Back on Sept. 27, Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, died at 91.
An ancient Roman maxim says that one shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but it would be irresponsible to not take note of his ideas and cultural influence, along with their consequences and victims.
Much of the coverage of his death has been admiring or even adulatory. The New York Times' obituary, while mentioning Hefner's feminist critics mostly in passing, emphasized how successful and influential he'd been. There's been a lot of "he changed the game," "he lived on his own terms" and "he lived life to the fullest" sort of language about him.
CNN said that while "Some critics dismissed him as a relic of a sexist era, especially in his later years many men envied his adolescent-fantasy lifestyle." The Washington Post called Hefner's legacy "complicated" and then proceeded to quote gushing tribute after gushing tribute. This sort of adulation for a man best-known for wearing his pajamas all day and spending nights with women young enough to be his granddaughter should embarrass even the media.
Eleven years ago, BreakPoint founder Chuck Colson put Hefner's legacy into proper perspective. On the occasion of Hefner's 80th birthday, Colson said that "Hugh Hefner did more than anyone else to turn America into a great pornographic wasteland."
Hefner's journalistic eulogists are celebrating his rebellion and ultimate triumph over the "puritanical elements of the [1950s]." You know, that "dark and joyless time in America," as writer Matthew Scully put it, "when one could actually go about daily life without ever encountering pornographic images." Without Hefner's pioneering vision, "American males could not avail themselves of hundreds of millions of obscene films every year - as they do now."
That our pornographic wasteland is filled with so many victims is also part of the man's legacy, which can only be fully understood in light of the larger story of the sexual revolution.
You see, Hefner once claimed to have changed America, and it's hard to argue that he didn't. He took Alfred Kinsey's ideas of sex separated from morality and embodied them in images and words, making them seem glamorous, sophisticated and respectable.
Along with the birth control pill, porn was the other tangible artifact of the sexual revolution and catalyzed the separation of the sexual act from its God-given purpose. Instead of a self-giving, life-giving act in the context of marriage like God intended, sex became an act of selfish pleasure in the cultural imagination.
Porn turned image bearers into objects to be enjoyed instead of subjects to be respected and honored, while giving the illusion that there were no consequences or guilt. Hefner was what I call "the artist" of the sexual revolution, granted a loosely used modifier here. Ideas alone can't change culture; they need champions, and the most effective champions are artists and educators.
The problem is that no one even won the sexual revolution, but everybody lost. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.
Hefner's legacy includes fatherless homes, objectified women, porn-addicted and trafficked children and the sexualization of all aspects of culture. And in a supreme bit of irony, a decreased interest in sex with real-life women by addicted men.
All of this is the result of what Hefner called the "Playboy Philosophy": ultimately the divorcing of sex from its God-given context - marriage - and its God-given consequences - children.
I posted about Hefner's legacy on Facebook soon after his death, and one commenter quoted Jesus, "For what will it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?" And thanks in large part to Hugh Hefner, the same might be asked about our entire culture.
From BreakPoint, Oct. 12, 2017; reprinted with permission of Prison Fellowship, www.breakpoint.org.