I’ve always thought Hugh Hefner, unwittingly at first perhaps, paved the way for gay rights. Difficult to imagine the sexual revolution without him.
38 thoughts on “So Long Hugh”
boss, hef not only may have “paved the way for gay rights” but he also motivated many a feminist to fight in far out fashion. above picture of1972 cosmo bunny-fold is a good example.
Appearing before an audience at New York City’s 92nd St. Y, Ginsburg was asked by CBS journalist Charlie Rose whether she thought sexism played a role in the presidential election results.
“I have no doubt that it did,” Ginsburg replied.
Was it the decisive factor, he asked . . . meaning if Clinton were a man, would she have won “going away?”
“There are so many things that might have been decisive,” Ginsburg responded. “But that was a major, major factor.”
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!  Hugh (and what happened to the popularity of that name??) in an odd way, rode the waves of feminism throughout his life.
Gloria Steinem was playboy bunny who hopped on the second wavers feminist train. Hugh helped accelerate feminism.  Feminism brought gender equality to the table of freedoms.  Women of the 1960s had birth control power in the new pill.  And the women brought their friends of the LBGTQIA community to the party.
I went to one Playboy Club for lunch in the 1970s in Denver. Not much of restaurant, but the bunny costumes were to die for…satin and cotton tails.  Just so much better than a strip club. A scene out of Madmen, for sure.
Craig, impressed by your yard work.  Seeing all of the vegetation lost in the hurricanes?  Wounds me to see such loss and to also be impressed by how vegetation survives the assault. Animals can move in a storm, but plants? They have roots and shoots and seeds to move, slowly, out-of-the area.  I remember hugging my palm trees when they died in the drought freeze, teenager trees, who were frozen to death.  6 years later? The drought is over and the vegetative growth on the remaining plants is amazing. The clean-up is a killer on an aging body.
Bunnies wore bow ties, not pussy bows in the club.
BW, isn’t it something, almost spiritual, how you bond with your land in a crisis. Sitting on the porch watching the hurricane take hold I was calling out support to the trees.
Craig, the natural world is so fragile and abused by us humans plus the aches and pains of lovingly cleaning the path through the jungle (and it is a jungle out there)?  Mother Nature is demanding attention…grooming, included.
Speaking of mother nature, BW, the most fascinating thing to me about the Playboy Mansion the one time I was there (a People magazine party during Gore’s 1980 presidential convention) was the walking paths through dense vegetation with a private zoo nestled in. David and I began strolling the grounds and suddenly encountered monkeys. We were a bit startled, didn’t know about the zoo.
cnn: Exclusive: IRS shares information with special counsel in Russia probe
The IRS is now sharing information with special counsel Robert Mueller about key Trump campaign officials, after the two entities clashed this summer over both the scope of the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and a raid on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s home, people briefed on the matter tell CNN. Part of the concern centered on the far-reaching and broad requests from Mueller’s team. In the case of Manafort, Mueller’s investigators are reaching back 11 years as they investigate possible tax and financial crimes, according to search warrant documents. Mueller is bound by a written order issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May which allows the special counsel to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”
[….]
Tension between the IRS and the special counsel played out behind the scenes of the high-profile raid on Manafort’s Alexandria, Virginia, home this summer, according to multiple sources.
CNN has learned that the IRS did not participate in the July raid by FBI agents in part because of IRS objections that the search would interfere with the separate IRS investigation of Manafort, according to people briefed on the investigations.
The special counsel’s office decided to proceed with the search on Manafort’s home with only FBI agents carrying it out, the sources said.
[…continues…]
Deus ex machina: former Google engineer is developing an AI god
Way of the Future, a religious group founded by Anthony Levandowski, wants to create a deity based on artificial intelligence for the betterment of society
Intranet service? Check. Autonomous motorcycle? Check. Driverless car technology? Check. Obviously the next logical project for a successful Silicon Valley engineer is to set up an AI-worshipping religious organization.
Anthony Levandowski, who is at the center of a legal battle between Uber and Google’s Waymo, has established a nonprofit religious corporation called Way of the Future, according to state filings first uncovered by Wired’s Backchannel. Way of the Future’s startling mission: “To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.”
[….continues…]
more from above link:
Silicon Valley, meanwhile, has sought solace in technology and has developed quasi-religious concepts including the “singularity”, the hypothesis that machines will eventually be so smart that they will outperform all human capabilities, leading to a superhuman intelligence that will be so sophisticated it will be incomprehensible to our tiny fleshy, rational brains.
[….it concludes…]]
We don’t know whether Levandowski’s Godhead ties into any existing theologies or is a manmade alternative, but it’s clear that advancements in technologies including AI and bioengineering kick up the kinds of ethical and moral dilemmas that make humans seek the advice and comfort from a higher power: what will humans do once artificial intelligence outperforms us in most tasks? How will society be affected by the ability to create super-smart, athletic “designer babies” that only the rich can afford? Should a driverless car kill five pedestrians or swerve to the side to kill the owner?
If traditional religions don’t have the answer, AI – or at least the promise of AI – might be alluring.
does that mean exclaiming “Aiii” one will be accused of taking the new lord’s name in vain?
and what will the new hell and heaven be like for the new sinners (luddites for sure) and new saints?
patd, creation hasn’t changed much since bible times.
You will have to tell me all about the visit to the mansion. My son still hasn’t forgiven me for getting an invitation (some political thing) and not going. It’s been more than 30 years, it’s time to let it go. 🙂
Once the new AI deity is in place, what are we supposed to do with all the people who don’t serve its existence?
Jamie, renewable energy source? Â either feed superfluous (the non-AI-useful) to critters who are needed to feed the AI useful and/or boil them down for oil to lubricate the machine gods. Â have a feeling that was tried before and didn’t work out so well.
If Levandowski needs a fill in while he gets his AI god up and running – I would be available – whatever intelligence I have is certainly artificial (as opposed to the real thing).
Hugh provided hours of enjoyment to me when I was a pre-teen and teenager. Â Two brothers who lived up the street, one my age and one a year older, had a broken down Packard parked in front of their house on the street. Â The older one kept his Playboy collection in that car. Â Provided me with enjoyable, if unrealistic, expectations of what women would look like while I was waiting for my voice to change and my girlfriends to mature into those women.
A gussied-up, self-important pimp. I truly doubt that hefner sped women’s rights or GLBTQ rights. He merely made the world safe for larry flynt.
Democrats have not seriously contested an Alabama Senate race since 1996, but they think they have a credible candidate in Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted members of the Ku Klux Klan who bombed a black church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four girls. Several progressive groups think they have a clearer shot at winning the general election in December than they would have if Sen. Luther Strange, the establishment candidate who lost resoundingly to Moore on Tuesday, had won.
Clearer, but not necessarily easier.
[….]
It may help Jones that national Republicans opposed Moore, too. Through PACs and allies, they dumped millions of dollars into anti-Moore ads in the run-up to Tuesday’s election, portraying him as a corrupt political lifer who enriched himself from his own charity. Now, the GOP must rally around a nominee who has twice been suspended from his job as Alabama chief justice for disobeying federal court orders with which he disagreed on religious grounds.
“I’ve never seen a clearer contrast between candidates,” said Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez. “Roy Moore is unfit to serve; all you have to do is ask Mitch McConnell about that. Moderate Republicans are just as offended as Democrats that Roy Moore might wind up in the Senate.”.
[….]
For Jones to win, Democrats believe he must achieve three difficult tasks. He needs strong black turnout; his civil rights record, well-known in the state, is considered an asset. He will need as much as 30 percent of the white vote — a stiff challenge in a state where Democratic presidential candidates now get about 10 percent of that vote. And he needs to be the beneficiary of a unique Dec. 12 election that could present a turnout challenge.
Well, XR, he gave the feminist movement a convenient target. Â To that extent, he probably did help speed up the women’s rights movement. Â As to LGBT rights and how Playboy fit into that, I really don’t have a sense about it. Â I never saw Playboy as anything but a full-on heterosexual male publication.
I think all higher intelligence (above instinct) is artificial. We are merely irrational computors that breathe, reproduce, eat, and poop. All human decisions are made through irrational leaps of charged molecules across the gaps in synapses. The business of human living is the business of deciding, and deciding is nothing but a series of irrational leaps across gaps. This is how we humans navigate successfully through both rational and irrational problems.
However, when faced with irrational problems, what can AI do ? How does it measure patriotism vs romantic love vs personal ambition vs aesthetic beauty ? Can AI understand any of this ? If not, can we Irrationals win against AI, when AI decides to make earth more efficient and less irrational ?
Pogo,
Okay, but it took a dozen years or more before playboy and hefner became targets of the 2d Wave Feminists. Several Feminists also allowed interviews of themselves to be purchased and used by playboy. Creepy.
Nothing’s pure, XR, nothing’s pure.
Pogo,
sigh
XR, yes, I know….
A gussied-up, self-important pimp. I truly doubt that hefner sped women’s rights or GLBTQ rights. He merely made the world safe for larry flynt.  x-r
not much left to say
Ms Graham Cracker, Mr xrepublican:
Well said.
My own feelings about the recently deceased …. ick. The kind of person you put the plastic covers on the furniture before you allow him to sit down.
test, test, check, check.
Hefner lead the charge against all the sexual repressions of his time. With out him taking on the status quo as it was at the time and we are talking about 1954.  Without playboy and Hefner leading the way feminism and gay rights would look very different today. Funny thing is that by 1980 the country had completely absorbed the playboy ethos and made it so main stream that all you all can fight against is a caricature. If you can’t tell the difference between Hefner and Flynn then you never read playboy you just looked at the pictures. Even then the difference was obvious.
True Playboy idealized and objectified the women on their pages but they never brutalized women like Flynn and  Hustler did. That is what a pimp does, Hefner just feed adolescent fantasies of men who were old enough to know better.
Mr Flesh Peddler was a flesh peddler. He used pictures of naked women to make money.
Encouraging fantasies of the idealized woman as a willing young lovely has repercussions. Remember “Crooked Hillary?” Crooked, besides having a criminal meaning, can also denote an old, bent frumpy hag. Venture a guess most readers of that magazine did not read it for the stellar writing or thoughtful interviews. They used it for masturbation purposes & they weren’t getting their jollies to pics of the everyday average female but idealized pics of what they wanted females to be.
I respectfully disagree with the distinguished Trail Hand from Kansas, and on every point, about hefner. I believe in my heart that hefner was a social climbing mack, who did more to legitimize pimping than he did to empower women or GLBTQs.
exrep
Where as I see the opposite.
Playboy freed women from the pimp, from the abusive husband, from the sexual restrictions that society placed on her.
With the playboy ethos it was a womans choice when she had sex and who she had sex with. It is but a short step from there to It is a woman’s right to control her body. Which playboy supported. It is also a short step to it is nobodies business who I have sex with or who I marry (gay rights). And as I said by the 80’s American women were going hell yes!! and the world has never been the same since.
But in 1954 that idea was really far out there radical
Good read here. Sort of goes with my take on Mitch. He really is not all that good at what he does.
SJ
I suspect most of us both read the articles and looked at the pictures at least in my circle of friends in the early 70’s that was true, As I remember we even took a turn at trying to cook some of the gourmet food. It was a complicated magazine, more about fantasy life style.
Jack
Jace
I just read the head line on that one and went:Â Â Well duh!
Jack,
duh is right. Why is something that is so evident to the average person such a difficult jump for the press? I’ll never understand.
boss, hef not only may have “paved the way for gay rights” but he also motivated many a feminist to fight in far out fashion. above picture of1972 cosmo bunny-fold is a good example.
excerpt from today’s wapo:
Appearing before an audience at New York City’s 92nd St. Y, Ginsburg was asked by CBS journalist Charlie Rose whether she thought sexism played a role in the presidential election results.
“I have no doubt that it did,” Ginsburg replied.
Was it the decisive factor, he asked . . . meaning if Clinton were a man, would she have won “going away?”
“There are so many things that might have been decisive,” Ginsburg responded. “But that was a major, major factor.”
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!  Hugh (and what happened to the popularity of that name??) in an odd way, rode the waves of feminism throughout his life.
Gloria Steinem was playboy bunny who hopped on the second wavers feminist train. Hugh helped accelerate feminism.  Feminism brought gender equality to the table of freedoms.  Women of the 1960s had birth control power in the new pill.  And the women brought their friends of the LBGTQIA community to the party.
I went to one Playboy Club for lunch in the 1970s in Denver. Not much of restaurant, but the bunny costumes were to die for…satin and cotton tails.  Just so much better than a strip club. A scene out of Madmen, for sure.
Craig, impressed by your yard work.  Seeing all of the vegetation lost in the hurricanes?  Wounds me to see such loss and to also be impressed by how vegetation survives the assault. Animals can move in a storm, but plants? They have roots and shoots and seeds to move, slowly, out-of-the area.  I remember hugging my palm trees when they died in the drought freeze, teenager trees, who were frozen to death.  6 years later? The drought is over and the vegetative growth on the remaining plants is amazing. The clean-up is a killer on an aging body.
Bunnies wore bow ties, not pussy bows in the club.
BW, isn’t it something, almost spiritual, how you bond with your land in a crisis. Sitting on the porch watching the hurricane take hold I was calling out support to the trees.
Craig, the natural world is so fragile and abused by us humans plus the aches and pains of lovingly cleaning the path through the jungle (and it is a jungle out there)?  Mother Nature is demanding attention…grooming, included.
Speaking of mother nature, BW, the most fascinating thing to me about the Playboy Mansion the one time I was there (a People magazine party during Gore’s 1980 presidential convention) was the walking paths through dense vegetation with a private zoo nestled in. David and I began strolling the grounds and suddenly encountered monkeys. We were a bit startled, didn’t know about the zoo.
cnn: Exclusive: IRS shares information with special counsel in Russia probe
The IRS is now sharing information with special counsel Robert Mueller about key Trump campaign officials, after the two entities clashed this summer over both the scope of the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and a raid on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s home, people briefed on the matter tell CNN.
Part of the concern centered on the far-reaching and broad requests from Mueller’s team. In the case of Manafort, Mueller’s investigators are reaching back 11 years as they investigate possible tax and financial crimes, according to search warrant documents. Mueller is bound by a written order issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May which allows the special counsel to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”
[….]
Tension between the IRS and the special counsel played out behind the scenes of the high-profile raid on Manafort’s Alexandria, Virginia, home this summer, according to multiple sources.
CNN has learned that the IRS did not participate in the July raid by FBI agents in part because of IRS objections that the search would interfere with the separate IRS investigation of Manafort, according to people briefed on the investigations.
The special counsel’s office decided to proceed with the search on Manafort’s home with only FBI agents carrying it out, the sources said.
[…continues…]
OMG! aka our mighty google
from the guardian:
Deus ex machina: former Google engineer is developing an AI god
Way of the Future, a religious group founded by Anthony Levandowski, wants to create a deity based on artificial intelligence for the betterment of society
Intranet service? Check. Autonomous motorcycle? Check. Driverless car technology? Check. Obviously the next logical project for a successful Silicon Valley engineer is to set up an AI-worshipping religious organization.
Anthony Levandowski, who is at the center of a legal battle between Uber and Google’s Waymo, has established a nonprofit religious corporation called Way of the Future, according to state filings first uncovered by Wired’s Backchannel. Way of the Future’s startling mission: “To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.”
[….continues…]
more from above link:
Silicon Valley, meanwhile, has sought solace in technology and has developed quasi-religious concepts including the “singularity”, the hypothesis that machines will eventually be so smart that they will outperform all human capabilities, leading to a superhuman intelligence that will be so sophisticated it will be incomprehensible to our tiny fleshy, rational brains.
[….it concludes…]]
We don’t know whether Levandowski’s Godhead ties into any existing theologies or is a manmade alternative, but it’s clear that advancements in technologies including AI and bioengineering kick up the kinds of ethical and moral dilemmas that make humans seek the advice and comfort from a higher power: what will humans do once artificial intelligence outperforms us in most tasks? How will society be affected by the ability to create super-smart, athletic “designer babies” that only the rich can afford? Should a driverless car kill five pedestrians or swerve to the side to kill the owner?
If traditional religions don’t have the answer, AI – or at least the promise of AI – might be alluring.
does that mean exclaiming “Aiii” one will be accused of taking the new lord’s name in vain?
and what will the new hell and heaven be like for the new sinners (luddites for sure) and new saints?
patd, creation hasn’t changed much since bible times.
donnie the drain and the Puerto Rico golf club bankruptcy rumor — mixed truth from snopes.
Playboy After Dark
Craig
You will have to tell me all about the visit to the mansion. My son still hasn’t forgiven me for getting an invitation (some political thing) and not going. It’s been more than 30 years, it’s time to let it go. 🙂
Once the new AI deity is in place, what are we supposed to do with all the people who don’t serve its existence?
Jamie, renewable energy source? Â either feed superfluous (the non-AI-useful) to critters who are needed to feed the AI useful and/or boil them down for oil to lubricate the machine gods. Â have a feeling that was tried before and didn’t work out so well.
If Levandowski needs a fill in while he gets his AI god up and running – I would be available – whatever intelligence I have is certainly artificial (as opposed to the real thing).
Hugh provided hours of enjoyment to me when I was a pre-teen and teenager. Â Two brothers who lived up the street, one my age and one a year older, had a broken down Packard parked in front of their house on the street. Â The older one kept his Playboy collection in that car. Â Provided me with enjoyable, if unrealistic, expectations of what women would look like while I was waiting for my voice to change and my girlfriends to mature into those women.
A gussied-up, self-important pimp. I truly doubt that hefner sped women’s rights or GLBTQ rights. He merely made the world safe for larry flynt.
wapo:
Democrats have not seriously contested an Alabama Senate race since 1996, but they think they have a credible candidate in Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted members of the Ku Klux Klan who bombed a black church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four girls. Several progressive groups think they have a clearer shot at winning the general election in December than they would have if Sen. Luther Strange, the establishment candidate who lost resoundingly to Moore on Tuesday, had won.
Clearer, but not necessarily easier.
[….]
It may help Jones that national Republicans opposed Moore, too. Through PACs and allies, they dumped millions of dollars into anti-Moore ads in the run-up to Tuesday’s election, portraying him as a corrupt political lifer who enriched himself from his own charity. Now, the GOP must rally around a nominee who has twice been suspended from his job as Alabama chief justice for disobeying federal court orders with which he disagreed on religious grounds.
“I’ve never seen a clearer contrast between candidates,” said Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez. “Roy Moore is unfit to serve; all you have to do is ask Mitch McConnell about that. Moderate Republicans are just as offended as Democrats that Roy Moore might wind up in the Senate.”.
[….]
For Jones to win, Democrats believe he must achieve three difficult tasks. He needs strong black turnout; his civil rights record, well-known in the state, is considered an asset. He will need as much as 30 percent of the white vote — a stiff challenge in a state where Democratic presidential candidates now get about 10 percent of that vote. And he needs to be the beneficiary of a unique Dec. 12 election that could present a turnout challenge.
Well, XR, he gave the feminist movement a convenient target. Â To that extent, he probably did help speed up the women’s rights movement. Â As to LGBT rights and how Playboy fit into that, I really don’t have a sense about it. Â I never saw Playboy as anything but a full-on heterosexual male publication.
I think all higher intelligence (above instinct) is artificial. We are merely irrational computors that breathe, reproduce, eat, and poop. All human decisions are made through irrational leaps of charged molecules across the gaps in synapses. The business of human living is the business of deciding, and deciding is nothing but a series of irrational leaps across gaps. This is how we humans navigate successfully through both rational and irrational problems.
However, when faced with irrational problems, what can AI do ? How does it measure patriotism vs romantic love vs personal ambition vs aesthetic beauty ? Can AI understand any of this ? If not, can we Irrationals win against AI, when AI decides to make earth more efficient and less irrational ?
Pogo,
Okay, but it took a dozen years or more before playboy and hefner became targets of the 2d Wave Feminists. Several Feminists also allowed interviews of themselves to be purchased and used by playboy. Creepy.
Nothing’s pure, XR, nothing’s pure.
Pogo,
sigh
XR, yes, I know….
A gussied-up, self-important pimp. I truly doubt that hefner sped women’s rights or GLBTQ rights. He merely made the world safe for larry flynt.  x-r
not much left to say
Ms Graham Cracker, Mr xrepublican:
Well said.
My own feelings about the recently deceased …. ick. The kind of person you put the plastic covers on the furniture before you allow him to sit down.
test, test, check, check.
Hefner lead the charge against all the sexual repressions of his time. With out him taking on the status quo as it was at the time and we are talking about 1954.  Without playboy and Hefner leading the way feminism and gay rights would look very different today. Funny thing is that by 1980 the country had completely absorbed the playboy ethos and made it so main stream that all you all can fight against is a caricature. If you can’t tell the difference between Hefner and Flynn then you never read playboy you just looked at the pictures. Even then the difference was obvious.
True Playboy idealized and objectified the women on their pages but they never brutalized women like Flynn and  Hustler did. That is what a pimp does, Hefner just feed adolescent fantasies of men who were old enough to know better.
Jack
Here is a well written piece about Hefner
Mr Flesh Peddler was a flesh peddler. He used pictures of naked women to make money.
Encouraging fantasies of the idealized woman as a willing young lovely has repercussions. Remember “Crooked Hillary?” Crooked, besides having a criminal meaning, can also denote an old, bent frumpy hag. Venture a guess most readers of that magazine did not read it for the stellar writing or thoughtful interviews. They used it for masturbation purposes & they weren’t getting their jollies to pics of the everyday average female but idealized pics of what they wanted females to be.
I respectfully disagree with the distinguished Trail Hand from Kansas, and on every point, about hefner. I believe in my heart that hefner was a social climbing mack, who did more to legitimize pimping than he did to empower women or GLBTQs.
exrep
Where as I see the opposite.
Playboy freed women from the pimp, from the abusive husband, from the sexual restrictions that society placed on her.
With the playboy ethos it was a womans choice when she had sex and who she had sex with. It is but a short step from there to It is a woman’s right to control her body. Which playboy supported. It is also a short step to it is nobodies business who I have sex with or who I marry (gay rights). And as I said by the 80’s American women were going hell yes!! and the world has never been the same since.
But in 1954 that idea was really far out there radical
Jack
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/28/myth-mitch-mcconnell-genius-master-senate-215656
Good read here. Sort of goes with my take on Mitch. He really is not all that good at what he does.
SJ
I suspect most of us both read the articles and looked at the pictures at least in my circle of friends in the early 70’s that was true, As I remember we even took a turn at trying to cook some of the gourmet food. It was a complicated magazine, more about fantasy life style.
Jack
Jace
I just read the head line on that one and went:Â Â Well duh!
Jack,
duh is right. Why is something that is so evident to the average person such a difficult jump for the press? I’ll never understand.