BREAKING: Sometimes Famous People Die

[Miisa]

I had heard of him. Celeb in my book.

[JoeP]

Miisa's Book of Celebs.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Originally Posted by mickthinks

Wrong thread.

Knew of, forgot his name.

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[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner dies at 91 | abc7.com

[Stormlight]

So the old sleazebag finally snuffed it? Good riddance.

[The Man]

(I've spent quite a bit of time revising this and I'm still not completely satisfied with it, but I've got other stuff to do, so fuck it; I'll post it with a preemptive apology in case I've phrased something inartfully or messed up some of the details. I argue below that we should accept humanity's flaws, so I might as well accept my own.)

As is often the case when figures like this die, I feel it's more complicated than either that or the uncritical hagiographies he's been getting from other sectors on the Internet.

The man certainly had become a caricature of himself by the end of his life, and his involvement with women less than a third of his age is creepy as hell. Aspects of his work are at times incredibly problematic and at times far worse, and by all accounts he often treated the women in his life horribly.

But human beings are complicated, and the same person is often responsible for both incredibly beneficial and incredibly harmful acts (Fidel Castro was another good example of this). As much as "I read it for the articles" became a punchline, Playboy actually did publish some superb journalism and fiction, particularly in its heyday. It published interviews with Malcolm X, Jimmy Carter, Miles Davis, Martin Luther King, John Lennon and Yoko Ono; it published Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote, Alex Haley, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Saul Bellow, Gabriel García Márquez, Arthur C. Clarke, Doris Lessing, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton, Kurt Vonnegut, John le Carré, Gore Vidal, the list goes on.

Hefner also did a substantial amount to further the cause of queer rights throughout his life and even used his platform as a media publisher to emphasize their importance to his readership, publishing journalism and literature that foregrounded queer rights issues and specifically highlighting how attacks on queer rights could endanger his audience. (For that matter, contra his public image, he may well have been queer himself - he openly acknowledged having at least experimented sexually with men.)

Beyond that, he did an enormous amount for African-American civil rights. In particular, another recently deceased celebrity, Dick Gregory, credited Hefner not merely with giving Gregory his big break as a performer but also with a $25,000 donation (about $200,000 adjusted for inflation) that helped him crack the lynching case that some historians have credited with triggering the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act:

“Hefner understood what those rednecks didn’t: that things had changed,” [Gregory] told British GQ in 2011. That you could no longer argue that you’d ‘killed three Jews’. Or ‘killed three blacks’. What you’d done was, you’d killed three fellow human beings.”

Then, of course, we have the simple "free speech" argument. I have issues with free speech, particularly as it is presently constituted, since it's often used as a snarl world by reactionary snowflakes to assault anyone who dares challenge their sheltered worldviews. (These man-children who whine about others' safe spaces, of course, usually want the whole world to be their safe space, and I say "man-children" because they're almost all men.) Hefner's conception of free speech, though not without its own problems, was crucial for its time. As many problems as the pornography industry may have, it does not strike me as remotely coincidental that almost every authoritarian regime goes after porn - because open expressions of women's sexuality are deeply antithetical to authoritarianism.

Hefner's expressions of sexuality weren't exactly open expressions of women's sexuality either, but compared to those of the right-wing culture scolds who opposed him in his day, it was still a major leap forward. (Keep in mind the magazine was first published in 1953.) If our reactionaries had their way, women would be replaced with Stepford Wives - culture wouldn't even acknowledge that women had sex drives. Playboy certainly objectified women, and often in a deeply sleazy way, but it's never come across to me as shaming them for their sexuality. Before Playboy, it's almost as if sex was a dirty secret that popular culture only ever even alluded to, and there was certainly a lot more shame in it.

(I've been watching a lot of classic films lately, and I've noticed a major difference between the pre-'50s films and the ones from the mid-'50s and later. Some of the pre-Hays Code ones get pretty raunchy, but the ones between the Code and Playboy are quite chaste. By 1959, we have Some Like It Hot; by 1966, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Playboy certainly doesn't deserve credit for that by itself, but I can't help but think it may have been a contributing factor to the unraveling of the Code.)

This isn't to say that Playboy was a great benefactor for women's lib. It wasn't. Forced monogamy can be incredibly harmful for women, but the '60s and '70s free love movement had an undercurrent that was patriarchal in a different, but not necessarily any less harmful, way. Playboy certainly falls into that. An "open" relationship whose conditions aren't reciprocal is open to all kinds of problems, and the idea that women might want more than one partner seems mostly to have been absent from Playboy. By all accounts, this seems to have been present in Hefner's personal life as well.

I'm not even going to attempt to delve into the many labour industry abuses associated with the pornography industry. They're still horrible today (although some active performers such as Belle Knox have said they haven't ever been coerced into doing anything against their will in the course of their work, and as far as I've been able to discern, the major porn studios all responded to the allegations of sexual assault against James Deen by blacklisting him, so conditions do seem to have improved at least somewhat - however, they've still got a long way to go), and they were far, far worse during Playboy's heyday. (This is one topic I'll admit I haven't researched too thoroughly, because there isn't enough brain bleach in the world.) And there is certainly room to criticise Playboy as pornography as well.

I hold to the view, as I've explained at length elsewhere, that pornography is an art form. Not only is the history of art itself, to a much larger extent than most people seem willing to acknowledge, a history of porn, but the creation and production of porn ultimately involves the same kinds of decisions that go into the production of any other work of film, television, photography, or art. Our society has simply arbitrarily decided that, because these works primarily focus on sex, they are less meritorious.

I completely sympathise with the argument that the artistic qualities of most pornography as presently produced are not particularly high. But just because much of today's pop music is disposable trash doesn't make works by pop groups like the Beatles, Abba, or the Bee Gees any less artistic - it's not as if there wasn't plenty of disposable trash in the '60s and '70s either. Sturgeon's Law seems relevant here: 90% of science fiction is crap, but 90% of everything is crap. (An occasionally heard corollary is that the remaining 10% is worth dying for.)

This gets back to how we can criticise Hefner's work as pornography, then. Few women have natural body types; many have implants; most are heavily airbrushed; there is a consistent look to most of the centerfolds; they are almost all in the 18-25 age range. Modern pornography frequently goes much further than Playboy ever did in depicting women's sexual agency (a case could be made that, contra Playboy, a significant portion of modern porn depicts women with more sexual agency than they actually exhibit in real life, and that it is a fantasy of a world where women feel comfortable exhibiting that much sexual agency and aren't shamed for doing so).

Playboy was, in contrast, quite small-c conservative, at least by today's standards, then (as opposed to our modern-day reactionaries who call themselves conservative). There is plenty of room to criticise him for this, and I'm sure people who have paid closer attention to his work can delve into much further depth about issues I haven't even noticed. But he is nonetheless an enormous figure in the histories both of free speech and of pornography with a complex legacy that is neither all beneficial nor all destructive. Since I used a music metaphor earlier, I'll extend it by comparing him to Elvis Presley. He wasn't the first to do what he did, and he wasn't the most original, and there are aspects of his work that are deeply problematic, but he brought his genre to a much wider audience than it had ever reached before, and it has never been the same since.

The comparison to Elvis is accurate in another sense because he and Hefner were contemporaries - again, the magazine was first published in the '50s. Beyond everything I've outlined above, Playboy actually does seem to have been fairly substantial in furthering the at-the-time radical notion that men's acts could help women get more enjoyment out of sex, and that men should aspire to do this; it also published articles on how to do exactly that. In the Internet age where sex advice is ubiquitous, it's easy to underestimate how revolutionary that was. The magazine also pushed the idea that women weren't somehow tainted or lesser for enjoying sex - it seems to have been selling the idea that the girl next door also enjoyed sex, and that she wasn't a whore for doing so. We take these attitudes for granted today, but they weren't remotely common in the early Fifties when the magazine was first published.

Of course, this doesn't erase Hefner's ethical failings - even if we grant that he wanted women to enjoy sex, and that this was a major leap forward for American culture, this doesn't make his overall treatment of women less problematic. But his ethical failings, equally, don't erase his positive contributions. Overall, like an awful lot of celebrities, Hefner was a complicated person with a complicated legacy.

I think that as a society, we in the West are very bad about nuance when it comes to celebrities and political figures - we often either venerate them while overlooking their shortcomings, or we despise them while overlooking their positive traits. I suspect it'd take me hours to address this topic in the depth it deserves, and I don't have time to do that right now, but this single sentence by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett encapsulates a major theme I'll cover: "It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people." This applies no less to celebrities and political figures than it does to everyone else.

In short, we certainly shouldn’t unequivocally celebrate Hugh Hefner's life, but unequivocally condemning him seems equally misplaced. Much as with Castro, I feel ambivalent about his death, and much as with Castro, his passing feels like the end of an era, and I lean overall to the extent of feeling more sorry to hear about it than not.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

[JoeP]

Thanks The Man ... even though I didn't read all of what you wrote with anything the care you put into it ...

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too long ...

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[Stormlight]

Well let's see:

- blatant anti-feminist
- dressed the women in his harem (or brothel) in bunny costumes
- defended Bill Cosby
- didn't allow visitors for the women in his harem (or brothel)
- the women in his harem (or brothel) were put on a curfew
- no condoms allowed

“These chicks are our natural enemy. What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart. They are unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes.”

Holly Madison Reveals Sad Truth About Life In The Playboy Mansion | HuffPost

So no, for me it remains: good riddance to a dirty old man.

[The Man]

So did you celebrate Bowie's death because of the Victoria Station incident and the accusations that he slept with underage groupies? Joan Rivers' because of her virulently anti-Palestinian racism? John Lennon was outright physically abusive towards several women in his personal life. Did his death deserve to be celebrated? Does Gandhi's horrifying personal life erase the contributions he made to Indian liberation? Do Obama's often horrifying uses of drone strikes against civilian populations mean that everyone who's benefited from the Affordable Care Act should be decrying him as an irredeemable monster and not thanking him for ensuring they have health care?

There are aspects of Hefner's life that are completely indefensible, just as there aspects of plenty of other celebrities'. This doesn't mean that their deaths deserve to be celebrated. Whedon may have used his power in Hollywood in sleazy ways to take advantage of impressionable women, but I'm not going to celebrate his death. I'm not going to celebrate the deaths of Jagger or Richards despite the blatant misogyny of many Rolling Stones lyrics. I won't even celebrate someone like Eric Clapton's despite his blatant cultural appropriations from people of African descent combined with statements that at least border on white supremacist, or Jimmy Page's despite actions that by today's standards qualify as paedophilia and a long history of outright musical theft. (Jagger and Richards, to their credit, have at least consistently given credit to the minority musicians they've borrowed from.)

Moreover, I suspect that on balance, Hefner's net contributions to humanity overall balanced out more on the positive than the negative side, even if some of those contributions were unquestionably, unambiguously negative. But it's absurd, reductionist thinking to reduce people to their worst traits. I suspect most of the minorities who've benefited from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 aren't celebrating Hefner's death right now, at least assuming they've learnt of his contributions to Gregory's investigation. Hefner may have been on the wrong side of several issues, but on plenty of others he was on the side of the angels. He supported minority and queer rights at times when it was highly unfashionable to do either, and not only was he under no obligation to do so, but it arguably would have been personally beneficial for him to have remained silent on them, and it certainly was a personal risk for him to speak out. He spoke out anyway.

Flawed people often provide great services to humanity. In fact, I'd argue that great services to humanity have only ever been provided by flawed people, because there's no such thing as a person who isn't flawed. That doesn't mean that we should overlook anyone's flaws, but we also shouldn't let our views of those flaws make us incapable of recognising the good they've done. Hefner's flaws may even have been greater than most people's, but, to pick an example from above, so were John Lennon's, and I sure as shit wouldn't have celebrated his death either, and I suspect that Lennon's contributions were overall on the net positive side too, despite his often monstrous personal life.

You mentioned Cosby. I might celebrate Cosby's death. Hefner might've given Cosby the unwarranted benefit of the doubt, but until anyone presents any evidence that Hefner was anywhere near that bad himself, I'm not going to see his death as something to be celebrated. I'll leave that for the real monsters like Schlafly, Thatcher, and Trump - people who've consistently dedicated their entire lives to the cause of making others miserable - or like Cosby, whose personal crimes are so monstrous that they outweigh any good they've otherwise done. (I would put Trump in this category too, but I don't see any evidence that he has ever actually even done anything that would qualify as good.) You can say a lot of things about Hefner, but I don't see any evidence he wanted people to be miserable, nor that he was an irredeemable criminal. The Lennon comparison feels pretty spot-on to me, really - he was terrible in many aspects of his life, but he still did a lot of good for the world despite that. Feel free to continue celebrating if that's still too much for you to overlook, but I won't be joining in.

[Stormlight]

I don't celebrate his death but I'm certainly not sad that he's gone. Anyway, I can see your point but I maintain that he was a bad human being who did some good along the way. Like Trump. Or Hitler!

[Watser?]

I think it was Hitler who introduced universal healthcare here...

[Qingdai]

well for some people, although cure was often the worse than the "disease"


A lot of heroes are celebrated as not being flawed humans, true. There are no saints, don't get me started on Mother Theresa...

[Ari]

Monty Hall, man responsible for arguments over the best way to get a donkey, dead at,
95, 96 or 97, choose an option to reveal an answer you didn't choose... would you like to switch?

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Monty Hall, legendary host of ‘Let’s Make a Deal,' dead at 96 - NY Daily News

[The Man]

Tom Petty pulled off life support after no brain activity: TMZ | Chicago Sun-Times

Gods damn it, 2017.

[Limoncello]

RIP Tom, just heard Free Fallin this morning on the radio

[Crumb]

Damn.

[Crumb]

I learned that the documentary Runnin' Down a Dream is on Netflix so I am watching it again. It is 4 hours long but worth the watch.

[slimshady2357]

A poet and a voice of a nation, Tragically Hip singer Gord Downie has died at 53 - BBC News

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

The Tragically Hip - Ahead By A Century - YouTube

[The Man]

R.I.P. Robert Guillaume, Emmy-winning star of Soap, Benson, Sports Night, The Lion King, Phantom of the Opera (onstage), etc., age 89 of complications from prostate cancer. It's worth noting that he suffered a stroke during Sports Night, and this was actually written into the show in one of its most powerful moments. The electric Twitter machine also informs me that he was one of the first celebs to appear at AIDS fundraisers.

[mickthinks]

Fats Domino: Rock and roll legend dies aged 89 - BBC News

[Watser?]

R.I.P.: Faith No More singer Chuck Mosley dies at 57 | AFROPUNK

Faith No More - We Care A Lot (Official Music...

[curses]

Malcolm Young, AC/DC Guitarist and Co-Founder, Dead at 64 - Rolling Stone

[Basset Hound]

Good guitarist. Screaming is not singing. I'm sorry for his family.