Hugh Hefner, the Logic of Porn, and the Homosexualization of Sex

After the death of Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, many people have been reflecting upon his cultural significance. Several of us recalled an especially powerful piece on Hefner from 2003 by Read Mercer Schuchardt. Christianity Today later published the piece here. Having read the original article, which can still be read here (I highly recommend that you do), I strongly recalled a number of lines, which seem to have been omitted from the CT version. My curiosity piqued, I skimmed through both, and soon realized that the CT version had omitted quite a number of lines from the original article.

I can quite understand why some lines and sections were omitted (presumably back in 2003, when the piece was first published on CT). Some statements were unclear, some claims were of questionable accuracy, and other assertions were unguarded. However, looking at the statements that were left out of the CT version is interesting, in part because many of them were likely making people nervous back in 2003 and in part because you would be very unlikely to hear them today.

The CT piece really cushions many of punches of the original piece. For instance, in describing Hefner’s hosting of an ongoing discourse with religious critics in the pages of Playboy, the CT version adds ‘Granted, these discussions raised some valid points.’ It also removes the original article’s two references to Hitler, where Schuchardt compares Hefner’s perverse culture-altering power to Hitler’s power over the German people. For instance: “G. K. Chesterton suggests that Hitler could have been laughed off the stage if the German people weren’t so serious. So too could Hefner have been shamed into obscurity if Americans weren’t so prudish.”

The Feminization of Men and the Masculinization of Women 

There’s more going on than just editing out potentially explicit content. The CT version also removes key points of Prof. Schuchardt’s thesis on the effects of porn on basic human sexuality. For example, it references to feminization. In the original, Schuchardt observes, ‘Hefner succeeded at inverting gender roles by feminizing men and masculinizing women.’ The CT version removes the ‘by feminizing men and masculinizing women.’ It also omits a nearby sentence: ‘Echoes of this feminization are still heard today in films like Fight Club, where “a generation of men raised by women” wonder why they even know words like “duvet.”’

It also omits statements like:

And pornography assumes (and then demands) of women a sex drive that used to be associated only with men. (Unlike women, the joke goes, men don’t need a reason for sex, they just need a place.)

And the following section is reduced to the statement ‘Thanks largely to Hefner’s pioneering spirit, where women are free and equal, they are free and equal to be as promiscuous as men’:

In Hugh Hefner’s world, meanwhile, equality for females has come to mean synonymity with males. Unisex clothing is: male. Unisex hairstyles are: male. Equal pay for equal work is: male (inasmuch as it assumes the irrelevance of childbirth, and certainly of childrearing). Thanks largely to Hefner’s pioneering spirit, men have won every battle in the modern war between the sexes. Where women are free and equal, they are free and equal to be men.

The concluding statement of that paragraph is also omitted, where Schuchardt speaks about the limited routes that might be open to women who wish to escape the sexualization of American culture:

In America right now, three out of four converts to Islam are women. Call it a jihad of the hijab.

An entire paragraph is then removed:

Even the bodies of women—especially their bodies—have become increasingly masculinized in the last fifty years. As Tom Wolfe describes it in A Man In Full, today’s ideal female is “a boy with breasts.” Though the original Playboy bunnies actually looked like women you might want to marry, the bunnies of today are lean, mean sex machines. Their breasts are enhanced with silicone because their body fat percentage usually precludes the possibility of an ample bosom, as well as, in many cases, the possibility of a baby (the biological reason women have extra fat in the first place). The average real woman weighs about 140 pounds. The average Playmate weighs 115. Pamela Anderson, the “full-figured” Playmate of a few years back, was 11 percent under the average woman’s weight for her height, and even then a portion of that beauty was added silicone.

The omission of this paragraph isn’t entirely surprising. The source of the statistic about the average woman’s weight is unclear. The average American woman’s weight back in 1960 was around 140lb: now it is closer to 170lb! However, the CT article generally seems to be concerned to downplay any references to the feminization of men or the masculinization of women.

Hefner and Progressive American Culture 

The CT article also omits the following lines:

On the playboyenterprises.com Web site you can witness the Playboy bunny icon digitally morphing, with breathtaking symbolic audacity, into a dove of peace winging its way around the world. Why is he so at peace? Because Hefner has made the world safe for a 50 percent divorce rate, guaranteeing him a constant stream of beautiful and financially vulnerable young women.

The CT article also removes certain references to other figures in the culture. For instance:

Contemporary technology has its own version of this game, promising omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. It pretty nearly delivers on the first two—but even Bill Gates hasn’t achieved omnipotence, which is why he keeps working despite not needing to.

And:

If the future sounds like Britney Spears, then please, give us back Janis Joplin, Mamma Cass, and Barbara Streisand.

The longest omitted section is:

Like the serpent in the garden, Hefner has accomplished all of this while hiding in plain sight. Listen to Vladimir Nabokov as he introduces and defends Lolita, which he wrote in fifty-six frenzied days in 1954, not long after the first issue of Playboy was published. Nabokov’s eerily familiar words may unwittingly (or wittingly, who knows?) be the best description of Hefner and Playboy you’re likely to find:

I have no intention to glorify “H.H.” No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!

The man who opened the box has quite a bit in common with Nabokov’s “H.H.” As he puts it, he’s spent a lifetime “living the fantasy life of an adolescent boy.” Don’t you wish you could peek in on that incredible fantasy? Well, now you can.

The original article ends with an especially powerful passage, in which one of Hefner’s former girlfriends describes Hefner struggling to find satisfaction in intercourse, telling the girls to pleasure each other, while he masturbated to gay porn. Schuchardt writes:

Yes, you read that right. There it is, attributed to someone who ought to know, the stated fact on the public record. It may seem shocking or it may seem trivial, but it amounts to a significant confirmation that Hugh Hefner embodies what his detractors have been saying for years: All pornography is ultimately homosexual. All pornography stifles the development of genuine human relationships. All pornography is a manifestation of arrested development.

The CT article reduces this passage to:

This statement may seem either shocking or trivial. But it points to that which Hefner’s detractors have been saying for years: Pornography stifles the development of genuine human relationships. Pornography is a manifestation of arrested development.

What Christianity Today Doesn’t Want To Say 

The striking thing about the CT version is the way in which it reworks the original article in a way that removes much of the bite of Prof. Schuchardt’s thesis on two fronts: carefully downplaying his masculinization of women and feminization of men claims and also his claims about the homosexual character of the culture of porn. Both claims make some appearance in the CT article, but in a form that are radically weakened from their form in the original piece.

Yet Schuchardt’s original thesis, though overstated at points, is an important one. Our society, in whose construction Hefner has played no small part, depends upon the feminization of men, the masculinization of women, and the homosexualization of their approach to sex. Such assertions violate all of our culture’s sensitivities, but they are important.

Men are feminized as they start to forsake labour, nature, and callings of husband and father for private domestic consumption as the source of their masculinity, or when they lack robust and healthy male sociality and are largely socialized by and with women. Women are masculinized when they are expected to display the same sort of sexual behaviour as men, when they are expected to work in the economy in the same ways as men, or when their bodies and callings are abstracted from childbearing and rearing. Modern society has flattened out the differences between men and women and porn is one manifestation of the egalitarian ideal, where women are ‘released’ to express male-like sexuality free from childbirth and men are freed from the responsibilities of manhood to be louche yet emasculated sybarites. Such statements are very controversial even in Christian contexts, where many people are highly committed to the minimization of any difference between the sexes.

The homosexualization of sex by pornography is another crucial point that Schuchardt highlights. What Schuchardt recognizes is what some Christians have spoken of as the ‘intrinsically disordered’ character of homosexual relations and the desires that give rise to them.

Hearing such language, many of us will feel our hackles rising. Most of us have LGBT persons in our lives: family members, close friends, colleagues, and neighbours. Their desire to have sexual relations with other persons of the same sex seems to be of much the same sort of character as the desire most people have for relations with the opposite sex. They are experiencing a profound drive to live out their innate identity, which draws them to such relations. Their motives, which we easily presume to be the appropriate measure of their actions, hardly seem especially blameworthy.

It is exceedingly important to recognize that there is a difference between reflecting upon the ‘intrinsic’ moral character of particular acts or desires and reflecting upon the manner in which or motives by which people approach them. For instance, many philosophers and theologians have reflected upon the horrific moral character of the act of suicide, while being able to recognize that people who attempt suicide seldom do so fully witting of this character, or intending their act to have such a force. Rather, suicide tends to be an act of despair, undertaken in states of mind that radically diminish responsibility. For instance, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who himself had suffered with suicidal ideation and had three brothers who committed suicide, observed:

If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin.

In a similar manner, it is important to reflect upon the intrinsic moral character of homosexual acts, without simplistically conflating this with statements upon the moral character of those drawn to or engaging in such acts. As we struggle to draw such distinctions, it is common to encounter resistance to reflection on the intrinsic moral character of acts. For instance, people might presume that statements about the horrific moral character of suicide is a statement that straightforwardly identifies all who attempt suicide as the most horrific and culpable of sinners. It isn’t. However, it does highlight a proper moral reaction that should be provoked by certain actions, even though our proper response to most of those who commit them might appropriately be largely characterized by pity (for instance, there is growing evidence suggesting the existence of an ‘orientation’ to paedophilia in some persons, an orientation that cannot straightforwardly be dislodged: we can pity the paedophile in his agonizing struggle, while being appalled by the evils towards which he is drawn).

What Wittgenstein wrote of suicide—‘when one investigates it, it is like investigating mercury vapor in order to comprehend the nature of vapors’—is something that the Christian tradition has often recognized to be true of homosexual relations. There is something paradigmatic about this sin that serves to reveal the character of sin more generally, especially in the arena of sexual relations. This realization strongly challenges any who would like to treat persons who engage in homosexual relations as a special class of moral lepers, in comparison with whom we can all flatter ourselves in self-righteousness. The Christian tradition has often displayed this moral insight in the ways that it has, however imperfectly, condemned homosexual relations: it has condemned them, not as a discrete and detached type of sin, but as the paradigm species of a particular genus of sins. These sins would include things such as anal sex, masturbation, and other forms of sexual relations seeking to frustrate their proper procreative end.

In claiming that ‘all pornography is ultimately homosexual,’ Schuchardt shares this insight. If we were to think that his claim is merely an opportunistic attempt to appropriate a stigma that exists against homosexual relations and apply it to pornography use, we would be badly misunderstanding him. Schuchardt is engaging in something closer to a task of harmatological taxonomy—exploring the proper classification and phylogeny of sins and vices—a serious task which, though quite unfashionable, is immensely important and illuminating.

The Logic of Porn

Prof. Schuchardt’s homosexualization thesis puts it finger on something extremely important. It shouldn’t be taken in a wooden and literalistic manner: it doesn’t relate primarily to porn-addicted men developing a sexual attraction towards men. Rather, it is about the intrinsic logic that the world projected by porn and the world of homosexual activity have in common. Both displace women. The world of porn substitutes actual women with ‘women’ that are projections of male fantasies, with sterile masculinized bodies, whose sexual desire is similar to men’s own. This has a lot in common with the world of homosexual activity, where sex is necessarily sterile and men can be and are highly promiscuous and non-monogamous (as one instance of the wealth of material on this, this recent report on sex in Australia finds that the average gay or bisexual man has 96 lifetime male partners in contrast with the average woman who had 8 male partners in her lifetime; the average lesbian or bisexual woman had 6 lifetime female partners). In porn men can escape from the limitations that actual woman place upon the satisfaction of their sexual desire and get sexual release on their own libidinous terms.

The logic of porn is the logic of masturbation, where a drive that should lead a man out into the world towards the creative and self-transcending reality of relating to a woman and bringing children into the world is replaced by a selfish self-satisfaction that makes no demands upon him, which is sterile and impotent, and terminates ultimately upon himself. The Apostle Paul’s discussion of homosexual relations in Romans 1 recognizes something of the same logic to them, observing their homology with idolatry. Both homosexual relations and idolatry cut a person off from the possibility of a relationship with one who is naturally other from himself that might allow for self-transcendence. For both porn and male homosexuality, sex becomes about private sexual satisfaction or perverse male bonding.

The logic of porn and homosexual relations both render sex impotent and sterile, collapsing sex into little more than the stimulation of genitals and other erogenous zones for persons who end up trapped in the prison of the self. Our society is homosexualized as it reduces sex to a matter of self-stimulation and achievement of pleasure. Porn has normalized this view of sex for the society more generally. People don’t get pregnant in porn. All sex is sterile, a fruitless commerce of sexual fluids. The body of the other is just a collection of holes within which you can find different forms of stimulation and release, with no qualitative difference being drawn between them, save perhaps in the elevation of the sodomizing of women as the most satisfying form of stimulation and release. Again, the similarities between porn and homosexual relations here shouldn’t be ignored.

Paul Kahn writes:

Pornography is a form of sexuality shorn of the ordinary, generative characteristics of the body. The pornographic act produces no offspring: no children, no discourse, no enduring relationship to an other, no useful products. It is marked by the absence of labor in both of the biblical senses. It is episodic; it exists neither as a form of historical memory nor as a claim upon the future. Its only temporal condition is the present. Because the pornographic is sexuality without children, it is sex freed of the state’s demand upon the body. Sex without children is sex taken out of both the political construction of time and the familial economics of providing for a secure future. The pornographic event happens instantaneously. There is no symbolic continuation of the pornographic moment in a representation of an other—the child. The event is not a symbolic reference point for a more complex, continuing involvement of two individuals in a common life. This is a representation of a radical claim to freedom.

The connection between homosexual relations and the deinstitutionalizing and privatizing logic of same-sex marriage shouldn’t be missed. As I have observed before, in our porn-forged age, gender naturalized marriage is becoming the norm, not just a permitted exception from the rule: ‘The ideal “marriage” is a bespoke contractual union between interchangeable partners who engage in mutual genital stimulation, freed from the burdensome responsibility of procreative potential, in deinstitutionalized sexual arrangements open (in principle) to third parties, only having kids through a mutually chosen act of production that can be legally controlled and medically optimized.’

Fabrice Hadjadj perceptively remarks (you should read the whole interview):

It is also interesting that when we take pleasure as a foundation then we come to homosexuality. However, I believe in all seriousness that the concept “homosexuality” is a contradiction. Why? Because sexuality presupposes a difference between the sexes. When we are dealing with “homo,” in other words “the same,” then we go outside of sexuality. The Greeks were well aware of this. Pederasty was a way of avoiding sexuality for them and not one of their sexual practices. Homosexuality is a non-sexual use of the sexual members and is not sexuality in its most proper meaning. It is similar with all the other abnormalities of the variety that involve giving oneself pleasure through the help of one’s sexual organs.

In the creation of man and woman, the relationship between them was always framed by and ordered out into the wider world. The relationship between the man and the woman wasn’t primarily a matter of a private sexual relationship and enjoyment of intimate companionship. Rather, it was a means of fulfilling the divine calling to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and exercise dominion over its creature. The bond between man and woman was one designed to overcome any narcissistic self-preoccupation (whether that of a solitary individual, or the shared narcissism of a couple) and to direct the human being out into the world. Homosexual relations, like pornified sex, are marked by a frustration of this order, a closing in on ourselves. The homosexual world is marked by psychosexual disorder, by a masculinization of women and a feminization of men, rendering both sexes unfruitful, collapsing a fruitful order of men and women into the fruitless frottage of gender neutralized individuals’ bodies.

Conclusion 

Speaking forthrightly about these issues jeopardizes the respectability that Christians so covet. It will even provoke outrage from a great many modern Christians, who have a great deal invested in the neutralization of sexual difference and pretending that men and women are largely interchangeable in the family, in the church, in society, in politics, and in the economy. It will deeply offend those whose extreme concern not to say anything remotely insensitive about homosexual persons prevents them from speaking forthrightly about the intrinsically disordered and destructive character of the acts they are drawn to. It will anger people who have made their peace with the extremely elevated levels of porn’s background radiation within our society and within their own lives and will rationalize or excuse the effects that it is having upon us.

However, our desire for respectability and the approval of men shouldn’t lead us to defang the teeth of truths that will pierce our thin skins. The issues Prof. Schuchardt’s original article highlight are very real and are effecting us all. We must speak candidly about them and address them unflinchingly both in our own lives and within the society at large.