Civic honor for Hefner?

Great Debates
1

The City of Chicago wants to honorarily name a portion of a street after Hugh Hefner, the founder of the Playboy publishing empire.

[A note on Chicago’s system of honorary street names: all such streets retain their official name, which is posted with green signs. The honorary name, which can apply to as short as a single block or as long as the entire length of the street, is posted on brown signs below the official green signs. Honorary street naming can be (and usually is) proposed by the alderman for the ward encompassing the intended stretch of street, and the Council almost universally defers to his or her proposal.]

Ald. Burt Natarus, whose ward includes the office building that houses Playboy (originally the Palmolive Building, then the Playboy Building, now called by its address) and, IIRC, the old Playboy Mansion as well, proposed the honor for the block in front of the office building (Walton east of Michigan Avenue) due to Hefner starting Playboy here and living here for several years.

A firestorm of protest ensued. Two female aldermen – from wards far away from the proposed “Hugh Hefner Way” – made long and impassioned speeches against the proposal on the floor of the Council. People are waving signs and squawking about “glorifying a pornographer” and a man whose success “is due to one basic business service: he gets women to expose their genitalia for money.” The latter is an actual quote from a U of C law student who stated before the assembled media that he would work to defeat any alderman who supported the Hefner resolution.

IMHO, I don’t see the big deal. A person who started a large business here in Chicago that’s still located here, and who lived here for several years, gets a short stretch of street honorarily named after him. I’m sure that some streets have honorary names of mobsters or mob-connected politicians. The people who squawk about glorifying a “pornographer” apparently can’t tell the difference between Playboy and Hustler. Hugh Hefner is definitely no Larry Flynt. IMHO, of course. The only thing that these protests do is make Chicago look like a hick Bible-Belt town straight out of “Footloose” or something.

2

The rational that you provided- Hefner started a large, prosperous business in Chicago that remains there, sounds like a fine reason to name a street in his honor.

You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.

–Lyndon B. Johnson

3

Either Playboy has gotten a lot racier than the last time I saw it, or this guy doesn’t know the definition of “genitalia”. He should really look it up.

Hopefully, I can convince you to accept “hopefully” as a disjunct adverb.
Frankly, I would be lying if I said I were confident.
Perhaps this subject is simply too complex for me to explain.
Unfortunately, I would be lucky to explain my way out of a paper bag.

4

Ah, but we do get to see female genitalia on the Playboy Channel.

5

Incidentally, the following poem appeared in MAD Magazine at one point in the 1970s:

Unfortunately, the poem loses a little bit of its oomph when you realize that, since the time it was written, there really was a pornographic magazine named Jack & Jill*. :wink: