Hugh hefner was gay

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But it is also reductive.

Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker, points out that what Hefner actually commoditized was “the male gaze.” This may seem like semantic quibbling, but it is not. That’s why the feminist critique resonates. The emotions often follow, but are not required to fuel our rich fantasy life. Esquire had rejected “The Crooked Man,” a science fiction story written by Charles Beaumont.

But the word has taken on an ugly veneer, as if the object of desire is reduced to the status of thing. You are also agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner died from natural causes at his home, the Playboy Mansion, on Wednesday. This is how male sexuality works.

Gay men objectify other gay men, and let me tell you, those of us who have been objectified don’t mind it at all.

Not so fast. And that also had an enormous effect on women — by creating natural allies to feminism, and in granting women permission to have whatever kind of attraction they had to others as well.

But there is a flipside — and it is huge.

I am a feminist, and I want to acknowledge that I hear of all arguments about Hugh Hefner’s legacy being a negative one, largely because Playboy so furthered a culture in which the objectification of women became celebrated. Ditto, lesbians (see Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle.)

Men eventually became sex symbols.

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Hefner also was one of the first to stand up for transgender rights.

The glorification of the male torso has now reached such a point that both Carrie Ann Inaba and Bruno Tonioli can fan themselves after a hunky dancer reveals his glistening pectorals during a cha-cha on Dancing With the Stars.

The equality of objectification of male and female has no doubt gone overboard.

He kept his stance on gay rights years later when he told the Daily Beast in 2009 that nothing was wrong with gay marriage. I understand this critique. We don’t feel insulted — quite the opposite.

When Hugh Hefner proposed that men stop feeling bad about the primacy of lust in their thought process, he may have been talking to heterosexual men, but gay men heard the message as well.

He was 91. Look at the difference between Gary Cooper, Rock Hudson, and Rod Taylor in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.