Playboy and Porn, Part 1: Hugh Hefner Makes Good on His Promise
Playboy and Porn, Part 1: Hugh Hefner Makes Good on His Promise
How Alfred Kinsey's Self-Designated "Pamphleteer" Became Immensely Successful.
In continuing to study the pernicious effects of the porn industry born of Alfred Kinsey’s false “research findings” as exposed by Dr. Judith Reisman, here is Exhibit A: Hugh Hefner and his creation, Playboy.
Not meant to be an exhaustive analysis, this piece touches on certain points about this major, morally subversive phenomenon of the last century. (Warning: much rambling up ahead!)
TAKE A GANDER AT THIS INTERVIEW FROM 2008 by the New York Times, nearly a decade before Hugh Hefner’s death at age 91.
The freedom to indulge in selfish male hedonism without consequences or constraints—this was essentially the Playboy credo.
In Hefner’s own words, he lived “an adolescent’s dream life.” Yes—a life of self-indulgence and perpetual immaturity, shunning the normal adult responsibilities of a wife and children—a family—the basic unit without which society withers away to …irrelevance.
(Note that no mention is made here of Alfred Kinsey’s tremendous influence on Hefner.)
NOW, WATCH THIS CONVERSATION nearly 4 decades earlier, featuring conservative intellectual William F Buckley, on his show, Firing Line:
William F Buckley employs his theatrical “gladiatorial combat” mode with arched eyebrows, glib rhetoric and detached tone as he questions Hefner’s authority to deploy this new “moral code” upon the world. It’s an in-depth discussion in a manner never seen today. (And also fun to watch!)
Hefner glorifies the gratification of physical desires whenever they arise as a “good” end in itself. Buckley asks (essentially) if this isn’t plain selfishness, since there are other parties affected in the matter. He hints gently at Hefner’s arrogance, asking why he thinks that he has the moral right to toss out millennia-old conventional mores that have served society well for so long.
Hefner proceeds to lay all the marital and psychological ills and sexual crimes at the feet of “sexual repression” born of religion, venting his disdain for its concept of sin and guilt, supremely annoyed at their “Thou shalt not…” decrees.
And he brings up the dangerous “new morality” of ”situational ethics.”
Kinsey’s work is openly cited here as “scientific evidence” for the “rightness” and “morality” of Hefner’s world view.
This was, of course, before Dr. Judith Reisman’s exposure in the 1980s to 1990s of Kinsey’s “research” as fraudulent, as pseudoscience based on perverted, criminal activity. Kinsey’s books were taken as “unquestioned scientific truth” at the time of this interview.
We return to WFB and Playboy a little later.
(Aside: Can you believe that such sober exchange of contrary ideas was once a common scenario on TV, with no one screaming at each other, nor coming to blows, nor tossing furniture at people à la Geraldo’s daytime show?)
CLICK TO READ: Buckley wrote down his thoughts on the “Playboy Philosophy” in his own National Review.
From the essay [emphases mine]:
A well-disciplined society needs few laws, but it needs strong mores. And the kind of solipsism that is encouraged by the sexual revolution goes further by far than to encourage a loosening of the laws. It encourages the loosening of public attitudes.
So, how did Hugh Hefner start Playboy?
By his own admission, he was “inspired” by reading the “human sexual behavior” books of diabolical lying sadomasochist pervert and pseudoscientist, Alfred Kinsey. Hefner vowed to be Kinsey’s “pamphleteer,” via his pornography-promoting magazine and business, Playboy and Playboy Enterprises.
He certainly made good on that promise.
VIDEO: Listen to the late Dr Judith Reisman on Kinsey and Hefner:
Dr Reisman: “He [Kinsey] lied about my father and grandfather’s generation. He projected onto them what he himself was doing.”
(For a more complete write-up of the courageous, unremitting crusade against the lies of Kinsey & evils of the porn industry by Dr Judith Reisman, please click HERE.)
PLAYBOY’S GAME PLAY
Playboy’s early gambit to fool the world was first, to sell its photographs of carefree-seeming, nude women as “art.” Supporters also claimed that, finally, such “liberated” women had the choice to do what they wished with their own bodies, were comfortable with and unashamed of their own sexuality, and were now “free” to behave in the sexual sphere in exactly the same way as men.
But how “empowering” was it for young, buxom women clad in corset-like, swimsuit costumes, as men ogled them—epitomized by the Playboy Bunny serving drinks at the Clubs? Was this something women truly desired—to be used and looked upon by men as objects of their (admittedly, natural) lustful urges? Interestingly, this Ms. Magazine article will find conservatives and feminists on the same side of a particular issue (although not for exactly the same reasons).
Hefner’s clever, if cynical, marketing ploy was to present the Playmates as “sweet and wholesome,” as “the girl next door” (which an older and wiser ex-Playmate and Hefner girlfriend Holly Madison swiftly mocks in the recently aired A&E docu-series, Secrets of Playboy; more on this program in a future installment). This furthered the brazen lies put forth by Kinsey’s fake “sexual behavior reports” which claimed that, beneath their polite and reserved exterior, American adults were actually hyper-sexualized and perverted creatures just hiding away their “secret” lives.
Going further, Hefner even had the temerity to introduce a new Playmate in the AIDS-era 1980s as “a good Baptist”! Her parents were so proud of her “achievement” that they graced the proceedings with their presence. (I forget which video has this tidbit, so apologies for the lack of a source link.)
Thus was launched the campaign to eradicate the “nice girl” and the “nice boy” from public consciousness.
OTHER AGENDAS
The continually mutinous Hefner also promoted racial equality and the loosening of drug laws including the legalization of marijuana. For the former, he showed whites and blacks socializing on his TV shows, and featured black jazz musicians, long before it became legally and culturally acceptable to do so. While a laudable move for egalitarianism in principle, I also wonder if Hefner (consciously or not) seized on jazz as an occasion to demolish yet another social taboo. Jazz music was long considered a fringe social element since, for one, it “broke the rules” with its free-flowing, improvisational form. It was linked to speakeasies and the “flappers” of the 1920s—considered “loose” women, who drank booze, smoked cigarettes, wore shorter skirts and hairstyles, and freely socialized with men.
THE INTERVIEW
Then there’s the magazine’s Playboy Interview, a part that would garner a measure of academic “respectability”. A regular feature that dived deeply into each subject’s history, background, ideas, and opinions as few other popular periodicals did, the Interview section was built up and nurtured in order to lend the magazine (and its lustful readers) an air of intellectual sophistication. Most politicians still declined to appear in it; such a move still bore some risk with some constituents. (Then-Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter’s Playboy Interview nearly did in his political career).
ABORTION, “FREEDOM”, MODERNISM
Unsurprisingly, Hefner also advocated the legalization of homosexual rights and abortion rights. It’s not hard to see why Playboy supported abortion rights: per author Mary Eberstadt,
“There’s an unbroken line of them [men accused of sexually harassing women in the #MeToo movement] extending straight back to Hugh Hefner, who was agitating for legal abortion fully eight years before Roe v. Wade precisely because he understood one big thing: abortion is the factory floor to the industrial sexual use of women.”
Of course, the mainline media, Hollywood and Madison Avenue went giddy celebrating Hefner and his supposed “freedom” causes. Controversy was always good for business, at any rate. All helped to persuade an uncertain public (and world) to accept these “shiny, new things.” It was all about being “modern” and ditching the dusty old fuddy-duddies, the killjoys, the “squares.” And this “dawning new age” of the Sixties, with its exciting and limitless possibilities, was now come. Heck, by the decade’s end, Man had even “gone to the moon” (or so some claimed)!
BACK TO BUCKLEY
Back to the curious case of conservative icon, William F Buckley. Surprisingly, Buckley had already written lengthy articles for Playboy years before the 1966 TV interview with Hefner. In 1970, he also agreed to do the magazine Interview.
Whaaat? you ask? Was this a case of double-dealing, then?
It was rationalized as an opportunity for Buckley to “evangelize,” if you will, the readers of Playboy with his conservative ideas, even as he acknowledged the publication’s impressive distribution numbers.
As a strategy to undermine the Playboy Philosophy from within its own pages, the gamble failed, since the results from his long-term experiment were not encouraging. Instead, by his presence within its pages, he may have given his imprimatur, even if unintentionally so, to a morally noxious publication. Ultimately, a strange and untenable position for the self-confessed Catholic, as he also criticized the Hefnerian ideology in other outlets. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” was perhaps not a good tactic for waging stealth war against the immensely popular rag. At its height in the early 1970s, Playboy boasted a circulation of over 7 million.
MORE VILENESS
Yet, beyond the naked women, there was something even more disturbing in Playboy that Dr Judith Reisman discovered early on. In a study done on a Department of Justice grant, Dr Reisman found that a not-insignificant number of cartoons sexualizing children were finding their way into the magazine. This was clearly child pornography grooming children for sex. It also featured pictorials of 14-year-old Jodie Foster and a prepubescent Brooke Shields.
HAPPIER AND HEALTHIER?
Thanks, then, to the eventual mainstreaming of the Playboy creed, the shame and stigma attached to the use of contraception and the practice of unfettered sex whenever, wherever, and with whomever (or whatever?) one wished were gleefully discarded by disciples of the “sexual revolution.” Hefner declared that this change was a “moral must,” and could only lead to healthier, happier lives for all.
Was he right? Is everyone healthier and happier today?
To the contrary. These radical changes in sexual mores have fostered the wholesale destruction of American society (as will be examined in a future ‘stack post).
SATANIST LINKS
A closer look at the roots of Hefner’s worldview—beyond Kinsey—takes us to that heinous acolyte of satan, Aleister Crowley. Hefner chafed under the religious commandments of, “Thou shalt not…” Crowley’s abiding motto was, “Do what thou wilt…” referring to one’s own will, and not God’s.
Is it any wonder that such an audacious, distasteful and venomous social experiment as Playboy, its “philosophy,” and its allied cultural forces would leave such calamitous effects in its wake?
Never one to rest, satan happily plies his sordid work through his many minions today.
For the video and page linked below: *** Viewer/Reader Discretion is Advised. ***
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NOTE: This link (after the arrow) takes you to a church of satan page: Caveat emptor!
→ This man is a member of the church of satan and eulogizes Hefner as a “de facto” satanist.)
I will read and watch later (So much to do. Only so much time to do it ). I watched the Kinsey documentary you posted, all 2 hrs 45 minutes of it. Oh my goodness. I remember going to see the Kinsey bio pic with Liam Neeson which I now recognize to be another blaring example of Hollywood propaganda. Afterwards I was rattled realizing just how easily I, along with practically everyone else, was so easily brainwashed.
I’ve been going through a deep purification over the last year recovering from a lifetime attachment to the slave self. Part of the process is to face the captor and realize that it has no power over the higher divine self which only answers to the heart. Once we are on that wavelength it never lets us down. Cheers to our ongoing awakening!