The cultural irrelevancy of The Cultural Victory of Hugh Hefner

[elfs]

You know you're in trouble when someone starts an essay with this:

One of the occupational hazards of Christian thinkers is the tendency to see Satan behind every sociological phenomenon with which they personally struggle. One of the secret pleasures of this habit, however, is that occasionally, you really do find him... Hugh Hefner...

Now I will confess, as a secularist, to having a secret vice as well. I too can spot Satan. He's alive and well in Mercer Schuchardt's fantasy life, as the essay, The Cultural Victory of Hugh Hefner illustrates all too well.

The author gives away too much while engaging in the usual Hefner-bashing that the right adores. The usual bashing is all about Hefner's evil genius, conflating beautiful naked women with success by using the advertising not only as a way of paying for the magazine, but by associating objets de bon vivant with beautiful naked women, and thus "legitimizing" pornography by bringing it out of the basement and into the living room.

He objects to the "feminization" of men, saying that once upon a time they never knew what a "duvet" was (quoting Fight Club in the process) and enumerates what the "feminized," "domesticated" man has been taught to enjoy: literature, a good pipe, a cashmere pullover, a beautiful lady.

Makes ya wonder if Schuchardt's taste in women is anything like Neal Horsley's, the anti-abortion activist who recently and shamelessly admitted that his first girlfriend "was a mule."

The rest of the article is just as silly: somehow, despite all of this rampant "feminization," it's women who've really lost out, that "unisex" styles are all masculine and men don't wear the frilly things that girls like. Quick, someone call the Queer Eye guys. There's also a strange undercurrent of anti-intellectualism, the accusation that introspection, criticism, and the hard work of thinking are also "feminine," and that men belong "in the field and stream," rather than in the library or the lab.

He also makes the weird accusation that rock stars have to be "porn star beautiful" to get on stage. Someone tell that to Alanais Morissette or Queen Latifah.

There are some things I actually agree with: I've stopped reading Playboy precisely because the modern bunny does look like "a lean, mean sex machine," and not much more; I much prefer the bunnies of the pre-silicone age. But that's a matter of taste, and Playboy competes with lots of other outlets where unlean, unmean women cavort in the popular imagination.

You really have to wonder about a man who reads Annabell Chong and accuses Hefner of "not having the balls to put his name on the first issue" [sic] but proclaims himself a culture warrior on the side of Christ.

Finally, Schuhardt asks the question he wants to ask: "Bring it out in the open, Hefner said, and you'll feel better... Do you feel better?"

And I have to say yeah, yeah I do. It's not perfect yet. There are still technological barriers to truly consequence-free fucking, which is not a bad thing to wish for. But they're merely technological barriers; sex ought to be about the wanted risks taken by the human heart, not the roulette wheel of the human body. Social critics like Schuhardt are still wringing their hands because antibiotics and birth control methods have lessened many of the consequences, and we can only hope that those techniques will get better with time.

Schuhardt's wrong about depicting the current age as "a mess." It's not. No more so than the year before Playboy was published. Society will clank on, succesfully; every generation think it gets to own the eschaton, and so far every generation has been wrong. Schuhardt's generation, my generation, will be as well.

Comments

[partran.livejournal.com]

Well spoken as always.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I could have some respect for somebody who argued against pornography, without raising the meretricious spectre of the feminisation of men. There is something about the Playboy meme which can be criticised, but the signifiers of feminisation often seem indistinguishable from the options open to the wealthy. In general, history shows us that the men who could afford the ostentatious displays of fine foods and fancy clothes where the men who led wars from the front. It once was that Kings died in battle.

Capitalism, in many ways, broke that pattern, and the robber barons of modern times fought their wars in courts and smoke-filled rooms. And now, without incredible effort, any of us can aspire to luxury.

And some people don't like the idea that an ordinary guy can own at least some of the symbols of wealth, possibly bacuase they also know, deep in their hearts, that they cannot bear to pay the price that Kings once did, and ordinary men still do. They're groping for something to make themselves special, and can only do it by denigrating any sign of competition.

Plus, probably, they don't get invited to test condoms.

[woggie.livejournal.com]

And yet they don't seem to wring their hands over the violence and ill-will...just the sex.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

As woggles says, that's always been the thing I found hardest to take about wowsers and censorship, why is violence preferable to sex?

On feminization of men, well, we're half female anyway, and one must point out that wigs, make-up, and perfume were male accoutrements for many centuries before the Puritans.

Anyway, women seem to get all the cool boots and clothes, and I for one feel it's about time men took back the right to wear whatever clothes they like! :)