In psychology, the psyche /ˈsaɪki/ is the totality of the human mind, conscious and unconscious. Psychology is the scientific or objective study of the psyche. The word has a long history of use in psychology and philosophy, dating back to ancient times, and represents one of the fundamental concepts for understanding human nature from a scientific point of view. The English word soul is sometimes used synonymously, especially in older texts.[1]
Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner
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| THE VILE MONSTER THAT WAS HEFFNER |
Hugh
Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and
chauvinist who got rich on mXXXXXX, consumerism and the
exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat,
and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his
pathetic orgies.
Hef
was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the
ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating
disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster
who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.
The
arc of his life vindicated his moral critics, conservative and
feminist: What began with talk of jazz and Picasso and other signifiers
of good taste ended in a sleazy decrepitude that would have been
pitiable if it wasn’t still so exploitative.
Early Hef had a pipe and suit and a highbrow reference for every occasion; he even claimed to have a philosophy,
that final refuge of the scoundrel. But late Hef was a lecherous,
low-brow Peter Pan, playing at perpetual boyhood — ice cream for
breakfast, pajamas all day — while bodyguards shooed male celebrities
away from his paid harem and the skull grinned beneath his papery skin.
This
late phase was prettied up by reality television’s “The Girls Next
Door,” which kept the orgies offstage and relied on the girlfriends’ mix
of desperation, boredom and charisma for its strange appeal. The behind-the-scenes accounts were rather grimmer:
depression and drugs, “dirty hallway carpets and the curtains that
smell like dog piss,” the chance to wait while Hef “picked the dog poo
off the carpet — and then ask for our allowance.”
Needless to say the obituaries for Hefner, even if they acknowledge the seaminess, have been full of encomia for his great deeds: Hef the vanquisher of puritanism, Hef the political progressive, Hef the great businessman and all the rest. There are even conservative appreciations, arguing that for all his faults Hef was an entrepreneur who appreciated the finer things in life and celebrated la difference.
What
a lot of garbage. Sure, Hefner supported some good causes and published
some good writers. But his good deeds and aesthetic aspirations were
ultimately incidental to his legacy — a gloss over his flesh-peddling,
smeared like Vaseline on a pornographer’s lens. The things that were
distinctively Hefnerian, that made him influential and important, were
all rotten, and to the extent they were part of stories that people tend
to celebrate, they showed the rot in larger things as well.
His
success as a businessman showed the rotten side of capitalism — the
side that exploits appetites for money, that feeds leech-like on our
vices, that dissolves family and religion while promising that
consumption will fill the void they leave behind.
The social liberalism he championed was the rotten and self-interested sort, a liberalism of male and upper-class privilege, in which the strong and beautiful and rich take their pleasure at the expense of the vulnerable and poor and not-yet-born.
The
online future his career anticipated was the rotten side of the
internet — the realms of onanism and custom-tailored erotica, where the
male vanity and entitlement he indulged has curdled into resentment and misogyny.
And
his appreciation of male-female difference was rotten, too — the
leering predatory sort of appreciation, the Cosby-Clinton-Trump sort,
the sort that nicknames quaaludes “thigh openers” and expects the girls
to laugh, the sort that prefers breast implants to female intellect and
rents the charms of youth to escape the realities of age.
No
doubt what Hefner offered America somebody else would have offered in
his place, and the changes he helped hasten would have come rushing in
without him.
But
in every way that mattered he made those changes worse, our culture
coarser and crueler and more sterile than liberalism or feminism or
freedom of speech required. And in every way that mattered his life
story proved that we were wrong to listen to him, because at the end of
the long slide lay only a degraded, priapic senility, or the desperate gaiety of Prince Prospero’s court with the Red Death at the door.
Now
that death has taken him, we should examine our own sins. Liberals
should ask why their crusade for freedom and equality found itself with
such a captain, and what his legacy says about their cause.
Conservatives should ask how their crusade for faith and family and
community ended up so Hefnerian itself — with a conservative news
network that seems to have been run on Playboy Mansion principles and a
conservative party that just elected a playboy as our president.
You can find these questions being asked, but they are counterpoints and minor themes. That this should be the case, that only prudish Christians and spoilsport feminists
are willing to say that the man was obviously wicked and destructive,
is itself a reminder that the rot Hugh Hefner spread goes very, very
deep.
No. 06 The "Nosson" Sherman:
ReplyDeleteThe Dadbag is a fanny pack (or bum bag, depending on where you're from) that looks like a hairy belly sticking out from under your t-shirt.