that isn't really too surprising. The glamour that was once bizarrely attached to his enterprise wore off as well, and the clubs that once existed (and maybe still do) in Chicago, and the large parties that were once reported on at his mansion in California, faded from view. Indeed, in perhaps a final ironic note one of the more legendary celebrated attendees of those parties, Bill Cosby, went from "America's Dad" to giant creep in the public's view in recent years only to see, bizarrely, Hefner abandon him in a "I didn't know" statement. He likely didn't, but given what he sold, what possible difference could that have made?
Well, Hefner, like everyone, has passed on. The money generated from the prostitution of young women by photographic means will not go on with him. His legacy of smut here on Earth and the untold damage it has done are still with us. The negative acts of real bastards just keep on keeping on.
No comments:
Post a Comment