Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh: Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo. I just like it. Two young couples. Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and thei...Folks who may have thought, and probably still do, that I was a bit off base by going after the recently departed Hefner and essentially condemning him as one of the worst products of the 20th Century may be disturbed to know that I wasn't the only one. Of course, I'm cheered to know that myself. Maybe there's some hope out there.
One of Time's columnists, in fact, did much the same thing. Op ed writer Jill Filipovic, who shares two of my three vocations with me, did the same but from a female prospective, starting off her article with:
Hugh Hefner loved his things: his silk bathrobes, his palatial mansion, his vintage cars. And of course, he would be quick to say, his girls — those interchangeable blondes all below a certain age, with their Barbie-shaped bodies and smiles that never moved their eyes.
Hefner claimed to "love women." He certainly loved to look at women, or at least the type of women who fit a very particular model. He loved to make money by selling images of women to other men who "love women." He certainly met a lot of women, had sex with a lot of women, talked to a lot of women. But I'm not sure Hefner ever really knew any of us. And he certainly did not love us.And it goes on from there. Well worth reading.
She notes:
What Hefner and Playboy never did was present women as human, or consider us anything like men. Hefner made female sex objects more relatable and accessible — the Playboy centerfold was the girl next door, not the famous movie actress —but this wasn't so much an elevation as a downward shift: social permission for men to look at all women through the zipper in their jeans, and not even bother to pretend it was otherwise.Quite right.
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