Body of evidence stacks up against The Hef
The Donald. The Hoff. The Hef. It never ends well, does it? Old age has ended it for Hugh Hefner who, despite being 91 when he died, retained that bizarre rabbit fetish right to the end.
What remains inexplicable is the mythologising that follows a man who put the grot in grotto, who presented women as sexualised cartoon consumables, who sold a toxic version of living the masculine dream as shagging people a quarter his age, stripped of all emotional intimacy. Reverse that, and see how it reads.
Would a nonagenarian woman in a dressing gown and pretend captain’s hat be widely regarded as something of a legend, were she to surround herself with men 60 to 70 years her junior who were dressed identically as adult rabbits? No. She would not. She would be bundled off for psychiatric evaluation.
But let us not linger on the past, where Hugh Hefner had long been stuck, dated as steak Diane, stale and flat as an abandoned Babycham. Let us instead celebrate how we are currently witnessing unpleasant chunks of the present being processed into unpleasant chunks of the past, even as we gawp in disbelief at their belated departure.
As the ladies of Saudi Arabia go forth and buy themselves sunglasses for the glare of the road ahead, you might pause to gasp how — even as we approach end times, with the world teetering on the dual precipices of ecological meltdown and mad dictators — we are only now acknowledging that in the world’s 14th richest country in 2017, a woman may legally sit into a car, hit the ignition, and drive away.
Imagine. Saudi women can now drive themselves to watch public beheadings, although they would still require a male guardian to accompany them in case their brains contract to a quarter the size of a man’s at the sight of a traffic light, as was suggested by a learned Saudi cleric. (A male learned Saudi cleric. They don’t do female ones.)
Good grief, we Irish ladies might scoff, as we drive ourselves where ever we damn we please while triumphantly listening to Hugh Hefner obituaries on the radio.
How backward, despite all the cash their husbands earn from selling us oil to fuel our cars. Poor loves.
Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, ladies.
Only this weekend were Irish women marching in Dublin and London protesting not a driving ban, but a body ban. When it comes to the nitty gritty of owning one’s own uterus, we are as restricted as a Saudi lady driver, our physiology not quite our own property. But finally, change is coming.
Let us look to a future, for all men and women, that contains — in the immortal words printed on a tea towel my friend gave me the other day — ‘More Feminism, Less Bullshit’.
