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Hugh Heffner and Ayn Rand

Posted by coaldigger 6 years, 6 months ago to Culture
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Not being much of an intellectual, I am not ashamed to admit that my second encounter with anything related to Ayn Rand was her interview in Playboy which comes to mind today on Heffner's passing. First my roommate had tried to get me to go to her lecture on campus a year before and I didn't bother (I kick myself). Second was the interview. I used to force myself to read Playboy interviews so I could claim that I didn't subscribe just for the pictures (I was lying). I related her interview to the fact that I missed her lecture and thought I should have gone but it did not inspire me to read her books. I was too busy trying to figure out what I wanted to be, while taking courses towards a degree in Electrical Engineering. I never intended to become an EE but graduated before I picked something else. I was going to just keep going to school but fell for this girl and decided to get married and become a responsible citizen.
Several years later a colleague asked if I read Atlas Shrugged because he thought I had already read and accepted it. When I said no, he bought me a copy and left it on my desk. 50+ years later I am retired, still reading the same book and married to the same girl. Somehow all this comes to mind because of Hefner. His interviews were amazing, the articles on style, travel, music, food and drink increased my awareness of a greater more sophisticated world, also but I still liked the pictures.
SOURCE URL: https://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/3901-the-lost-parts-of-ayn-rand-s-playboy-interview


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  • Posted by $ Suzanne43 6 years, 6 months ago
    Great story! I'm glad that you admitted to liking the pictures. I have a story, too...Not as good as your, but here it goes: I interviewed for a teaching position my last semester in college. It was the principal's responsibility to interview me and take me around the school building. As he was opening one of the classroom doors, I saw a Playboy key on his key chain. Whoa, this must be some dude. I got the job. And to make a long story short, we eventually married. Yeah, I married my boss. My husband subscribed to Playboy until the day our three year old son was seen with the magazine in his arms. That was the end of Playboy for us. BTW, I didn't care much for the pictures, but I thought the cartoons were good. Oops, almost forgot. I read Atlas Shrugged in school and twice since then.
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    • Posted by wiggys 6 years, 6 months ago
      the man who brought porn to America has died, so we have to honor him!
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      • Posted by 6 years, 6 months ago
        Way before Hugh Heffner bought the rights to Marilyn Monroe's previously published calendar photo there was plenty of porn to go around. I was 6-7 years old in 1947-48 when an airplane flew over our little coal mining town in Southern WV and dropped thousands of photos of nude women. Needless to say, I scooped up as many as I could and taped them to my bedroom wall. I got in some serious trouble not only with my mom but her housekeeper as well. I don't know how he kept from laughing but my father gave me a lectures and took my pictures. I never found out what he did with them. LOL However, I can almost guarantee you that Hef was not the pilot of that plane.
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      • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 6 years, 6 months ago
        You intended that as sarcasm, didn't you? Hugh Hefner did not "bring porn to America" but he did give it a middle class respectability by wrapping the pictures in good wring by leading authors and bright new talent.

        Hugh Hefner's Playboy was an important element in the extension and expansion of freedom and equality, no less than the Civil Rights, and anti-war movements. They all were fraught with problems that eventually came back to haunt them. But those philosophical contradictions do not condemn the larger works any more than the fact that Thomas. Jefferson owned slaves invalidates the Declaration of Independence.
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      • Posted by $ Suzanne43 6 years, 6 months ago
        Just wanted you to know that my previous comments in no way excuse what Hugh Heffner stood for or did. He was a reprobate of the first order. Am I sorry that he is dead....NO!
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        • Posted by $ allosaur 6 years, 6 months ago
          Me dino remembers when Mad Magazine sized him up for a pseudo-intellectual while calling The New Morality as still being The Dirty Old Morality.
          I still continued to be a teenager who'd buy Playboys and hide them between the mattresses of my bed.
          Five or so years ago, I read that each night a dirty old Heff had his live-in whores--and that's what they really were if temporarily while there--surround him topless and he'd pick one out for a bed partner.
          This was revealed by a guest who refused to remove her top and got glowered at by Heff.
          Think she left on her own the next day. If I'm wrong, she got booted.
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          • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 6 years, 6 months ago
            (1) You read a second-hand story you choose to believe.

            (2) Your view of Hugh Hefner was shaped by Mad magazine. Interesting and insightful as it could be, Mad parodied and ridiculed everything without discrimination, so, not everything funny was really funny. I liked Mad also, but I would not put too much stock in it as a philosopher's stone.

            (3) You called the women "whores" to denigrate them. What is it that you object to? Their having casual sex? Why?
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            • Posted by $ allosaur 6 years, 6 months ago
              I've also read "The Playboy Philosophy" when I was a teenager. Looking studious for holding a pipe and publishing an interview a contributor (always called Playboy) sent in does not put Hefner anywhere near Ayn Rand's philosophical level.
              I've had some casual sex. Can't recall requiring women to line up half naked like whores in a bordello.
              And if that second hand story ain't true, I very much doubt that at the very least all those hot chicks are paying with money for their room and board.
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    • Posted by 6 years, 6 months ago
      Your husband is just a good red-blooded guy. I dropped my subscription when my wife asked our 3-4 year old son why he was sitting out on the Milk Box (another old clue) and he answered that he was waiting for the mailman because today is the day that he should be bring "dad and my" copy of Playboy.
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      • Posted by $ Suzanne43 6 years, 6 months ago
        LOL Yes, my husband is a "good red-blooded guy," which I am happy to say. And so is our son. Sounds as if your son is, too. These boys start early. Hope that this is something the feminists never conquer.
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        • Posted by 6 years, 6 months ago
          My 3 sons are known as Haggar's brood of cavemen so they are OK but I fear that they are becoming the exception rather than the rule. The interesting fact is that these cubs were raised by their mother while I worked for the money to support our family. She taught them how men are supposed to behave, not me. They are educated, successful and have the utmost respect for her and indeed all women.
          Feminists, like many active groups have been duped to take on extreme positions dangerous to our society. I think that calling people out as "conspiracy theorists" has become a defense to protect some from exposure but I am willing to take that risk in saying that there is an invisible hand behind every movement we see today to destroy the only system based on rational morality in the history of the world. Transgender, feminists, white supremacy, Black Lives Matter, single payer health care, bogus tax reform, climate change, all being pushed by progressives with the goal of telling everyone what to do and how to act. There's no rational debate, just a "feeling" for what is in the common good.
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  • Posted by Herb7734 6 years, 6 months ago
    I first read The Fountainhead at age 14. Roark's speech did it for me. I went to the local drug store and bought two more paperback copies.I then methodically tore out all the pages containing Roark's speech and taped them to my bedroom wall.Whenever I felt down or discouraged, I could stand by my wall and read the inspiring speech. Which is the real reason I tried to keep my mom out of my room. (I finally taped them to a posterboard.)
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  • Posted by dukem 6 years, 6 months ago
    I was growing up (I thought) at the time Playboy was launched, during the fifties. Later, in the early sixties, Playboy was a staple for me, and believe it or not (after the photos) the interviews formed my intellectual background, far more than the engineering courses. They were quite penetrating (forgive me), challenging, and introduced me to a world I did not know existed. I shall always be thankful for being literally kicked out of my fifties mentality (conformity to the Democrat ideal) by reading those interviews and other articles. I think I actually did grow into adulthood when I cancelled my subscription (and I was in my thirties.) Fond memories!
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 6 years, 6 months ago
    "In mid-1962, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner was given a partial transcript of an interview with Miles Davis. It covered jazz, of course, but it also included Davis’s ruminations on race, politics and culture. Fascinated, Hef sent the writer—future Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Alex Haley, an unknown at the time—back to glean even more opinion and insight from Davis. The resulting exchange, published in the September 1962 issue, became the first official Playboy Interview and kicked off a remarkable run of public inquisition that continues today—and that has featured just about every cultural titan of the last half century.
    To celebrate the Interview’s 50th anniversary, the editors of Playboy have culled 50 of its most (in)famous Interviews and will publish them over the course of 50 weekdays (from September 4, 2012 to November 12, 2012) via Amazon’s Kindle Direct platform. Here is the interview with the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand from the March 1964 issue." -- https://www.amazon.com/Ayn-Rand-Playb...

    Ayn Rand's interviewer was Alvin Toffler.
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  • Posted by bassboat 6 years, 6 months ago
    Hefner did more to harm America than any good he ever did. He made females into objects of pleasure with no regard to the evil that he was spreading. He was a pornography peddler plain and simple. No one can know the number of marriages that he affected in a negative way and as a result children are hurt when mom and dad split up. Hefner being a hero? Never in my lineup of heroes.
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    • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 6 years, 6 months ago
      Women were sex objects long before Hugh Hefner and Playboy came along. If anything, Hefner and Playboy helped end it by making it so explicit as to be unsustainable. On the same thesis, homosexuality used to be "the love that dares not say its own name." Now you can. Playboy and Cosmopolitan and spin-offs such as Playgirl and Us helped to liberate sex and sexuality from the iron heel of the anti-life, anti-Earth mystics.

      We talk about economic controls and the loss of political freedoms. But consider that in the 1957 of Atlas Shrugged the looters successfully blackmailed Hank Rearden who sought to protect Dagny Taggart from the public exposure of their affair. In the movie, it just fell flat. Can you imagine Carly Fiorina or Marissa Mayer being blackmailed over an extra-marital affair? That change in social standards is attributable in large part to the revolution that Playboy responded to and fed.
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  • Posted by $ Radio_Randy 6 years, 6 months ago
    Hefner's passing should be made into a National Day of Mourning. There aren't many Americans who do not know his name and he definitely affected the culture of the country.
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  • Posted by freedomforall 6 years, 6 months ago
    Interesting that unlike some elected officials (Bill Clinton, for example) Hefner has not been accused of misusing his power over subordinates and admirers.
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  • Posted by term2 6 years, 6 months ago
    If anyone "did it my way", it was High Hefner.

    It would have been cool to have gone to the Playboy mansion and meet him, but I never got invited !
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