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The Frankfurt School and Hugh Hefner

To say that a figure of the past is "good" or "bad" is not just an oversimplification, it's an intellectual cliche that lingers on boredom.  Undeniably, Hugh Hefner will go down in history as an incredibly controversial figure,.  For many people, he deserves praise for his role in the sexual revolution.  For others, he was simply an abusive creep.  Much can be sad about Hugh Hefner's degradation of women that is awfully true in more respects that most people would like to admit.  However, If the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School taught us anything, it's that society and culture have been so mutilated by the routines and pressures of late capitalism, that the shortcomings of imperfect individuals within the culture industry are more importantly reflections of widespread social sicknesses, such as the ideology of male supremacy.

Theodor Adorno, the most widely known intellectual of the Frankfurt School, argued that the femininity of women is a product of masculine society.  In Minima Moralia, he wrote:

The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modeled, are products of masculine society. The image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite.  Where it claims to be humane, masculine society imperiously breeds in woman its own corrective, and shows itself through this limitation implacably the master.

Hefner's reproduction of women in photos, moving pictures, and live performances distorted their nature.  As the master, he conformed the image of women to his vision of human nature.  When confronted with the objectification of women in a 2010 Vanity Fair interview, Hefner was open about his view of human nature: "But they are objects!"  Earlier in a VH1 documentary, he remarked that "the notion that women are sexual objects is what makes the world go round."  It's hard to think of a clearer statement of one's worldview.

Hugh Hefner openly shared his groundbreaking vision for Playboy that went 'against the grain' of the mainstream.  As a self-made crusader of the sexual revolution, he railed against the austere and repressive influences of Puritan society on American sexuality: "I saw the craziness of our puritan attitudes toward sex, and there was a significant new generation who felt the same way."  It's true that Hefner supported civil rights, abortion rights, and gay rights throughout the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, but one mustn't equate a handful of liberal values as a truly radical vision.

Frankfurt School philosopher and Sociologist Herbert Marcuse's concept of repressive desublimation demonstrated that Hugh Hefner's imagination was limited in its aims to transform the status quo.  First coined in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man as a Freudian-Marxist critique of the sexual revolution, repressive desublimation posits that industrial capitalism commodified the mass of 20th century art, removing many of the revolutionary and transcendental impulses that it once had.  Where art once offered a controlled stream of pleasure that came with patient analysis and appreciation, modern art offers immediate gratification in a way that removes the life from its liberating potential.  More than anything, Marcuse helps us understand that Hefner's deluded self-image as a progressive crusader was predicated upon his ambition to create and sell an edgy image of Playboy magazine to a demographic of men who saw that the taboo on sex was fading.  As Barabara Ehnreich wrote most clearly: "The magazine’s real message was not eroticism but escape from the bondage of breadwinning. Sex — or Hefner’s Pepsi-clean version of it — was there to legitimize what was truly subversive about Playboy. In every issue, in every month, there was a Playmate to prove that a playboy didn’t have to be a husband to be a man."

Lastly, Hefner experienced a sense of shock when he was confronted with the reality that male-engendered femininity is sustained by symbolic, psychological, and physical violence.  On the Dick Cavett show in 1970, feminist Susan Brownmiller unexpectedly berated Hefner for his concealment of women's oppression:

Hugh Hefner is my enemy.  Hugh Hefner has built an empire based on oppressing women.  The role that you have selected for women is degrading to women because you choose to see women as sex objects, which deny their humanity and their femininity.

Most striking, is Hefner's comment in hindsight that he "didn't have the language for responding to that kind of thing."  One can only guess what he was thinking, but what is clear is that there was nothing that he could respond with that would be publicly acceptable.  He would have to reinvent Playboy's message in a way that conformed to the progressive values of the 1960s.  Social movements were defining the terrain of an acceptable language  that Playboy was forced to navigate.  Adorno writes: "the femininity which appeals to instinct, is always exactly what every woman has to force herself by violence - masculine violence - to be: a she-man."  Truthfully, symbolic violence is required to recreate ideas about instinct and human nature that reinforce male supremacy.  Soon after his encounter with Brownmiller, Hefner counterattacked in an internal memo: "These chicks are our natural enemy. What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart. They are unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes."

Looking back, Hugh Hefner was a pioneering product of male superiority and the culture industry of late capitalism.  Pioneering, in that he reinvented male domination under the veil of human nature.  Of his first marriage that failed, Hefner wrote: "It doomed us from the start. But I think it gave me permission to live the life I’ve lived."  Perhaps there is a hint of vengeful misogyny here, but it shows that what really drove Hefner was his ideology, routinized by habit, custom, and failure.  As Adorno wrote: "Whatever is in the context of bourgeois delusion called nature, is merely the scar of social mutilation. If the psychoanalytical theory is correct that women experience their physical constitution as a consequence of castration, their neurosis gives them an inkling of the truth."

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Secular Dictators and Islamic Jihadists: A Question of Extermination

On Tuesday, Amnesty International released a chilling report that detailed the execution by hanging of approximately 13,000 Syrians over the past 5 years.  This was done in secret, in the middle of the night, in front of a speedy Kangaroo Court at the Saydaya Military Prison.  Lynn Maalouf, Deputy Director for Research at Amnesty International' regional office in Beirut remarked: "the horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government."  The success of the Assad regime and its Western allies in hiding the Syrian government's program of extermination is derived form their ability to shift the public's focus to the atrocities ISIL, which are much smaller in scale.  This is a crucial factor in determining the outcome of the bloody conflict.  Early in the conflict, surface to air missiles were never provided by sympathetic Western countries to Syrian rebels because Assad's henchmen propagated an Orientalist narrative that painted the opposition as dominated by Jihadists.  The reality is that the state terrorism of a well armed state is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the civilian deaths in Syria.  This is no accident.

The conditions inside Saydaya Military Prison's 'human slaughterhouse,' can only be described as systematic extermination.  Starvation, physical beatings, rape, and confessions extracted by torture are the norm.  A 'Military Field Court' presides over a one to two minute trial using their false confessions.  Lawyers are denied and defendants are forbidden from speaking in their defense.  Hangings are typically carried out every week or two, while those who were held in the detention area above the gallows reported that "we were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death."  This sort of treatment is hauntingly similar to the dehumanization carried out in Nazi death camps such as Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Auschwitz.  This leads us to some observations drawn by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

The typical narrative of the Syrian conflict, dominated by ISIS fighters garbed in black cloth, is not only a dimension of Islamophobia, but more importantly it is a facet of the defense of the Assad regime's extermination of the opposition.  The true threat to humanity does not come from ideological fanatics, as Hannah Arendt points out.  Careerist figures with an inability to truly think sow the grounds for systematic death of unfathomable proportions.  Furthermore, what she points out is that the Nazi regime made stringent efforts to remove men who sadistically enjoyed harming their victims from the ranks of S.S.  What really allowed these men to continue the endless killing was the idea that they were a part of something grandiose, unique, and magnificent in the annals of history.  This sort of bureaucratic extermination poses the gravest threat to the Middle East, because killing with efficiency promises lucrative advancement in the ranks of the Assad regime.  Fascists who cloak their banality of evil with ties and close shaves are the real threat, not minimally equipped fascists with beards.

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The Minstrelsy of Trumpness

"America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show for so long that one can do it in one's own sleep." - James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

Minstrel shows are an American tradition like none other. Their charm still resonates with the unconsciousness of many Americans. In the run up to the 2016 Presidential election, Donald Trump's comic skits and variety acts represented the sexually crude, racist, and politically rebellious appeal of America's minstrel show culture that never fully met the grave. His revival of nostalgic whiteness comforted white working class anxieties about declining living standards, just as the racist content of nineteenth century minstrel shows became an escape for American workers from the crushing pressure of the industrial revolution. Trump provided a flood of sexist undertones , and often overtones, that harkened back to the burlesque sideshows that precluded blackface performances. The main act was the political rebelliousness of Trump. Clearly, many Trump supporters overlooked the offensiveness of his racism and sexism in favor of his critiques of the status quo. These "psychological wages," as David Roediger describes in The Wages of Whiteness, provide an egotistical boost to working class white Americans who suffer from a sobering decline of wages, living standards, and life expectancy in Rust Belt America.

Blackface originated in the early 1830s in Pittsburgh during the rise of President Andrew Jackson. Jackson, a President with populist appeals similar to Donald Trump, was a Wealthy Tennessee slaveowner whose party courted voters who attacked abolitionists with verbal and physical violence. Even so, President Tyler's inauguration commenced with a minstrel show and President Lincoln frequented blackface entertainment to escape his Civil War duties. The first minstrel performers were white working class men in mechanics' halls. Out of this context, white performers appropriated "Negro spirituals," black music that originated in the Southern United States, in order to sell "blackness" as an entertainment form. It's clear that their original content was knowingly perverted into humor for white audiences. As a 1867 Atlantic Monthly article summarized:

“These quaint religious songs were to the men more than a source of relaxation; they were a stimulus to courage and a tie to heaven. I never overheard in a camp a profane or vulgar song. With the trifling exceptions given, all had a religious motive, while the most secular melody could not have been more exciting.”

Blackface performances became an object for which white workers could project their fears, anxieties, and temptations. They feared the dislocation of craft labor and the rise of the alienatng factory work. Anxious about becoming "wage slaves' or 'white slaves,' white workers inflated the inferiority of blacks in order to elevate their own social standing that was rapidly deteriorating.  

Temptation in the form of alcoholism, sexual privation, and a higher enjoyment of life were consciously and unconsciously envied by white workers who now had to deal with the speed of industrial work and controlling managerial supervision. These temptations became black racial stereotypes. The constructed "Blackness" of minstrel shows came to be something that was in direct opposition to new conceptions of "whiteness," which repressed preindustrial desires. Although many liberals tend to view the violence of Trump rallies as relatively unprecedented, minstrel shows typically concluded with race riots in which free blacks were beaten by mobs, even inside Northern black churches. The Origins of this cultural formation suggest that racism and the decline of work due to industrialization went hand in hand.

Sexism was typified by the sort of female exclusion and white male unity that was implicit in minstrel shows. Although openly sexist jokes were typically forbidden from minstrelsy, sexual purity was abandoned. Mockery of women's rights conventions, in which men dressed and acted as women, clearly depicted opposition to male suffrage. In addition, mystic tales of black men's sexual organs was a frequent topic, as the minstrel song "astonishing nose" shows:

Like an elephants trunk it reached to its toes, And wid it he would gib some most astonishing blows No one dare come near, so great was his might He used to lie on his bed wid his nose on the floor, An when he slept sound his nose it would snore, Like a dog in a fight - 'twas a wonderful nose An it follows him about wherever he goes. De police arrested him one morning in May, For obstructing de sidewalk, having his nose in de way. Dey took him to de court house, dis member to fine; When dey got dere de nose hung on a tavern sign.

Franz Fanon's psychological study of racism, Black Skin, White Masks, comments on the colonialist origins of Trump's grab them "by the pussy" appeal: 

"The Civilized white man retains an irrational nostalgia for the extraordinary times of sexual licentiousness, orgies, unpunished rapes, and unrepresentative incest. Projecting his desires into the black man, the white man behaves as if the black man actually had them."

These sort of sexualized, hyper-masculine performances were weaved into the image that Donald Trump created of himself. "Look at those hands, are they small hands?" Trump told the audience during one of the Republican debates, in response to comments made by Marco Rubio. He went on to reassure the audience: "I guarantee you there's no problem, I guarantee it." For many men, anxieties about their declining economic security were restored and reflected in these sort of implicit statements. As economic power declines, sexual might plays an increasingly important role.

Political rebellion, no matter how shallow and superficial, was the main attraction for both minstrel shows and Donald Trump. The Civil War brought new content for minstrel performers looking to win over white, urban, Democratic audiences. These shows began to attack topics such as emancipation, the recruitment of black troops, tax revenue being allocated to the Freedman's Bureau, universal civil rights, and supposed favoritism of the "nigger." These "rebelliousness" critiques of Radical Republicanism lined up nicely  with the proslavery views of wealthy elites in the urban North, such New York City. Likewise, Trump's statements about putting Hilary Clinton in jail, criticism of the Iraq War, and denouncements of free trade agreements such as NAFTA resonate with many Americans. Still, these criticisms carefully leave class struggle and wealth inequality out of the script. What these nineteenth century and contemporary critiques of the status quo have in common is there focus on moralists and national political authorities, rather than conflicts between capital and labor.

We cannot deny that racism still resonates with the white working class, although the extent to which is not certain. The white working class is not inherently racist; Trump did not win over working class whites, as liberal commentators seem to claim. In fact, Trump's portion of working class voters was comparable to previous Republican candidates. What we do know, is that Trump won because Hilary Clinton lost a large portion of voters who elected Barack Obama in 2008, and with an even smaller margin in 2012.

There is very little of Donald Trump's political content that is unprecedented.  He is not a fascist, as many on the left claim. This is not to deflate the very real threat that his disastrous appointments and policies pose. Things will get bad, no doubt. However, all of his horribleness can be traced back to various American political and cultural traditions that his campaign revived. Violence, sexism, racism, and hyper-masculine homophobia are all staples of American conservatism that can be traced back to the emergence of minstrel shows in the early nineteenth century. It is comforting to know that the politics of minstrely are incapable of increasing Republican voter turnout. Perhaps this type of conservative is dying and Donald Trump is its last gasp of air.