George Pyle: What we can learn from Hefner’s hedonistic fantasy world

Sept. 10, 1974.

I’m sure of the date because it was my 18th birthday. Old enough to finally buy a copy of Playboy magazine at the Campus Activities Center bookstore without fear of being challenged or denied.

I think I may have pulled the same stunt as the Woody Allen character in “Bananas.” I padded the order with copies of Time, Newsweek and National Review. Just so it all looked properly academic.

I don’t think the check-out clerk gave me a second look. Awkward young man. University bookstore. Happened all the time.

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

For maybe 20 years I was an avid buyer, subscriber and — honest and truly — reader of Hugh Hefner’s journal of intellectual pursuits — Alex Haley, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood — providing a respectable gloss for glossy images of fast cars, high-tech stereos, expensive booze and unbelievably gorgeous women.

First it was because I could say there were serious articles. Then it was because I really read the articles. Then I got too busy to read much of anything and turned my attention to more wholesome domestic pursuits.

(I even wrote an article on commission from a Playboy editor about the time my book on agriculture policy came out. It was an essay on how American agribusiness had so thoroughly undercut the Mexican corn farmer that it was a big driver of illegal immigration. Yes, Playboy has serious political essays. Though, in the end, they didn’t print mine. But they paid me $2,000 for my trouble.)

And, as the world marks the passing the other day of the 91-year-old Hefner, I am here to argue that I turned out OK.

I have been a feminist before I ever heard the word. I’ve worked for and with women and always treated them as equals — or superiors — with total respect and friendship. Hefner’s efforts to bring sex out of the dark and talk about it, fight off censors and prosecutors, spend real time and money to promote civil rights for blacks and gays and acquaint small town rednecks with Miles Davis and Malcolm X leave him, his publication and his readers on the positive side of history.

And it is said that he, like not a few other visionaries, could be a bit of an arrogant bastard, expecting certain people to fawn over him as the price of admission to his wealth and fame. He did not, by many accounts, treat individual women well.

And the photos? Did anyone ever believe that they were real? It was all part of the hedonistic, materialistic fantasy that Hef got rich selling. Unattainable women of unearthly perfection.

It is difficult to believe that even 15-year-old boys sneaking a peek thought that was real life, that the women who posed for the photographers under hot lights, with squadrons of hairdressers and make-up artists just out of camera range, subjected to every darkroom trick in the book, really looked like that any more than Andy Serkis really looks like Gollum. Or Caesar. Or Supreme Leader Snoke.

Objectivized? Obviously. Just like most of the people in the two- dimensional world of our mass media. Like, say, all those male athletes who careen, collide and collapse for our amusement, only to tick us off when they announce they have something important to say.

“Are you not entertained?”

Still, there was a human quality to it. I say that because I remember many of their names. Ester Cordet, to begin with, followed by Bebe Buell. Later Patty McGuire, Shannon Tweed, Debra Jo Fondron, Dorothy Stratten and Candy Loving. (OK. That last name was probably made up.)

It is sad, sometimes tragic, that young women sometimes measure themselves against those science fiction special effects and get depressed, anorexic, even suicidal, when they find themselves wanting.

But that’s the down side of freedom of expression. Sometimes, people, good people, get the wrong idea. Take things too literally. Don’t let themselves in on the joke.

That’s what we are seeing now as we wonder about how something as big as a presidential election can be swayed by swarms of targeted ads and notices on Facebook and Twitter, missives designed to spread lies about Hillary Clinton, about Black Lives Matter, about Dreamers and immigrants and refugees, to carefully selected audiences in the U.S., U.K and E.U. Audiences so narrow that people who might call out the lies and put things to right don’t even know the messages are out there to be refuted.

It’s not just freedom of the press or of speech. This whole First Amendment business — religion, assembly and petitioning the government — only works, only makes sense, can only be justified, if enough of the people aren’t fooled enough of the time. If parents and schools and media, respectable and risqué, help us see that.

That’s true as people think about sex and the changing role of women in society. It’s true as people consume fire-hose levels of political propaganda and argument.

It’s true as movie princesses (Buttercup and Leia) become generals (Antiope and Organa). It’s true as the sexiest women by far in today’s popular fantasy culture are not helpless damsels but Agents Romonoff and Wonder Women, who are not naked and, if you suggest that they should be, are fully capable of breaking both your arms.

That may not have been Hefner’s vision of femininity, but it is the one that’s ascendant in today’s pop culture. And he deserves some credit for letting that genii out of its bottle.

George Pyle, the Tribune’s editorial page editor, now buys The New Yorker and only looks at the cartoons.