THE LAST WANK.

I gave my tribute to Hefner years ago, through my ode to the Playboy After Dark TV show:

You're a little boy in Bridgeport, CT. Mom's asleep and you have the TV on. On Channel 11 you see a POV shot of someone arriving at the door of a penthouse suite. The door opens to reveal Hugh Hefner in a tuxedo. "Oh, hello," Hef murmurs, graciously removing the pipe from his mouth, "So glad you could join us. Come on inside, and meet my guests." The guests include Marvin Gaye, Shel Silverstein, Buck Henry, the Byrds, and, slithering around these celebs, gents in After Six evening wear and chicks in mini-dresses, all carrying cocktail glasses and looking exceedingly comfortable with themselves. I know what I want to be when I grow up! you cry to yourself. I want to be--a bachelor!

The now-dead Hefner's role in the sexual revolution has been overstated, or maybe misstated: he was mainly a savvy marketer. Nudity was already on the scene; he just classed it up, packaging it with serious-people interviews and world-class photography, fiction, and journalism. The symbiosis worked like a charm -- men got the message that the porn was classy because it came with intellectual stuff and reviews of high-end products, and was art-directed and copywritten to the highest specs. It is easier now than it was in my adolescence, or even for years afterward, to see that conflating women's bodies with Bang and Olufsen and dollar-a-word fiction as dream objects was not healthy. But then, capitalism isn't doing our psyches any favors generally.

Anyway, I've been enjoying the obits from comservative writers, who seem divided between those who think commodification is just darn fine and those who insincerely deny that they're fantasizing Hef roasting in hell. At The Federalist, Ben Domenech takes the former side, and continues to prove my theory that when he plagiarized, he did so not out of laziness or panic as most do, but to spare himself the embarrassment of his own writing:

Hefner’s death comes at a time of deep confusion for the country about all sorts of things sexual in nature.

Maybe for you, buddy.

Embedded in his work was the idea that what we appreciate in one another isn’t sexless. It’s deeply rooted in our differences. Without those differences, sex itself becomes much less interesting.

How can homos enjoy sex, without tits to squeeze? (Lesbos I can see.)

So while he was derided as selling prurience and stereotypes to the profane and stereotypical, he was actually celebrating the sexual complementarity that has bound men and women together since the dawn of time. The fact this idea has become a problematic one in some pockets of American culture is one Hefner would doubtless find absurd – he built an entire empire on it, after all.

I can never hear a wingnut go on about "complementary" boygirl sex without hearing Professor Robert P. George's old rant about "sexually complementary spouses" versus "Masturbatory, sodomitical, and other sexual acts which are not reproductive in type, [and] cannot unite persons organically." Maybe you think of mustard and ketchup. Either way, lol.

On the other side, as I said, lots of highly suppressed hellfire fantasies -- e.g. Susan Wright at Red State:

Does that mean I don’t hope for a peaceful afterlife for Mr. Hefner?

Not at all. My most sincere hope and desire is that as the sun set over Hefner’s life, he had this epiphany of his own mortality, and his desperate need for forgiveness.

Or at least one last orgasm. Wright finishes up (fnarr fnarr) by telling us she won't pray for the heathen, but for "mercy for a society that has too readily forgotten the family and embraced perversion." Hope you filthy sinners appreciate it! I'll close with this remembrance from Anonymous Conservative:

He had the upper lip and naso-labial folds of a man who I would have assumed had been at least sexually abused as a child, if not been outright homosexual.

If these guys have their own version of Hef's grotto, I shudder to think what's in it.