Dressing down for the dressing gown king

"A superficial creep is never down for long"

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Rosemary McLeod

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OPINION: If there is such a place as hell, I hope they have special plans for Hugh Hefner, the ancient breast fetishist who's currently tottering into deserved financial and phallic oblivion.

I see him on display in hell much as he currently appears in life, only with a section of his anatomy totally missing; blank between the legs like a little girls' doll.

There would be the core of his identity gone for all time. Disembodied silicone-enhanced mammaries would hover for ever out of his quivering reach, while feminist tracts were read aloud very loud on an incessant loop; and every time he saw one of his Playboy centerfolds, like every minute or so, he'd have to throw up. Forever.

Hefner's Playboy magazine is faltering after 55 years because sleazes get better action now on the Internet, and in a true hit below the belt, two of his mobile breast carriers have just shot through from the Playboy Mansion with younger men who presumably don't have to pay their bedmates to stick around.

Kendra Wilkinson has told an American chat show that she'd been having "cybersex" sessions from her room at the Playboy mansion with the gridiron player she ran off with.

This may not be so odd: one imagines the sex with Hef, 82, would have been virtual for quite some time. It is odd, maybe, that I should most detest, of all the ratbags in the world, a man I have never met.

But for Hefner I reserve a special level of rage because his influence spread so far, with such infuriating results for all women who regard themselves as being more complex than an E cup bra.

To equally pathetic men for half a century he has been Mr Cool, the guy who gets around in a shiny dressing gown to show he's eternally en route to bed, and has an eternal lineup of bimbos awaiting his lecherous paws. The bimbos are reportedly paid $1000 a week nowadays, with board and all the plastic surgery they can get, for being on hold for him and pretending they're permanently gagging for it.

Until recently Holly Madison was his head bimbo, and her photograph in the paper last week said all that anyone needs to know about his view of women. The poor girl's vast artificial bosoms only just managed to remain clad, oozing out of a vapid floral dress; her blonde mop was black at the roots; and she seemed to have substituted boot polish for mascara all in all, a very certain kind of old man's darling.

She was, laments Hef, the love of his life. Well, the latest one, anyway.

It is not a pretty thing, the commercial arrangement between rich old men and attractive young women with no other way of earning a living wage. It is intimate only in a commercial sense; unflattering for both parties involved. Hef's Playboy Mansion parties were once legendary, and you had to be invited. Today you can pay to attend, such are his financial straits, which at least puts the women's position on an honest footing.

Still, a superficial creep is never down for long, and Hef now has a pair of 19-year-old blonde twins in tow who he says will "probably become my girlfriends." They have in the past been arrested on assault and battery charges, and seem set to be lousy nursemaids.

We have our own version of Hef in extrovert billionaire Owen Glenn, so generous in the past to political parties, who is now approaching 70, making him a mere lad. Bikini-clad women crew his yacht, as proof that money can buy many things, though not a sense of the absurd. His two marriages have failed, he's still looking for True Love, and he'd better get a move on.

As the French say, he who excuses himself, accuses himself. Glenn revealed on 60 Minutes last week that he was "reaching the prime of my sexual powers, for God's sake." You've got to laugh.

I once had lunch with another very rich old man who regaled me with accounts of young Third World women he had sexual access to when he travelled, and who were only too grateful to be paid for it. It was one of the most depressing lunches I've ever had.

I guess he thought I'd be impressed at what a great guy he was, and perhaps even look on him as dazzlingly attractive, but he was just tedious and nasty. What makes a person attractive is, after all, what's in their heads, not their cheque books. How awful it must be to imagine otherwise.

- © Fairfax NZ News