Hugh Hefner was the ultimate enemy of women no feminist anywhere will shed a tear at his death

[NNadir]

305. Yeah. He was a jerk for jerk offs, not much of a human being. His consumerist nightmare was...

Last edited Sat Sep 30, 2017, 04:55 AM - Edit history (1)

just as bad as his misogyny.

I confess that as a young man, I used to read his dumb ass magazine, but then my pimples cleared up and I worked hard to become something known as "a man."

Speaking of pimps, Theresa Carpenter's "Death of a Playmate," was one step along the way to waking me up and making me become a man.

It was beautifully written, in the hey day of the Village Voice, and it won Carpenter the Pulitzer Prize, which she certainly deserved.

In it, she covers the death of "Playmate of the Year" Dorothy Stratten at the hands of her estranged husband, Paul Snider, in a murder-suicide, an act he carried out after learning she was going to marry film director Peter Bogdanovich. Hefner was obsessed with having her become what no other playmate had become because of him and his adolescent fantasy magazine, a legitimate star.

I'll never forget the closing paragraphs comparing the three men in her life, Hefner, Snider, and Bogdanovich:

Whether or not Dorothy Stratten would have fulfilled her extravagant promise can’t be known. Her legacy will not be examined critically because it is really of no consequence. In the end Dorothy Stratten was less memorable for herself than for the yearnings she evoked; in Snider a lust for the new score; in Hefner a longing for a star; in Bogdanovich a desire for the eternal ingénue. She was a catalyst for a cycle of ambitions which revealed its players less wicked, perhaps, than pathetic.

As for Paul Snider, his body was returned to Vancouver in permanent exile from Hollywood. It was all to big for him. In that Elysium of dreams and deals, he had reached the limits of his class. His sin, his unforgivable sin, was being small-time.

"Less wicked than pathetic..."

Maybe. In the end, Hefner was that only that...pathetic.