Sunday, July 12, 2015

Pondering Playboy, The Girls Next Door, and Eternity

Recently, I came across some YouTube videos from a 1959 television show, “Playboys' Penthouse,” featuring Hugh Hefner as host. The show oozed style, with a cool jazz soundtrack and Playboy “bunnies,” fully clothed, slinking around in those fashionable, quintessential 1950’s-style Mad Men dresses. It looked like a classy cocktail party that people felt privileged to attend. A sexual undertone permeated the atmosphere, prompted by association with the Playboy lifestyle, but people in the 1950s actually still adhered to a somewhat obsolete notion called “discretion,” so the show contained nothing overtly sexual.
 
Hefner came across as suave and debonair if not exactly scintillating. Playboy Penthouse featured some excellent musical performances but the conversational elements were more miss than hit. In my opinion, not even Lenny Bruce could infuse the show with enough energy to keep it from fizzling out. Hefner tried to replicate life at the Playboy Mansion life by having the show’s participants engage in then-nascent mansion rituals, like watching old movies—but watching people watch something doesn’t exactly make for compelling television. Cable wasn’t invented yet and decent public standards still prevailed so he couldn’t exactly show hardcore porn or hot and heavy grotto action.

Fast forward five decades and Hef (who, by the way, attended Steinmetz High School, the same Chicago public high school that I later attended) ended up on television again in the reality series “The Girls Next Door,” featuring Hefner and his three girlfriends, Holly, Kendra and Bridget. People watched with fascination and many men, no doubt, watched with admiration. By this time, the “if it feels good do it” mindset exemplified by Playboy had fully taken root, and the 60s revolution, with its abandonment of traditional morality, had catapulted hedonism’s self-indulgence, with its disregard for God's standards, into the mainstream. Consequently, public standards plummeted and the Playboy media empire overall seemed to be playing catch up, offering raunchy porn videos and who knows what else (really, I wouldn’t know—would I?)

Actually, I would know about some porn.  In the 1980s, I stayed at the house of someone who subscribed to The Playboy Channel and, while flipping through the channels by myself, my curiosity got the better of me. I watched a few too many videos with a mixture of arousal and disgust, witnessing sexual  permutations I had never seen before and would actually prefer to forget. Porn exists as a business because it achieves an objective, but in the end, it felt desperate and pathetic. I never watched The Playboy Channel again.

Years later, I did read a couple of articles about The Girls Next Door supposed “reality” series and watched a couple of episodes. The show portrayed a lifestyle that seemed deliciously fun, like a perpetual romp in an adolescent boy’s idea of a Sexual Nirvana, all blondes and boobs and nonstop fun. But like anything that promotes an immoral lifestyle, the tempting hype masked a dark pit of lies that are just now beginning to crawl out of the abyss.

I remember a story I heard once in church as an illustration of temptation’s deception. A man told about lusting after a woman’s shapely form in India, but when she turned around, he saw that she was severely disfigured by leprosy, and the repulsion of that reality jolted him out of lust’s grip.

I always suspected that The Girls Next Door was just an alluring facade covering a leprous core. Indeed, it turns out that The Girls Next Door was more of a drug and jealousy-fueled cesspool than a big, happy family or sexual Nirvana.  

Former Hef girlfriend Holly Madison recently released a book where she described life in the mansion as akin to being in a prison. She described her first miserable sexual encounter with Hefner: “There was zero intimacy involved,” she says. “No kissing, nothing. It was so brief that I can’t even recall what it felt like beyond having a heavy body on top of mine.”

Despite being surrounded by a bevy of beauties, she describes Hefner as more adept at Viagra-fueled masturbation than at pleasing or getting pleasure from women, whom he manipulated and pitted against each other.

And another former “Girl Next Door,” Kendra Wilkenson, reported that sex with Hefner felt like a "clock in-clock out" job and that she had to get thoroughly drunk or high to tolerate it—recalling a night when, after Hefner came to her bed for some brief, perfunctory sex, he inexplicably started to weep.

I don’t know why he wept and perhaps he doesn’t know either, but I suspect that he had a moment of clarity where the emptiness of his supposedly have-it-all life flashed before him. Perhaps he realistically saw himself as a decrepit old man, standing on the precipice of eternity, with nothing to show for his earthy journey except a lifetime of fleshly indulgence, superficial, broken relationships, and the promulgation of destructive, pornographic propaganda.

Perhaps he realized that his string of father-hungry, silicone-enhanced girlfriends and/or ever-revolving wives were seeking vicarious fulfillment through notoriety and would never have given him the time of day had he lived in obscure poverty. So they didn’t really love him, did they? Or if they did, he didn’t know how to love them back.

Wilkerson claims of Madison, “The one thing she truly wanted was a piece of that stock, a piece of Playboy and a piece of Hef’s will.” Or perhaps, as Madison counters, “Hef used money as a means to control each girlfriend,” and he tried to “buy” her with the enticement of leaving $3 million to her in his will provided she stayed at the mansion, an overture she viewed as pathetic.

Lovely, huh? Jealously, blackmail, manipulation, and that’s just the start.

A feature writer wrote about current Playboy mansion life and described how Hefner’s environment “looks less like a love nest than the cave of a hoarder, unable to let go.”

But he will let go eventually because, perhaps ironically for him, as Job said in the Bible, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return.” And Hefner is the perfect example of Jesus' illustration that, “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul?”

The environment today is a far cry from my first exposure to Playboy Magazine in the 1960s when a neighbor friend showed me a page she had ripped out of her brother’s Playboy magazine. (On a side note, I shudder to think about what kids today are exposed to via the Internet.) The page featured a cartoon drawing of a bunch of naked people milling around in someone’s depiction of hell. It looked more like a bunch of bored people on an overcrowded nude beach than a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, or Christ’s description of hell as a place of “weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.”  I don’t remember the punchline but it was probably something about hell not being so bad after all.

Hefner is 89 years old now so, statistically, he’s very close to finding out exactly what hell is like. In fact, most news outlets probably wrote his obituary feature years ago.
                                                The Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch

I don’t understand why my husband, who was an extraordinarily wonderful man, passed away recently at the relatively young age of 65 while someone like Hef keeps ticking. But I do know that as long as there is life, there is hope.

Hefner is alive because of God’s abundant grace. Maybe God can see beyond the bravado and the caricature of a sexual Lothario and perceive a wounded, lonely man who pursued a tainted fortune to overcompensate for feelings of rejection and who never really learned to give or receive love because he had no relationship with G-d, who IS love. Maybe the fact that Hefner had everything the world can offer and found that it is not enough has softened his heart. Or maybe not.

Regardless, the Playboy “empire” is what Johnny Cash sang about in the song “Hurt”—an empire of dirt. At some point, Hefner will not be able to trade his entire empire for even one more moment of life on this earth.

But the most amazing thing to me is that, even at this moment, God extends grace and mercy to him.  Just as the thief on the cross turned to Christ in the last moments of life, Hefner can do the same.  And if he’s sincere, and truly desires forgiveness, he can receive it.  Christ’s sacrifice is that all-encompassing and God’s love is that big.

The door is open for “Hef” or anyone else who wants to walk through it but the day will come when the door closes.  Don’t delay.  


One of the most poignant songs ever recording and the video just rips my heart out. 



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