Our most influential pimp
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Article I wrote with colleague and friend Robert Jensen to “celebrate” Hefner’s 80th birthday 11 years ago. What we said then holds true today. But now he is dead! Hopefully this is an antidote to the all the fawning over Hefner you are likely to be subject to by mainstream press.Hugh Hefner is 80 today. America, say happy birthday to our most influential pimp. Houston Chronicle, April 9, 2006
By Gail Dines and Robert JensenHefner, the legendary founder of Playboy magazine, a pimp? Yes, if we told the truth about Hefner’s “contribution” to society, we would refer to him as a pimp, as someone who sells women to men for sex. While pornography has never been treated as prostitution by the law, it’s fundamentally the same exchange. The fact that the sex is mediated through a magazine or movie doesn’t change that, nor does the fact that women sometimes use pornography. The fundamentals remain: Men pay to use women for sexual pleasure.
These days Hefner is more likely to be called an entrepreneur, publisher or philanthropist. He’s the subject of endless feature stories focused on his personal life and typically is treated as an elder statesman of the so-called sexual revolution. As a CNN anchor put it last year, “He lives almost every man’s fantasy — surrounded by sex, celebrities, and a lifestyle many envy.” He stars in an E! reality show called The Girls Next Door, featuring Hefner and three girlfriends young enough to be his granddaughters.
Hefner certainly is all those things. He made his name as the risk-taking publisher of the first sex magazine to win wide distribution in the United States and Europe. Behind his public playboy image, Hefner was a tough businessman whose strategic gambles paid off. Some of those profits created the Playboy Foundation, which describes its mission at “protecting and enhancing the American principles of personal freedom and social justice.” And many men dream of “Hef’s” life of sexual freedom — defined as the freedom to access women’s sexuality based on men’s needs and rules.
All that’s true, but it doesn’t change the fact that Hefner is every bit as much a pimp as the men who hustle prostituted women on the street. But Hefner is the most influential pimp in postwar U.S. history, the person who launched the mainstreaming of pornography that has led to easy availability of hardcore sexually explicit material that is overtly cruel and degrading to women.
When the first issue of Playboy hit the newsstands in 1953, it is unlikely that even in his wildest dreams Hefner had any idea that his fusion of a sex and lifestyle magazine would lay the economic, cultural and legal groundwork for a global pornography market estimated at $57 billion a year.The risks Hefner took have led to the pornographic culture we live with today; in 2005, 13,000 new hardcore videos were released in the United States, and any genre of pornography imaginable is easily available on any media platform. Playboy Enterprises, which has evolved into a multimedia entertainment company run by daughter Christie Hefner, has a healthy share of the market. Although it posted a slight net loss in 2005 and the publishing end of the business is sinking, the company’s revenue from licensing fees is strong. Technology changes, but selling women to men remains good business.
In that market, the fastest growing segment is what the industry calls gonzo pornography — sex on tape with no pretense of plot, characters or dialogue. This low-cost/high-profit genre is where pornographers push the limits, legally and culturally. Hefner’s original images of the girl-next-door with a coy smile have been replaced by the body-punishing penetration of a woman by any number of men. Gone is any pretense — and it always was pretense — of pornography being a celebration of women’s beauty, and in its place is an industry that promotes itself as overtly cruel and sadistic to women.
This is the world that Hefner helped create. Along with other pornographers, he would have us believe it’s a new expansion of freedom. But it’s an old story about men’s domination and use of women.
As he nears the end of his life, it’s tempting to see Hefner as self-parody, a pathetic character struggling to hold onto adolescent fantasies long past the time he should have grown up. But in the pornographic world he helped create, Hefner is not alone — men of all ages hold onto those fantasies about sex and domination. And all too often those fantasies become a grim reality for the women, children, and vulnerable men who end up as targets of men’s violence.
Dines, an American Studies professor at Wheelock College in Boston, and Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, are co-authors of “Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality.” They can be reached at gdines@wheelock.edu and rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
That’s a very good and informative essay. However, it makes Hugh seem like he was responsible for the outcome of events he had no direct correlation to.
A Boeing 737 is ubiquitous. Almost everyone has flown on one and almost all other jets look very similar. Is Boeing responsible for all of modern air transportation? No. Likewise, an iPhone revolutionized our world, but is it responsible for all aspects of how it revolutionized our lives? No. Could there have been other Facebooks? Of course. Etc.
Physical and sociological boundary conditions dictate the direction of very complicated systems but they are often bound by constraints which make the general features the same over time regardless of the specific details.
If Miles Davis never lived would modern music be the same? Not entirely, but really how different would it be? Until today, I’ve not thought of Hefner in many decades. I really can’t see that humans would have been too different if he had never existed. For what he did, any number of men or small organizations could have been substituted. In this sense, Hefner is not special.
Kevin Henderson #1
Are you saying the production and use of sadistic pornography is inevitable, and not the product of choices people make?
Do you have extensive knowledge of the history of modern Western porn production and how it has come to be so ubiquitous? I’m not an expert in this area, but I understand that Gail Dines is, at least to a greater extent than most people.
I have no wish to criticize you. But it is so incredibly frustrating to hear men talk as if women have no choice but to put up with living in a society constantly lit up by images that show us being degraded and brutalised by men. I don’t believe men have to be this way. It is something they choose and condition one another into.
I am trying to step back from whether Hefner did anything good or bad. I am a little surprised that so many people (not here) are suggesting that Hefner was special or that he did extraordinary things. This is ghastly to me. Clearly he had significance (not to me) but in my view he did nothing that countless others could not have done. To count him as innovative is crazy.
I call this the Mohawk principle. Would I be noticed if I got a mohawk. Yes. Did it take any effort? No. This is Hefner’s life. A veritable waste that got noticed but could have been easily reproduced. Contrast this with someone who does something very simple: swim the length of a pool faster than any human being. Will this person get noticed. Yes. Did it take any effort? I would assert, wildly more than Hefner could ever comprehend.
Also, is pornography inevitable? I don’t know. Science is terrible at predicting such things. But ideologies, like religion, have produced reasons for people, both men and women, to believe that women can be inferior to men. There is evidence that suggests religion is waning, not just in America, but other parts of the world. This is a good thing for equality, not just for women, but all people. It’s only part of the ‘puzzle’ but whether pornography persists will certainly have a lot to do with how people consider themselves equal.
You know, I don’t hold much with the “great man” theory of history, but I do think there are people who somehow move us in a different direction. I think if Darwin had not been born, we would still have the theory of evolution, because many other people were doing that. But there are some things people do that I feel are unique, and do change the way the world operates. I don’t know about Miles Davis, but I do suspect music would be dramatically different if the Beatles had not been around, because they created sounds that seemed to come out of who they were at that time and place; I’m not sure anyone else could have created that sound, and it changed rock music as we know it.
So did Hefner create pornography? Of course not. Was he innovative? Not at all. But I do think there is a case to be made that he had just the right combination of personality, boldness, and determination that was able to mainstream sexuality, such that now I hear people discussing Playboy as if somehow it were just another sports or fishing magazine. It is regarded as mild by the standards of many of the other “girlie” magazines. Because Hefner came along and pushed the door open, and managed to mainstream female nudity for sale all over the place, it opened up the world for Larry Flynt, and those who came after. Could someone else have done that? Maybe, maybe not. I do believe that there are people who have something that allows them to go where other people can’t manage. Maybe it’s just that they don’t care what other people think about them, or maybe it’s that they have a “charm” or something that puts people off guard. Or, like I said above, it might just be the right combination of circumstances, which I think Hefner had. The world was changing, and he took advantage of that change for his own prurient and economic interests.
Many physicists have pondered if Einstein had not come up with General Relativity would it have been discovered. The general consensus now stands between around ten to seventy years. Science would not be that different.
If John had not met Paul, music would be very different. That’s fascinating. Back to the point, I think it’s interesting that someone could take a fluorescence image of some ultra-cold ions in the ground state of a magnetic trap and maybe twenty people might get excited. This work rests on half a dozen Nobel Prizes, an army of graduate students working years under several NSF grants to produce maybe one publication.
Likewise, someone like Carolyn Porco can show the world some images from Cassini’s 111th flyby of Titan that only ten people have ever cared about. A mission that costs billions of dollars and opened our eyes to one of the most amazing planets that we know. And yet, if someone, without any effort, manages to takes a nude image of an actress without her permission, violating her rights, the image would almost certainly be viewed millions of times (largely without concern for the one being violated).
Pornography takes little to no effort and yet it is so noticeable. Those who benefit from it are exploiting not only the participants but they are also hijacking biological features of the spectator.
You saw that NOVA about Cassini the other night too, huh? Very cool.
Carolyn Porco Is an inspiration. Contact happens to be one of the most re-watched movies in my life.
I would argue that starting and running a business as big as Playboy took one hell of a lot of effort and that the mainstreaming of pornography was innovative. It’s obviously what Hefner set out to do – I’ve never looked at an issue of Playboy(*) but I’m told that it’s a sort of mixture of sex and lifestyle stuff. That was obviously a deliberate decision and as far as I know an innovation. Were any other magazines doing this kind of thing?
I’m not saying it was a welcome innovation or that the effort was justified by the results, but I think it’s wrong to say that he didn’t put in any effort and that he didn’t innovate.
I don’t think any of that is relevant anyway. In the UK the news has been full of how he was somehow the father of the sexual revolution and a champion of equality and the empowerment of women. These are the supposed qualities I take exception to – he was none of those things. He was pretty much the exact opposite of those things. While it could be argued that being less uptight about sex and nudity benefits everyone, especially the enforceably repressed, I’m not sure we can claim that exploiting women is the way to achieve this. And yet, that’s what the news is saying without (that I’ve seen) anyone justifying the statements or offering opposing views.
(*) On reflection, that’s not quite true. I used to have a German girlfriend and we went to visit her family. Her parents spoke no English at all and I didn’t speak much German then so communication was a little difficult. At one point, about ten minutes after meeting my girlfriend’s father, he handed me a Playboy magazine. I didn’t really know how to react but to avoid seeming rude I flicked through it. Germans tend to be a lot less uptight about this kind of thing than we British. After pawing through the magazine for several minutes, I was informed by my girlfriend that i was supposed to be looking at the calendar in the back, which had notable “on this day” events. It turns out that my girlfriend’s grandfather had invented the machine that makes the inside of Thermos flasks and (this being a German edition of Playboy) this was considered and marked as a notable date in history.
I never quite forgave her for letting me read through practically the whole magazine in front of her parents before telling me this.
So much of Playboy’s potential was left untouched. Playboy was/is a business model. Hefner, took little to no risk to do something that could have made a difference. He calculated what was a particular market and played that market. He promoted free speech, but promotion of his business model was paramount. History is not reporting that Hefner made a difference standing for equal rights, against racism or against sexism. The same could be said of others who control social media, who have great potential to do historic things but choose to put a business model above all else.
I am continuing to read a great deal about how Playboy helped gay rights and racism all of the internet. I don’t get it. I grew up in the eighties. Gays had no rights as far as I could tell. All my friends who were gay hid themselves away. And racism? Good grief. Where was Playboy? I never head of Playboy changing the zeitgeist? As far as I can tell society changes and Playboy reacts. That’s not innovation.