The other day as I cast my eye over the
Guardian, my poor recourse since the
Times of London retreated behind a pay-wall, I
noticed an
obituary of a musician named Robbie Jansen
whom the obituarist described as a “South African alto saxophonist
who fought apartheid through his music.” Well, good for him, I
thought. But isn’t being a musician, and presumably a good one,
enough for anyone to be remembered for? Do you also have to fight
apartheid through your music for your life to make an impression on
the world sufficient for the Guardian to make a note of
your existence? Quite possibly you do. At any rate, the media
culture prefers to honor those who have served heroically (on the
right side, of course) in the culture wars in addition to (or
perhaps instead of) just being good at what they do.
I thought of Robbie Jansen, though I had not heard of him
before, when I saw Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Rebel, Activist
by Brigitte Berman who, if she isn’t a paid employee of Hugh Hefner
Enterprises might as well be. Of course, as everyone has heard of
Hugh Hefner — unlike Robbie Jansen — his right to be memorialized
is unquestioned, as is the fact that he was a business genius
during the 1950s and 1960s who was the first to spot the emerging
market for naked female flesh packaged for home consumption by
strangers — especially teenage boys of the baby boom, like me. As
Ms. Berman’s account of his career as “Mr. Playboy” makes clear,
our ideas of sophistication and glamour were largely shaped by Hef
and Hef alone. Yet from her movie, with its ludicrously pretentious
title, you’d think that Playboy was the least of him, and
that he was not just a shrewd skin-merchant but a cross between
Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Moses and Jesus Christ, so
noble was his liberation of — well, randy males who had had enough
of “repression” and were looking for some guilt-free
fun.
In this, of course, she is playing to the Hollywood
version of the media culture and especially to the media’s
mythologization of the last 60-odd years. Hef was there, she tells
us, manning the barricades at all the right moments of the
revolution, from his heroic opposition to segregation and racism,
to his determined fight against sexual “repression,” women’s as
well as men’s, to his defiance of the “witch-hunts” of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities to his opposition to the
Vietnam War. Naturally, if Hef was on the right side on all these
matters his opponents were on the wrong side — which meant that
being against the Playboy Philosophy [sic] also amounted
to being on the wrong side. Hence Hef’s reference to “sexual
McCarthyism” — an indescribably silly characterization of
traditional standards of public decency but one self-evidently
designed to appeal to that same media mythology.
Among Ms. Berman’s clips of Mr. Hefner’s heroic public
career there is one in which he says of the congressional
communist-hunters that “this notion of defining your neighbor by
what his politics were was abhorrent to me.” Indeed, he appears to
have thought it virtually Nazi: “I thought we were becoming the
people we had defeated.” But isn’t his calling those who disagree
with him sexual McCarthyists a case of defining his neighbor by
what his politics are? Officially, of course, Playboy and
its defenders were on the side of “freedom” and against the
oppressive laws or community standards they had been written to
defend which stood in the way of sexual freedom. But it turns out
that freedom has to adopt its own methods of oppression in order to
silence those who don’t like what the free people are doing. It’s
all a question of freedom for whom, and Mr. Hefner wants us to know
that he is on the side of freedom for pornographers.
Oh, and communists, too, whom he calls “liberals” — as in
the charge that Ronald Reagan as president of the Screen Actors’
Guild had “liberals” blacklisted. Likewise, he says that lovable
old Pete Seeger “was considered a revolutionary.” Too bad nobody
thought to ask Pete — who, age 90 and looking remarkably spry,
appears on-screen to offer Hef and his magazine his imprimatur —
if he considered himself a revolutionary, since so far as I know he
has never made any secret of the fact either that he was a
communist or that his communism, like everybody else’s in those
days, was a revolutionary philosophy. Come to that, Hef himself
could justly be called a revolutionary, but his modesty stops short
of such a claim.
More interesting than what is included in this film is
what is left out. We are told that the 1959 Chicago Jazz festival
heralded the arrival of Playboy as a mainstream
publication, which may indeed be true. Hef tells us that it was at
about this time that “I re-imagined myself; I was Mr. Playboy” —
that is, the public apologist for new ways of thinking about sex
(among other things) and not just a peddler of smutty magazines.
But the evolution of the magazine itself is hardly mentioned.
Visually, we are reminded of it by the sudden appearance of
unveiled pubic regions some time in the 1980s — had it really not
happened before that? — after the relatively demure decades of
mere breast fetishism. But there is no explanation or even notice
taken by the commentary of anything being different. There is a
brief reference to the murder of Dorothy Stratten but nothing else
so much as to hint at anything sordid in the immaculate,
freedom-loving 60 years of exploiting young women.
Stephen Holden, reviewing the
movie in the New York Times writes that
it
ultimately makes a strong case for Mr. Hefner as a
consistent and underappreciated champion of racial equality and
sexual emancipation. But that emancipation had a dark side. There
is simply no getting around the fact that Playboy, for all
of Mr. Hefner’s assertions that it helped level the playing field
in the battle of the sexes by affirming women’s right to pleasure,
also objectified women as compliant, ornamental playthings. As for
the man who invented it all, he remains a mystery in the film,
living out his days in sybaritic bliss.
Maybe the problem lies in that word “objectified” — a
feminist borrowing that has never made any sense to me. Of course
women become “objectified” whenever sex is involved, since nature
designed them that way — as objects to attract men. In this very
limited sense you’ve got to agree with Mr. Hefner in his reply to a
feminist complaint that he limits his understanding of humanity to
its “animal” nature. “Of course we’re animals,” he says. “What’s
left? Vegetables? Minerals?” But this inescapable animality is the
reason why “sex” used to be, before people like Hugh Hefner came
along, something that only existed under the tightest sort of
social circumscription — and why that social circumscription in
the form of marriage laws and the enforcement of standards of what
were once regarded as public decency were good for women: because
they very strictly limited the circumstances of that
objectification.
Women as public creatures, forced by the same
laws and customs to dress modestly, escaped the evolutionary prison
of their (and our) animal nature and became people, albeit people
who were in part defined by their non-masculinity. Doing away with
that social and legal differentiation of the sexes in the name of
equality, therefore, naturally went hand-in-hand with a shocking
increase in the amount of objectification. Or, to put it another
way, if you don’t like being objectified, try passing laws to jail
people who get rich from objectifying you or your sex. Oh right, we
tried that. Then along came Hugh Hefner and others like him to
suggest that the people who did it were Nazis or McCarthyists and
the whole pro-woman legal edifice came crashing to the
ground.
You’d think it would have been a brave move for Ms. Berman
to put Susan Brownmiller, of all people, on screen to add her
assessment of Hef’s career, and yet for some reason Ms. Brownmiller
doesn’t say any of this but only adds her two cents’ worth to the
general feast of banality by noting that not all women have the
perfect bodies of the Playmates. Do tell! A younger version of
herself very slightly embarrasses Mr. Playboy on The
Dick Cavett Show by asking how he‘d like to wear
a bunny-tail, much to the delight of the audience, or at least its
female members. I wonder why it didn’t occur to him to reply, “Do
you think that anyone besides yourself and a few other embittered
and unattractive feminists would pay to see it?” It would have been
not only a witty riposte but also a reminder to her and everyone
else who has forgotten it since just what sort of business he is
in.
