Celebrity deaths usually follow a similar trajectory these days.

First it’s the shock of the death and all the social media RIP posts, then the obituaries, and finally the think pieces and opinion pieces that analyse the celeb’s life from every angle.

He may have lived a life that many men are jealous of, but Hugh Hefner was a character that divided opinions. Not if you’re Ross Douthat writing for the New York Times, though, because he wasn’t mincing his words one bit.

Let’s get started with his intro:

Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.

Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.

It’s not like it got any better after that, mind you, because once he was up and running Ross really let loose:

Sure, Hefner supported some good causes and published some good writers. But his good deeds and aesthetic aspirations were ultimately incidental to his legacy — a gloss over his flesh-peddling, smeared like Vaseline on a pornographer’s lens. The things that were distinctively Hefnerian, that made him influential and important, were all rotten..

And his appreciation of male-female difference was rotten, too — the leering predatory sort of appreciation, the Cosby-Clinton-Trump sort, the sort that nicknames quaaludes “thigh openers” and expects the girls to laugh, the sort that prefers breast implants to female intellect and rents the charms of youth to escape the realities of age…

And in every way that mattered his life story proved that we were wrong to listen to him, because at the end of the long slide lay only a degraded, priapic senility, or the desperate gaiety of Prince Prospero’s court with the Red Death at the door.

Safe to say Ross isn’t losing sleep over Hugh moving on to a ‘better place’.

I’m sure his four children aren’t going to be sending well wishes Ross’s way, either (HERE).

[source:nytimes]