Posts Tagged ‘Hugh Hefner’

Paglia on Hugh Hefner and Modern Feminism

Wednesday, October 4th, 2017

Pretty much every Paglia interview is worth reading, and this one right after the death of Hugh Hefner is no exception.

Q: So let me just ask: Was Hugh Hefner a misogynist?

A: Absolutely not! The central theme of my wing of pro-sex feminism is that all celebrations of the sexual human body are positive. Second-wave feminism went off the rails when it was totally unable to deal with erotic imagery, which has been a central feature of the entire history of Western art ever since Greek nudes.

Snip.

I have always taken the position that the men’s magazines — from the glossiest and most sophisticated to the rawest and raunchiest — represent the brute reality of sexuality. Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.

Snip.

Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, all of those relentlessly ideological feminists are people who have wandered away from traditional religion and made a certain rabid type of feminist rhetoric their religion. And their fanaticism has poisoned the public image of feminism and driven ordinary, mainstream citizens away from feminism. It’s outrageous.

I hugely admired the early role that Steinem played in second-wave feminism because she was very good as a spokesperson in the 1970s. She had a very soothing manner that made it seem perfectly reasonable for people to adopt feminist principles. She normalized the image of feminism when there were a lot of crazy feminists running around (like Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol). That was Steinem’s great contribution, as far as I’m concerned. Also, I credit her for co-founding Ms. magazine and thereby contributing that very useful word, Ms., to the English language, which allows us to refer to a woman without signaling her marital status. I think that’s a tremendous accomplishment.

But aside from that, Steinem is basically a socialite who always hid her early dependence on men in the social scene in New York. And as a Democrat, I also blame her for having turned feminism into a covert adjunct of the Democratic party. I have always felt that feminism should transcend party politics and be a big tent welcoming women of faith and of all views into it. Also, I hold against Steinem her utter, shameless hypocrisy during the Bill Clinton scandal. After promoting sexual harassment guidelines, which I had also supported since the 1980s, Steinem waved away one of the worst cases of sexual harassment violation that can ever be imagined — the gigantic gap of power between the President of the United States and an intern! All of a sudden, oh, no, it was all fine, it was “private.” What rubbish! That hypocrisy by partisan feminist leaders really destroyed feminism for a long time. So now feminism has rebounded, but unfortunately it’s a particularly virulent brand of feminism that’s way too reminiscent of the MacKinnon-Dworkin sex hysteria of the 1980s.

Read the whole thing.

Hugh Hefner Dead at Age 91

Thursday, September 28th, 2017

Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner has died at age 91.

Conservatives will decry Hefner for debasing the culture while libertarians will celebrate his role in unleashing the sexual revolution, but neither view is particularly accurate. Pornography predated Playboy by decades, and various cultural and technological forces (not least of which was the widespread adoption of the automobile, ensuring people could decamp to less restrictive environs at will) were always going to bring about the sexual revolution. Hefner was a canny businessman who understood that he could marry nude pictures of women to an upscale lifestyle magazine. The business model worked, and for many years Playboy paid writers some of the top rates in the field.

Those same cultural and technological forces were also going to render Playboy obsolete, as the profit centers in the skin trade quickly moved first to video and then to the Internet.

Today, most attacks on pornography seem to come from the anti-sex feminist left than the religious right.

Hefner lived long enough to see himself transformed into a media icon, and for his flagship magazine to become culturally irrelevant.

LinkSwarm for January 15, 2016

Friday, January 15th, 2016

We’ll start with a couple by Mark Steyn:

  • “Hillary Clinton is now telling lies about her lies.”
  • Steyn also went to a Trump rally, and discovered how Trump is wowing crowds as an un-politician. “He moved the meter on the ‘war on women’, too. Mrs Clinton pulled out the card, and Trump flung it right back in her face with her sleazy sociopath of a husband’s four decades of abuse against vulnerable women.”
  • “These mostly disgruntled voters are turning away from their Democrat roots.”
  • The puzzling thing about the democrats’ push on gun control: Why gun control, and why now? “Unpopular as it is, gun control may be as good as they’ve got.”
  • Luntz focus group overwhelmingly says that Ted Cruz won last night’s debate.
  • Cruz also won the coveted Duck Dynasty primary.
  • Really, Jeb Bush’s path to victory requires Lindsay Graham’s endorsement? I’m sure in much the same way the Houston Texan’s plans involved Brian Hoyer leading them to the Superbowl…
  • Why Marco Rubio’s campaign is like trying to defend Europe in Risk. Points for geekiness and truth…
  • “The participation of Muslim migrants in the rape jihad is, of course, the fact most desperately suppressed by German officials.”
  • Obama (and Polifact) are lying about guns.
  • Even the New York Times notices that Obama is the best salesman the firearms industry ever had.
  • Now this is an opening paragraph:

    The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.

  • How the media distorts and suppresses news to avoid mentioning Muslims involved in rape.
  • Al Jazeera turns out to be every bit as popular as Air America.
  • Jihadists murder 15 at that Satanic outpost of Western imperialism, a polio vaccination center.
  • That Iraqi “refugee” arrested in Houston on terrorism charges is every bit as big a winner as you would expect him to be.
  • Obama Administration blocks visa waiver reform to appease Iran. One wonders what this administration wouldn’t do to appease Iran…
  • China’s debt is $28 trillion? Ho boy, we’re boned…
  • Anglicans suspend communion with Episcopalians for three years over same-sex marriage. This is kind of a big deal. (Hat tip: The Corner
  • Damn Millennials won’t show up to work on time. Or get off my lawn…
  • How Star Wars conquered the galaxy. Or, more specifically, how Star Wars action figures did… (Hat tip: The Goldberg File.)
  • You know, if you’re a sitting Texas Supreme Court Justice running for reelection, it’s probably not going to help you win Texas Republican voters if you do robocalling demonizing Michael Quinn Sullivan. Especially when the call goes to Michael Quinn Sullivan. (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
  • So $200 million for the Playboy mansion, the bunnies aren’t included, and I can’t even kick out Hugh Hefner? What’s the point?
  • Mapping the bushy-tailed menace.