[Conscious Pirate]

Hef Game: If you build it, they will cum.

[Conscious Pirate]

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/cel...3fd2b1f217

Quote:

FROM 1978 through 1979, Stefan Tetenbaum worked as Hugh Hefner’s valet, doing everything from restocking the Playboy founder’s fridge with necessities like perfectly chilled Pepsi to cleaning sex toys after Hefner’s infamous “Pig Nights”, when the robe-clad Hef would call in prostitutes for his friends.

My job as Mr. Hefner’s valet was to take care of him in a very personal way. I prepared his “sick menu” — Pepsi, Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and M&Ms — whenever he felt ill, which was often because he was a hypochondriac. I also made sure the maids took all the sex toys down to the basement after use and washed and sterilised them before returning the gadgets to the secret compartment above his bed.

On certain nights, Mr. Hefner had prostitutes brought up to the mansion and he would entertain them with a big dinner and invite his friends to come and participate in different intimate acts with them. It was called “Pig Night”. Sometimes the women had penises and Hefner didn’t want to be involved with that, although some of the other guests, especially John Belushi, they didn’t mind.

Hugh, most of the time, never had sex with women. He was more interested in watching. He would hire famous male porn stars, including John Holmes, with huge penises and watch them have sex with different girls he brought in. Hugh sat there in his favourite chair, smoking a joint and eating red licorice and watching. I had to go into the room afterwards and if the girls couldn’t walk, I would have to escort them to the bedrooms so they could recuperate. Hef sometimes gave bonuses to the women because the sex acts were so painful.

He always filmed the encounters. He had two large video cameras over his bed and he had these giant screens across from his bed. He had a whole library for these sex acts with different people and the video librarian told me Hef planned to use the footage against his associates if they ever threatened to come out with a memoir about him or the mansion.

For many people, the Playboy mansion was a safe haven from the paparazzi and private detectives. A married comedian came for years, bringing different girls to have sex with. I had to take many food trays into the room where he was with these girls.

There was always cocaine around, though Mr. Hefner didn’t partake, preferring weed (he would often have parties where he invited all the marijuana growers in California to the house).

The entire grounds were under surveillance. There were cameras everywhere and all the phones were bugged. The staff had to be very careful and the men weren’t allowed to speak to any of Hef’s girls or socialise with them. But if one of Hef’s bunnies was out by the swimming pool and requested a lobster or cheeseburger, you’d deliver it to her and put the tray between her legs and while she oiled her legs, you’d see all sorts of toys that were attached to her vaginal area. The girls loved to tease me. You also weren’t supposed to be married if you worked for Hef. It was one of the rules, which somehow he ignored for me since my wife also worked at the mansion as a greeter during parties.

Hef wasn’t a kind man. If he tasted the Pepsi and it wasn’t cold enough, he would throw it away and call me to replace it. I don’t know if he ever even knew my name. He would just call me “valet.” He was very brutal to his girlfriends and sex partners. He made sure they had breast implants. In those days, the implants were new and they would shift and burst and I witnessed many women who had this done begging and crying to Hef to help them and he would put them back in the hospital and then discard these women. He didn’t care. They were disposable.

I really didn’t feel anything when I heard Hef died. He started out as an innovator and was a very liberal guy. He was pro abortion, gay rights, marijuana. He was very ahead of his time and then when he moved from Chicago to Holmby Hills, he became just another dirty old rich man.

Hef was an impotent scum bag.

[Transsimian]

(09-30-2017 07:16 AM)RiderKnight Wrote:  

Also, anyone who watches porn is a cuckold by essence.

Agreed.

Porn is masturbating whilst someone fucks someone you are attracted to.

Solo porn is much less bad.

[Captainstabbin]

(10-01-2017 05:58 AM)nomadbrah Wrote:  

What practical game did you learn from Hef, Cobra? Honest question.

I'll take a stab. Drug game. Hef was well known for having to provide a ton of various drugs to get women to even accept a party invite. He didn't openly teach this in the magazine of course and he tried to downplay it in his personal life but plenty of playmates have talked about the Jordan Belfort level of drugs being passed around.

From early on, Hef used the same thing all celebrities use - being high status and letting that do the work for him. That's a form of game I guess but, again, it's not something he actively taught. He preferred to believe that the broads were there for his gamesmanship. He also had a team of friends who would pre-qualify women for him in exchange for party invites. At parties, Hef would pay the girls in cash, connections and thousands of dollars of blow to "entertain" guests. Magic Johnson talked about learning that from Hef.

Paying the girls to come to parties attracted a LOT of Hollywood's beta bux types - and the girls knew that. The girls would work the party trying to better deal their way out of the Playboy empire. David Spade ended up with a kid by falling for that one. Barbi Benton met her real estate developer husband that way.

Speaking of Barbi, Hef had to spend millions and travel the world to keep her interested. Is that good gamesmanship? It's not the same kind of game I'd think most men here aspire to. Most men here consider a dinner date to be a waste of money...at best. Imagine anyone here bragging about banging a girl they had to buy a private jet for, travel the world for, pay for her recording career, buy her way into TV and movie roles and she still quit having sex and left him for weeks at a time to focus on her career. He eventually found other chicks so player status maintained?

Hef made a huge push into TV and film at one point and turned his ability to get girls bit roles in various projects into sex...standard casting couch game.

Hef was a player in the sense that he was vehemently against monogamy and had the resources to procure new women, but his game wasn't great. He never had the ability to get women without the promise of instant status, money, drugs, connections or exposure.

(10-01-2017 05:14 AM)Cobra Wrote:  

That said, Hef was smart and smooth enough that he singlehandedly made more money from more men than McQueen or Nicholson ever did.

Actually, Jack has over 9 times the net worth of Hef when he died.

[polar]

(10-01-2017 04:05 AM)N°6 Wrote:  

(09-27-2017 10:58 PM)budoslavic Wrote:  

R.I.P.

Blue Pill PUA: Wow, I could have all these women with Game

Red Pill Man: The involuntary celibate men anti-represented by these women is why you now need Game

Most Don't Talk About This, but for around 100k / year you could make any schmuck look like Hefner or Bilzerian.

Book high end looking venues.
Hire whordes of Instagram ho's, and a few photographers.
Hire "models" to recognize you as a celebrity and bodyguards to follow you around when you're shipping.
Add a social media management team.

All you need is $$$ and a cameraman.

[The Lizard of Oz]

Porn is hated by all but loved by almost everyone.

[bgbusiness]

The legend.
You will be missed!

[Long Haired Samson]

I don't get all the Hefner love. He never struck me as particularly manly. Does he strike you as a guy who could hold his own with his fists, or fix a car engine, or is athletic, or is a true intellectual, or has a commanding presence? In those old 1950's-early 1960's film clips of his TV show he looked like a 1950's version of a metrosexual with the soft voice and slightly feminine mannerisms. He plowed a lot of women and even men apparently as he had admitted. I guess that impresses some people.

[Mercenary]

(10-01-2017 09:36 AM)Comte De St. Germain Wrote:  

It's pretty easy to see who has no game in this thread.

I think it's easier to see who has no desire or ability to break their love for porn and masturbation in this thread.

[Mercenary]

...

(10-01-2017 04:42 PM)Conscious Pirate Wrote:  

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/cel...3fd2b1f217

Quote:

FROM 1978 through 1979, Stefan Tetenbaum worked as Hugh Hefner’s valet, doing everything from restocking the Playboy founder’s fridge with necessities like perfectly chilled Pepsi to cleaning sex toys after Hefner’s infamous “Pig Nights”, when the robe-clad Hef would call in prostitutes for his friends.

My job as Mr. Hefner’s valet was to take care of him in a very personal way. I prepared his “sick menu” — Pepsi, Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and M&Ms — whenever he felt ill, which was often because he was a hypochondriac. I also made sure the maids took all the sex toys down to the basement after use and washed and sterilised them before returning the gadgets to the secret compartment above his bed.

On certain nights, Mr. Hefner had prostitutes brought up to the mansion and he would entertain them with a big dinner and invite his friends to come and participate in different intimate acts with them. It was called “Pig Night”. Sometimes the women had penises and Hefner didn’t want to be involved with that, although some of the other guests, especially John Belushi, they didn’t mind.

Hugh, most of the time, never had sex with women. He was more interested in watching. He would hire famous male porn stars, including John Holmes, with huge penises and watch them have sex with different girls he brought in. Hugh sat there in his favourite chair, smoking a joint and eating red licorice and watching. I had to go into the room afterwards and if the girls couldn’t walk, I would have to escort them to the bedrooms so they could recuperate. Hef sometimes gave bonuses to the women because the sex acts were so painful.

He always filmed the encounters. He had two large video cameras over his bed and he had these giant screens across from his bed. He had a whole library for these sex acts with different people and the video librarian told me Hef planned to use the footage against his associates if they ever threatened to come out with a memoir about him or the mansion.

For many people, the Playboy mansion was a safe haven from the paparazzi and private detectives. A married comedian came for years, bringing different girls to have sex with. I had to take many food trays into the room where he was with these girls.

There was always cocaine around, though Mr. Hefner didn’t partake, preferring weed (he would often have parties where he invited all the marijuana growers in California to the house).

The entire grounds were under surveillance. There were cameras everywhere and all the phones were bugged. The staff had to be very careful and the men weren’t allowed to speak to any of Hef’s girls or socialise with them. But if one of Hef’s bunnies was out by the swimming pool and requested a lobster or cheeseburger, you’d deliver it to her and put the tray between her legs and while she oiled her legs, you’d see all sorts of toys that were attached to her vaginal area. The girls loved to tease me. You also weren’t supposed to be married if you worked for Hef. It was one of the rules, which somehow he ignored for me since my wife also worked at the mansion as a greeter during parties.

Hef wasn’t a kind man. If he tasted the Pepsi and it wasn’t cold enough, he would throw it away and call me to replace it. I don’t know if he ever even knew my name. He would just call me “valet.” He was very brutal to his girlfriends and sex partners. He made sure they had breast implants. In those days, the implants were new and they would shift and burst and I witnessed many women who had this done begging and crying to Hef to help them and he would put them back in the hospital and then discard these women. He didn’t care. They were disposable.

I really didn’t feel anything when I heard Hef died. He started out as an innovator and was a very liberal guy. He was pro abortion, gay rights, marijuana. He was very ahead of his time and then when he moved from Chicago to Holmby Hills, he became just another dirty old rich man.

Hef was an impotent scum bag.

[Comte De St. Germain]

(10-02-2017 02:04 AM)Mercenary Wrote:  

(10-01-2017 09:36 AM)Comte De St. Germain Wrote:  

It's pretty easy to see who has no game in this thread.

I think it's easier to see who has no desire or ability to break their love for porn and masturbation in this thread.

I just jerked off to Sasha Grey shoving tennis balls up her ass. And it felt really fucking good. Does this trigger you?

[Icarus]

The 1st of the 4 great errors:

Quote:

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his work Twilight of the Idols, perhaps primarily known for the immortal maxim: "Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.", pointed out the four great errors which we constantly use to misinterpret reality and thus create many illusions that are used to show the world in a more convenient light for us.

The first error, which is also the most dangerous one, is mistaking the cause and effect, or in another words, mistaking the effect for the cause; an error that is the most recent and yet the most ancient habit of humankind, as Nietzsche says. This error is even praised by people as religion and morality, which always try to limit them with encouragement or prohibition of certain actions. Religion and morality supposes that man is, for example, ruined by certain vices like luxury or alcoholism and regard them as the cause of his downfall. But that is actually only the effect of his psychological deterioration, because he didn't have the strength to overcome or resist the hardships in life which he faced, so he instead turned to stronger and more frequent bodily stimulations to avoid confrontation with them. This inability to handle the unpleasant things in life is really the cause of his state of mind, and those vices are merely the effects, i.e. the actual representations of the cause.

[Aurini]

Anonymous Conservative does some facial analysis:

Quote:

I have noted a subset of gays exhibit a variation of this that pulls the naolabial fold outward slightly more than simple disgust, and often includes a nostril flare. I also notice this in girls who have been sexually abused. I think the first time I noticed it was in a young brunette pornstar who was profiled on Nightline. I do not remember her name, but I do remember she came from a Mormon family, and they said she was sexually abused at an early age by a relative, maybe fourteen. In the episode she immediately fell for a male costar on a trip to Italy, until he turned a porn scene into a violent scene, inexplicably transitioning to choking her, pulling her up by the neck, and slapping her back and forth from side to side while holding he up by her neck, as he acted out the acts they were assigned. She was wrecked right after it, crying and acting like it was nothing at the same time, as a crew member tried to comfort her. It was pretty awful. But all along the way as they interviewed her, I couldn’t help but notice what looked odd to me – that strange flaring of the nostrils and pulling that nasolabial fold up and outward to each side. Then I began to notice it in many, but not all, gays, usually the ones who seem the most neurotic (Milo does not have it, FWIW).

Hef is an excellent example of this – I would almost say textbook. In fact, he may be the most extreme example I have ever seen:

Cover over everything above the middle of Hef’s nose, and focus on the upper lip and mouth. Notice also Hef has no upper lip. It is curled under. That is usually a sign of quickness to anger or more often frustration.

Interestingly Hef himself spoke of having banged guys, and a commenter here said there was a book which said he kept gay porn playing on the TV while he was having anal sex with the girls. It would not surprise me if he had some sort of molestation history.

...

To me the expression is kind of like smelling something disgusting, and being disgusted by it. Given gays show structural anomalies in their amygdala in the literature, it is interesting an anomalous facial feature associated with disgust, which is intimately associated with amygdala, would be prevalent among many of them.

I make that expression myself in a mirror, and try to visualize what I feel, as affect psychology advises you do to understand affect, but it is deeper than an emotion. It is a mixture of disgust, horror, and dislike/extreme contempt for a person or situation. I almost wonder if the act of molestation is so intense for some, and it triggers that mixture of emotions and feelings so intensely, it burns that mixture of emotions into the brain so deeply that they wear the affect of that experience the rest of their lives. Once burned in, it always shows, even when they smile, or try to appear neutral. It might even be some sort of outward manifestation of a fundamental change in their amygdala.

I do not see this in every gay, or to the degree I see it in Sykes or Liberace. Milo doesn’t have it, nor does he look to me like he will get it when he gets older. I haven’t checked how many gays exhibit it as a percentage, and I have seen it in heterosexual girls who experienced sexual abuse on true crime shows several times. In some of those cases, girls in their early teens exhibited it. I cannot remember seeing it in a person who I judged to be of low amygdala and conservative disposition, though it is not impossible that affect could result from a physical/structural, rather than psychological origin, and thus just be there independent of amygdala-status.

[Sherman]

"Pamela Anderson breaks down in tears as she reacts to Hugh Hefner's death: 'Goodbye Hef'"

https://www.aol.com/article/entertainmen.../23226191/

[RichardCranium]

(10-01-2017 04:47 PM)Captainstabbin Wrote:  

(10-01-2017 05:58 AM)nomadbrah Wrote:  

What practical game did you learn from Hef, Cobra? Honest question.

Paying the girls to come to parties attracted a LOT of Hollywood's beta bux types - and the girls knew that. The girls would work the party trying to better deal their way out of the Playboy empire. David Spade ended up with a kid by falling for that one. Barbi Benton met her real estate developer husband that way.

(10-01-2017 05:14 AM)Cobra Wrote:  

That said, Hef was smart and smooth enough that he singlehandedly made more money from more men than McQueen or Nicholson ever did.

Actually, Jack has over 9 times the net worth of Hef when he died.

That's what people that claim the girls were "exploited" don't seen to realize. They were given access to the top 1%. Many of the playmates ended up married or involved with high status men or got hired in movies and TV shows from appearing in the magazine. Pam Anderson was a nobody before she was in Playboy. Even the ones that were just part of the entourage have complained about how "bad" they were treated but they conveniently leave out the part of them getting to live rent-free in a multi-million dollar mansion and have no worries in life simply because they have nice tits.

[debeguiled]

(10-02-2017 08:14 AM)Aurini Wrote:  

Anonymous Conservative does some facial analysis:

Quote:

I have noted a subset of gays exhibit a variation of this that pulls the naolabial fold outward slightly more than simple disgust, and often includes a nostril flare. I also notice this in girls who have been sexually abused. I think the first time I noticed it was in a young brunette pornstar who was profiled on Nightline. I do not remember her name, but I do remember she came from a Mormon family, and they said she was sexually abused at an early age by a relative, maybe fourteen. In the episode she immediately fell for a male costar on a trip to Italy, until he turned a porn scene into a violent scene, inexplicably transitioning to choking her, pulling her up by the neck, and slapping her back and forth from side to side while holding he up by her neck, as he acted out the acts they were assigned. She was wrecked right after it, crying and acting like it was nothing at the same time, as a crew member tried to comfort her. It was pretty awful. But all along the way as they interviewed her, I couldn’t help but notice what looked odd to me – that strange flaring of the nostrils and pulling that nasolabial fold up and outward to each side. Then I began to notice it in many, but not all, gays, usually the ones who seem the most neurotic (Milo does not have it, FWIW).

Hef is an excellent example of this – I would almost say textbook. In fact, he may be the most extreme example I have ever seen:

Cover over everything above the middle of Hef’s nose, and focus on the upper lip and mouth. Notice also Hef has no upper lip. It is curled under. That is usually a sign of quickness to anger or more often frustration.

Interestingly Hef himself spoke of having banged guys, and a commenter here said there was a book which said he kept gay porn playing on the TV while he was having anal sex with the girls. It would not surprise me if he had some sort of molestation history.

...

To me the expression is kind of like smelling something disgusting, and being disgusted by it. Given gays show structural anomalies in their amygdala in the literature, it is interesting an anomalous facial feature associated with disgust, which is intimately associated with amygdala, would be prevalent among many of them.

I make that expression myself in a mirror, and try to visualize what I feel, as affect psychology advises you do to understand affect, but it is deeper than an emotion. It is a mixture of disgust, horror, and dislike/extreme contempt for a person or situation. I almost wonder if the act of molestation is so intense for some, and it triggers that mixture of emotions and feelings so intensely, it burns that mixture of emotions into the brain so deeply that they wear the affect of that experience the rest of their lives. Once burned in, it always shows, even when they smile, or try to appear neutral. It might even be some sort of outward manifestation of a fundamental change in their amygdala.

I do not see this in every gay, or to the degree I see it in Sykes or Liberace. Milo doesn’t have it, nor does he look to me like he will get it when he gets older. I haven’t checked how many gays exhibit it as a percentage, and I have seen it in heterosexual girls who experienced sexual abuse on true crime shows several times. In some of those cases, girls in their early teens exhibited it. I cannot remember seeing it in a person who I judged to be of low amygdala and conservative disposition, though it is not impossible that affect could result from a physical/structural, rather than psychological origin, and thus just be there independent of amygdala-status.

Aurini wins if the game is ruining Playboy.

[Samseau]

One thing notable about Hef's life: smoking weed daily and making it to 91. Who says this stuff is bad...? Vape it and no more carcinogens...

[YoungBlade]

(10-02-2017 10:09 AM)Samseau Wrote:  

One thing notable about Hef's life: smoking weed daily and making it to 91. Who says this stuff is bad...? Vape it and no more carcinogens...

Join us!



thread-59839.html

[Sherman]

Let us not forget that Hugh Hefner left a grieving widow.

"Crystal Hefner Breaks Her Silence After Hugh Hefner Is Laid to Rest"

"He changed my life, he saved my life. He made me feel loved every single day. He was a beacon to the world, a force unlike anything else."

http://www.eonline.com/news/884122/cryst...id-to-rest


   

[Sombro]

Camille Paglia on Hugh Hefner's Legacy, Trump's Masculinity and Feminism's Sex Phobia

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ca...ia-1044769

Quote:

Is there anything of lasting value in Hugh Hefner's legacy?

We can see that what has completely vanished is what Hefner espoused and represented — the art of seduction, where a man, behaving in a courtly, polite and respectful manner, pursues a woman and gives her the time and the grace and the space to make a decision of consent or not. Hefner's passing makes one remember an era when a man would ask a woman on a real date — inviting her to his apartment for some great music on a cutting-edge stereo system (Playboy was always talking about the best new electronics!) — and treating her to fine cocktails and a wonderful, relaxing time. Sex would emerge out of conversation and flirtation as a pleasurable mutual experience. So now when we look back at Hefner, we see a moment when there was a fleeting vision of a sophisticated sexuality that was integrated with all of our other aesthetic and sensory responses.

Instead, what we have today, after Playboy declined and finally disappeared off the cultural map, is the coarse, juvenile anarchy of college binge drinking, fraternity keg parties where undeveloped adolescent boys clumsily lunge toward naive girls who are barely dressed in tiny miniskirts and don't know what the hell they want from life. What possible romance or intrigue or sexual mystique could survive such a vulgar and debased environment as today's residential campus social life?

[5-7 Hedonist]

Camille Paglia weighs in on the legacy and societal implications. This is a good read.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ca...ia-1044769

[augen sehen]

Pretty much the only reason none of the Fake News has anything bad to say about Hugh Hefner is because he was lock-step with every single one of their ideologies. Playboy was the vanguard of the sexual revolution for the 99% that weren't getting laid because of their natural-born Alpha Game™.

It is sickening that you can't find a single critical article about him on mainstream media, where you won't see anything about Trump in a positive light. Just goes to show who their idols are. I had a mildly positive opinion on Hefner when I was younger but now I just feel disgusted.

[polar]

Economist weighs in with an obituary:

Quote:

WHENEVER Hugh Hefner mentioned that his strict Methodist mother had wanted him to be a missionary, he got a big laugh. He got a bigger one when he said he answered: “Mom, I was.” His listeners were thinking of the missionary position, no doubt, and the hundreds of women he had conquered with that irresistible saturnine charm. But he was absolutely serious. As the man who brought sexual liberation to America in the form of clubs, casinos, Bunny Girls and naked centrefolds, he too was a preacher and a prophet. But instead of “Thou shalt not”, the creed of Puritan killjoys down the centuries, his was “Freedom!”—and the loud tooting of a sports car, accessorised with beauties, driving at speed through America’s drearily conformist suburbs and its herds of sacred cows. Blessed is the rebel, he cried; no progress without him.

(At this point Hef in his wolfish prime would pop another Dexedrine, take a couple of puffs on his ever-present pipe, spin round on his giant revolving bed and dictate the next para to his eager secretary. Hef in his dotage would retie his silk dressing gown, shuffle into his velvet slippers and get one of his nubile assistants to adjust his hearing aid, since too much Viagra—“the fountain of youth!”—had made him deaf.)

Playboy magazine was the voice of his rebellion. He started it in 1953, with borrowed money, as a pleasure primer for young urban males just like him. It was dedicated to the pursuit of happiness and the American dream: if you worked hard, you too could claim your prize of big hi-fi rigs, fine wines and bed-ready girls. He picked those himself in seigneurial fashion; sometimes, in the photos, his pipe would be perched in an ashtray beside them. He liked his Playmates to resemble a pretty girl next door, to show that nice girls liked sex too, in or out of marriage. If you doubted it, you only had to read the Kinsey report of 1948, which had let the sunshine in on the hyperactive sex lives of the citizenry. What was this hypocritical hangup America had, this bugaboo of “sin”?
Sex was fun. Whether it was morally good or bad wasn’t the point. The morality depended on the situation. All that stuff aside, sex was also the beginning of civilisation, the life force. It should be celebrated. Yet America had swarmed since its foundation with censors, prigs, prudes and bluenoses intent on sexual repression. To keep down a natural drive led to deviancy and crime, even witch-burnings, even mass madness (at least as he understood Cotton Mather, or Catholic medieval Europe). And it was tyranny, pure and simple.

This was his philosophy. He called it one, and laid it out in long editorials over months and years. This meant he had to defend it against lounging sneerers like William F. Buckley, who flung words like “latitudinarianism” at him on TV. Well, he could be an intellectual too, showing in the more literary pages of Playboy—with offerings from Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Bradbury, John Updike and Jack Kerouac and interviews with Orson Welles and Martin Luther King, among many others—that he was on the very cutting edge of culture.

Black-satin corsets
What other philosophers really disliked was that he made money from it. A lot of money. The first-ever run of Playboy, with Marilyn Monroe clothed on the cover and inside naked, sold out overnight. It was the coup of a lifetime. By 1958, profits were $4m a year. He branched out into Playboy Enterprises: clubs and casinos across the world, films, cable, digital. His bunny logo was on cufflinks and shirts. The 1970s were his best years, when he moved from Chicago to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles and flew in a black Playboy jet with attendants in ultra-brief black leather. The 1980s, when he lost gambling licences in London and Atlantic City and was dogged by scandals, were rocky, and in 1988 he gave up control of his empire. Playboy’s circulation fell to less than 1m. But by then he was so rich that he could go on living his big boy’s dream, wearing his captain’s hat in bed and parading with armfuls of giggling conquests clad, to his orders, in “lingerie or less”.

He backed civil rights of most sorts. Feminists, though, were the enemy. They seemed to want women to be asexual, when the point of his crusade was to celebrate their wonderful differences: as displayed by those Bunny Girls who staffed his clubs and casinos, so cute in those black-satin corsets that made their breasts bigger, those big ears and fluffy tails. (All Hef’s idea; he loved to have a menagerie at hand.) They were free, too, to turn any club member down, except for Number One keyholders. And he refused to run pornography, even in the 70s when, during the “Pubic Wars”, Penthouse did. Short of real smut, why cover up such objects of desire?

To many he was a priapic horror, but to himself he was a romantic. Playboy was really a boy-girl romance magazine. The first pin-ups he fell for at 14 were tasteful drawings of nudes from Esquire. He was a virgin on his first marriage, and tried it twice more, but he liked variety. His career was a quest for beauty as well as freedom, he said, and Marilyn gloriously topped and tailed it. He never met her, or paid her for those photographs, but he forked out $75,000 to get the crypt in Woodlawn right beside hers. To spend eternity together was the sweetest thought. And she, of course, would feel the same.

[Icarus]

(10-05-2017 12:11 PM)augen sehen Wrote:  

It is sickening that you can't find a single critical article about him on mainstream media

Yes, you can!!! Ross Douthat, that total square, is speaking ill of Hugh Hefner on the NYTimes.

Ross Douthat Wrote:

Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.

Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.

The arc of his life vindicated his moral critics, conservative and feminist: What began with talk of jazz and Picasso and other signifiers of good taste ended in a sleazy decrepitude that would have been pitiable if it wasn’t still so exploitative.

Early Hef had a pipe and suit and a highbrow reference for every occasion; he even claimed to have a philosophy, that final refuge of the scoundrel. But late Hef was a lecherous, low-brow Peter Pan, playing at perpetual boyhood — ice cream for breakfast, pajamas all day — while bodyguards shooed male celebrities away from his paid harem and the skull grinned beneath his papery skin.

This late phase was prettied up by reality television’s “The Girls Next Door,” which kept the orgies offstage and relied on the girlfriends’ mix of desperation, boredom and charisma for its strange appeal. The behind-the-scenes accounts were rather grimmer: depression and drugs, “dirty hallway carpets and the curtains that smell like dog piss,” the chance to wait while Hef “picked the dog poo off the carpet — and then ask for our allowance.”

Needless to say the obituaries for Hefner, even if they acknowledge the seaminess, have been full of encomia for his great deeds: Hef the vanquisher of puritanism, Hef the political progressive, Hef the great businessman and all the rest. There are even conservative appreciations, arguing that for all his faults Hef was an entrepreneur who appreciated the finer things in life and celebrated la différence.

What a lot of garbage. Sure, Hefner supported some good causes and published some good writers. But his good deeds and aesthetic aspirations were ultimately incidental to his legacy — a gloss over his flesh-peddling, smeared like Vaseline on a pornographer’s lens. The things that were distinctively Hefnerian, that made him influential and important, were all rotten, and to the extent they were part of stories that people tend to celebrate, they showed the rot in larger things as well.

His success as a businessman showed the rotten side of capitalism — the side that exploits appetites for money, that feeds leech-like on our vices, that dissolves family and religion while promising that consumption will fill the void they leave behind.

The social liberalism he championed was the rotten and self-interested sort, a liberalism of male and upper-class privilege, in which the strong and beautiful and rich take their pleasure at the expense of the vulnerable and poor and not-yet-born.

The online future his career anticipated was the rotten side of the internet — the realms of onanism and custom-tailored erotica, where the male vanity and entitlement he indulged has curdled into resentment and misogyny.

And his appreciation of male-female difference was rotten, too — the leering predatory sort of appreciation, the Cosby-Clinton-Trump sort, the sort that nicknames quaaludes “thigh openers” and expects the girls to laugh, the sort that prefers breast implants to female intellect and rents the charms of youth to escape the realities of age.

No doubt what Hefner offered America somebody else would have offered in his place, and the changes he helped hasten would have come rushing in without him.

But in every way that mattered he made those changes worse, our culture coarser and crueler and more sterile than liberalism or feminism or freedom of speech required. And in every way that mattered his life story proved that we were wrong to listen to him, because at the end of the long slide lay only a degraded, priapic senility, or the desperate gaiety of Prince Prospero’s court with the Red Death at the door.

Now that death has taken him, we should examine our own sins. Liberals should ask why their crusade for freedom and equality found itself with such a captain, and what his legacy says about their cause. Conservatives should ask how their crusade for faith and family and community ended up so Hefnerian itself — with a conservative news network that seems to have been run on Playboy Mansion principles and a conservative party that just elected a playboy as our president.

You can find these questions being asked, but they are counterpoints and minor themes. That this should be the case, that only prudish Christians and spoilsport feminists are willing to say that the man was obviously wicked and destructive, is itself a reminder that the rot Hugh Hefner spread goes very, very deep.

[Icarus]

Hefner's cameo on Entourage: