Boys in their immaturity often exercise hyper-masculinity. Grown boys who never become men put manners on it. In the church we need to call it what it is. Hyper-authoritarianism and subordination is anti-complementarity, just as much as “the act of onanism carried out to mass-distributed pictures of reified women who are deprived of voice, action, and thought.” No one is authorized to look at women or treat them this way. No one is to submit to unbiblical teachings of sexuality.

 
We all have some memories that burn into us like a branding. It may seem random, but some moments leave an impression that will always imprint our minds. One of those for me happened at a slumber party one of the girls on my cheerleading squad hosted for us in high school. She was a better kid than me, what we would think of as the Goody Two-Shoes of the squad. She pleased everyone, never got into trouble, and was always smiling—which was a total yawn for me at the time. But, you go to these team-bonding things, and there I was in the Two-Shoes household with the squad.

We ventured off into the basement as all teenagers do. I recall nothing about what we did there. All I remember is this branding moment. For some reason, we went into the storage room in the basement and against the wall was one of those metal muscle racks filled with Playboy magazines from floor to ceiling. I can’t remember the reactions of the other girls but I asked the question that only Captain Obvious could answer, Whose are these? This was all so outside of my reality of what a father would do that I totally would have believed the We’re holding them for a friend excuse. But Goody very matter-of-factly said they were her dad’s. I never wanted to look at her dad again. I suddenly felt reduced as a young woman.

The title Playboy says it all. It’s not for men. This dad is no real man, I thought.

And this mom, Mrs. Two Shoes—how was she going along with all this? Where was her dignity, I wondered. This open display was a public humiliation of his wife and children. And me.

What a boy does when his wife sins:

And yet that collection of magazines has nothing on what many so easily access in secret on the internet these days. I remember all the talk with the rise of Internet porn about Playboy being outdated and whether or not Hugh Hefner’s empire will survive. So it all seems kind of cliché now as everyone is talking about his recent death and the legacy he left behind.

Ashleen Menchaca-Bagnulo nails it in her excellent Public Discourse article, The Playboy Lifestyle and the Death of Complementarity. She opens sharing Hefner’s history before Playboy. A picture of virtue, at 22* he married his longtime sweetheart as a virgin who had saved himself for matrimony. Only this virtue all came crashing down when he discovers that his wife cheated on him before marriage. He describes, “I had literally saved myself for my wife, but after we had sex she told me that she’d had an affair …  My wife was more sexually experienced than I was. After that, I always felt in a sense that the other guy was in bed with us, too.”

This is the moment of integrity. Hefner did not get the reward he felt he deserved for his chastity. His reaction to this devastation of betrayal and unfaithfulness will reveal the man he really is. How does Hefner react when he doesn’t get what he wants? Well, we all know the answer: he becomes a coward who reduces women into soft bunnies, playthings that will be harmed by thousands of Lennies, only they already believe they are “living off the fatta’ the lan’.” All the Lennies buy into the dream; they can pet all the soft things they want with the right manners. And so a gentleman spin is put on vulgarity. In fact, Ben Domenech, writing for The Federalist, calls it “positively quaint” vulgarity, promoting a complementarity that the progressives of the sexual revolution deny.

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