Hugh Hefner (1926-2017)

Perhaps no single individual has done more in his lifetime to destroy the moral fabric of a nation, certainly not this nation, than has Hugh Hefner who died this week at the age of 91.

Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine in the early 1950s, was a major influence in the sexual revolution of the 1960s exploiting the confluence of the rebelliousness of youth in the sixties, the development of easy birth control, the unprecedented sociological phenomenon of perhaps hundreds of thousands of young men and women being mixed together and isolated from any significant oversight of their lives and conduct for four years in colleges and universities, and the erosion of religious influences on people's personal lives.

At a time when even theologians were proclaiming and celebrating the death of God Hefner exploited the moral vacuum His "death" left through the promotion of his Playboy "philosophy." That philosophy was in fact just a repackaging of the hedonism which has been around ever since the ancient Greeks and doubtless for long before, but it was enthusiastically received by generations of young men and women eager to believe its promise of fulfillment through the liberation of their appetites from the repressive strictures of the old morality, and eager to make physical pleasure and sexual gratification their new gods.

The destructive effect this "liberation" has had on the American family is incalculable. The promises of fulfilled lives and happiness turned to dust in the mouths of countless families destroyed by infidelity, pornography addiction, incest, sexual abuse and divorce.

Millions of girls have grown up believing the absurdity that the way to make boys love them is to make themselves sexually available. Millions of boys have grown up believing that sexual access to girls is a right, that girls are objects for male gratification, and a vehicle for affirming their masculinity through sexual conquest.

Countless families have been devastated by the unrealistic sexual expectations of the husband for his wife and mother of his children because she could not measure up to the sexual standard established for her, directly or indirectly, by Hefner and his acolytes. Millions of children have grown up disadvantaged by the lack of a father in their lives because the men who sired them had no intention of committing to their mothers and their mothers did not insist upon commitment before giving them sex.

It's hard to imagine anything which has been more corrosive to social well-being and cohesion than the assumptions about sex promoted by Hefner and his successors over the last sixty years.

David French, writing in National Review Online, says this:

Hugh Hefner didn’t invent pornography, and it would no doubt be thriving today even if he hadn’t founded Playboy magazine those many years ago. After all, man is fallen, and somebody would have filled that depraved niche in American life. Hefner, however, played his part, and the part he played was immensely destructive to our nation’s cultural, moral, and spiritual fabric. Hefner mainstreamed porn, he put it in millions of homes, and he even glamorized it — recasting one of America’s most pathetic industries as the playground of the sophisticated rich.

He then grew to a ripe old age, consorting with women young enough to be his granddaughters. He was America’s most famous dirty old man....

So many A-list celebrities spent time at the Playboy Mansion, especially at its peak, that there was a time when one could wonder who hadn’t embraced Hef or the magazine he made. Our president has. The evidence is on his office wall. These were the people setting the tone for American culture. These were the people mocking the values that kept families strong. These were the people who were teaching a nation that fulfillment could be found in sex, and that the joy of sex was worth more than marriage itself.

They were wrong, and the cultural harm done outweighs the cost of botched presidential elections, bad congressmen, or a judiciary riddled with knaves and fools. The cultural harm done is even now ripping kids from parents and husbands from wives. When I think of Hugh Hefner, yes I mourn, but I mourn because the bitter fruit of his life’s work has helped poison the families of people I know and love. He is gone, but his legacy lives on. And his is a legacy of despair.

Hefner is gone, but rather than grieve for him as some in the media have done it's more appropriate, perhaps, to grieve for the millions of people whose lives were diminished or destroyed because either they or someone in their life believed the delusions about human nature that Hefner made a fortune promoting.