Hugh Hefner is an Emasculated Drone

Update: In honor of the new TV series, The Playboy Club, I'm bumping this post from May of 2010. Enjoy.

---

... that's one of the things I learned from watching this video from the Witherspoon Institute's report on the Social Cost of Pornography. While clinical in nature, the portion of the video I'm referring to is still not safe for work nor is it safe for children. Go to 45:05 to hear how Hugh gets off.

Update: The video has since been moved to a private area. Suffice it to say that Hugh requires the ministrations of several playmates in sequence followed by a viewing of porn followed by more ministrations. Getting Hugh to fruition requires slightly more work than writing a 15-page paper analyzing Paradise Lost and seems to be less satisfying for all concerned.

The video originally interested me because the researcher was discussing brain plasticity (I used to do research in neural network artificial intelligence) as it applies to pornography rewiring neural pathways. It's sparked an interest in brain plasticity that might generate some blog posts here, but after thinking about this vignette for a while, something else occurred to me.

Hugh Hefner has totally emasculated himself. His own porn has rewired his brain to the point that he can no longer function as a normal, healthy man. The researcher describes the irony quite well, but doesn't take it the final step.

Hugh helped destroy all of our social norms and remove barriers to open sexuality. Now he's a wimp, a sissy, a girly-man. All of the music stars who make videos where girls with fake boobs are draped all over them in various states of undress, suggesting an orgy to come are simply walking down the road to total emasculation. All the flexing of muscles, the primping in front of the camera, the guns and fast cars and other trappings of masculine success are just props in what amounts to a reenactment of Poe's Masque of the Red Death. They're poisoning themselves, slowly but surely until in the end, the pleasures they pursued so hotly are denied to them forever.

He (the chief rapper or rock star) bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure (the porn filling his video and his life), when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry -- and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which most instantly afterward, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and seizing the mummer whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Party on, dudes.