Hef

Hey, Kids!

I usually wake up on Sundays feeling shitty and tired; much like a hangover minus the BAL or regret of what I might have done the night before.  Nope.  I'm just a man with a fatigued body and a hungry mind.  While I eat my breakfast and try to muster the energy to be productive in even some small way, I try to engage my mind with some form of media.  It's a somewhat passive engagement, I know, but it's all I have the strength for in my slumbery stupor.  The thing that is oddly important is that this media not offend me visually.  I am eating after all.  So I usually turn to sports.  They're fairly banal visually speaking.  I mean unless a player is constantly spitting (I'm talking to you Matt Garza), it's pretty easy to watch without drawing up any queasiness that I feel so much more vulnerable to in the mornings.  Of course right now there are no good sports to watch on a Sunday morning being that football has ended and baseball, my true love, has yet to start (from a televised perspective).

So I've been turning to Netflix.  But not just any old movie will do.  I find myself unwilling to watch a narrative film because I feel like the experience might be tampered by my mood. I find myself turning to documentaries.  It's weird because I think that it's okay to watch them regardless of my mood much like I'm okay with watching them with the lights on; something that I'm not happy about with narratives.  You don't have to be as intently focused it seems.  It's like watching the History channel to me.  How many of you turn off the lights to watch that?  So anyway, that's generally how I spend my Sunday mornings: watching documentaries.

This morning I watched Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, And Rebel.  It was a very thorough depiction of his social significance in American society.  It got me to thinking about my perceptions of the man.

I think that most people my age think of him based largely on his personal life, and the wackiness that we've seen of it on The Girls Next Door.  It's generally shown him to be an out-of-touch old man surrounded by young women.  I think in most people it's the last perception of someone that sticks and if this were my last perception of Hef, it'd be a sad one.  But thankfully this documentary served as a very welcome reminder of the large amounts of good Hef has brought to the world.

He and his magazine have been completely inclusive in terms of race.  It can't be stated enough how significant that was, being that the magazine was started in the early 50's.  Hef has long embraced jazz music and it's stars which were largely black and Playboy has had in depth interviews with Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Jesse Jackson among others.  I can't say for sure how many of the bunnies were black but Hef's stance on racial equality was so public, both in the magazine and his TV show, it bordered on revolutionary.

Hef has also been an avid proponent of free speech, and not just in the case of his own magazine, but also in the arrests and trials of Lenny Bruce.  Hef literally lent Lenny Bruce the Playboy lawyers to defend his case.  This is hugely important to me both because I firmly believe we should have the right to say whatever (and I mean WHATEVER) in most civil forums and also because of my love of George Carlin.  Without Lenny Bruce there'd be no George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Maher, or David Cross because their language itself (the words) would be restricted and worst of all their ideas would be restricted.  Can you imagine what it'd be like if they got arrested all the time because some bureaucrat didn't like what they had to say or how they said it?  I've held firmly to the idea that comedians are the philosophers of our time, in the Socratic sense (except comedians make a living), in that they publicly question policy using logic and rational thought; things you may not always find in music or painting or literature (though you can, see Rage Against The Machine or Kurt Vonnegut).  So this was a deathly important battle.

Certainly watch this documentary to see and hear all of this in more detail.  I think it's important.

So back to Hef, I certainly understand the criticism of his magazine.  I have some of my own.  It's certainly relatively tame in modern society where EVERYTHING can be found with a mouse click.  But I think that that might actually make Playboy kind of quaint and classy in a way today.  What has bothered me about it was the proliferation of breast implants and the airbrushing away of ethnicity that I've seen, though only sporadicly as I've never been a subscriber to Playboy nor have I ever owned a single issue.  But I've perused...

Everyone who knows me knows I very much love breasts.  I don't know why and I don't care to examine it.  So it's definitely been troublesome to see the number of women getting implants sky-rocket.  I'm not against a woman trying to better herself, if that's the aim.  If it's a point of self esteem, that is, an attempt to gain some I completely understand.  It's no different than trying to lose weight.  It's about feeling better about yourself.  But the idea that silicone is the only way into Playboy and that bigger is always better is where I draw the line.  I can't tell you how many times I've looked at a picture on the internet and thought, "She'd probably be just as hot without those implants."  Or even worse is when you see the thumbnail of a photo and think the girl is gorgeous, click on it for a closer look, only to be repulsed by the amount of scarring she has from the surgery.  It's sad, and an unfair tradeoff if you ask me.  But I must acknowledge that this does go beyond Playboy.

It's also no secret that I've been a fan of latin women for a good long while now.  It probably has a lot to do with where I grew up.  There've been a few times where there's been a latina centerfold in Playboy and it seemed as if they tried to "airbrush the brown off" of her.  I can't say that it always happens but I can say it has.  Again, this issue may be larger in society than just the pages of Playboy but I can't help bringing it up when thinking about the magazine.  It may have to do with where Hef's tastes lie but that's purely speculation.  But if he asked me, I'd say, "Embrace the exotic, Hef."  There's certainly nothing wrong with our cornfed white girls but variety is always a good thing.

But to bring all back to Hef as a social and cultural icon: I think it's important to look past the characature of Hef that you may have and look at American culture and how it has progressed since that first issue of Playboy with Marilyn on the cover.  I don't know if it could've gotten here without him.  There have certainly been excesses.  But I fear to think what things might have looked like had we not had a choice.

Watch the documentary and make your choice.  Or don't.  See if I care.

:-P  Pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbth!!!