The Playboy of the Western World

Hugh Hefner died last week. It is time to say a few words about Hugh Hefner.

Obits seem to have been mostly laudatory: he is credited with launching the sexual revolution.

I find that shocking: that anyone, in 2017, would still believe the “sexual revolution” was a good thing.

The sexual revolution has destroyed the family, and through this, countless lives. It has brought us free, legal, and frequent abortion, a holocaust that trumps anything Hitler did every few weeks. It has caused a demographic collapse that looks as though it will end Western civilization. AIDS and other venereal diseases are the least of it. Treating other people as objects for your pleasure, like a steak or a lobster, are the worst of it.

Yay, sexual revolution.

And Hefner himself was always an absurd figure, an embarrassment to himself and to anyone who took him seriously. Really: silk pyjamas, a smoking jacket, and a yachting cap with crossed anchors? The man lived his life as a cartoon. No doubt he had to, for business reasons. But it hardly amounts to an exemplary life. He was an eight-year-old boy’s fantasy of what it would be like to be grown up. Stay in bed all day. Party every night. Drink alcohol, smoke a pipe, and listen to cool jazz. Have your own pad! So sophisticated!

It’s not about the pornography, or, if you prefer, “erotica.” That I can see a justification for. It’s the lying about it. It’s the “philosophy.” I can forgive him only if he did it all for the money. But that still does not make him admirable.

The world is not a better place because Hugh Hefner was in it.