The following argument's aim is to explain why I don't think Hefner is ESFP as opposed to advocating for another type that I think better fits but for the sake of this blog I will partially argue for ENFP because that's the type I think is the best fit at the moment. That is to say, the main purpose of this argument is more of a case against ESFP than a case for ENFP but nonetheless this blog will propose ENFP as a possible alternative but if another type comes to mind while reading this blog, then it will be more than welcome.
Counterstereotype:
One might say “how can someone who devoted their life to ‘Se activities’ be anything but an Se dominant type?” And that is a good question, after all Hefner was a champion of the hedonistic YOLO lifestyle and was guilty of sexual objectification with regard to women. Are these not strong indications of someone who has a preference for Se? Wouldn't Occam's Razor tell us that he is most likely an Se type? Well for starters, as IDRlabs has stated in their “Why Epicurus is ESTP” article, “What is important to understand when inquiring into the type of Epicurus is that one cannot simply conclude that he had a preference for sensing over intuition just because of his championing of pleasure and sensual enjoyment. In Western philosophy, the British empiricists similarly held the senses in high regard as a source of information, yet in terms of type they were mostly NTs. … In short, we cannot look so much at Epicurus’ conclusions as we must look at his methods … when determining his type.” In other words, we cannot conclude that Hefner is an Se type because he lived a lavish lifestyle (otherwise we'd type Oscar Wilde as an Se type) nor can we look at his behavior as a direct constituent of his type. That being said, behavior shouldn’t be completely ignored as we, to some extent, have to look at their behavior to infer their cognitive processes. So this first part of my argument will be a counterstereotype that challenges the perception of Hefner being naturally predisposed to the stereotypical Se inclinations:
Arthur Kretchmer (former editorial director of Playboy): “Victor Lownes played a great role at the company. He was something that Hefner was not... bold, brash. He was the complement to Hef, who was, after all, a little bit shy and cerebral.”
Christie Hefner (daughter of Hugh Hefner): “Victor, in some ways, was more the image of the editor/publisher of Playboy than my father was, because Victor was someone who loved good food and wine, who loved to travel, who was more gregarious and sociable.”
Rolling Stone: “Whereas Hefner was ‘shy and cerebral,’ Lownes … was gregarious and promiscuous – the sort of person Hefner wanted to be.”
Steven Watts: “[At an early age, Hefner] tended to be reserved in formal situations at school or home. … Absorbed in his imagination, he often neglected his studies. … In his early teenage years he continued drawing cartoon strips — eventually they would number about seventy different series — and to write and illustrate stories. He had begun to read fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells and became a devotee of Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu tales and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. … By 1940, Hefners creations were reflecting the pressure of world events. … A 1940 comic strip told the story of three French brothers escaping from a Nazi prison in occupied Europe, while a ten-page tale imagined a German invasion of the United States that was heroically rebuffed near Chicago. Indeed, throughout childhood Hefner created vivid fantasy worlds in which he immersed himself, a trait that would prove to be lifelong. The boy who wouldn’t answer the telephone or venture alone to the dentist’s office a few streets away preferred to inhabit a reality he had created.”
Steven Watts: “While searching for vocational direction in the early 1950s, Hefner also struggled to shape his views of the world into some kind of cohesive form. In typical adolescent fashion, this bright young man had soaked up a mishmash of ideas and theories during his high school and college years, ranging from Hollywood movies to Freud, popular cartoons to Darwin, Protestant theology to Tarzan. He had come out of college with more questions than answers. … Increasingly, he drew together several elements—Ayn Rand and heroic individualism, popular psychology, Alfred Kinsey and sexual liberation, and sentimental images from popular culture, particularly the movies and … they became the building blocks of a social fantasy.”
So while Victor Lownes was what we might assume to (stereotypically) be an Se type. Hefner, on the contrary, often withdrew into an internal world of thoughts and images, being “absorbed” and “immersed” in his imagination, neglecting his daily practical tasks and responsibilities (such as school studies, answering the telephone, or venturing alone a few streets away to the dentist) in the process; he was described as "reserved" and "cerebral" and was an avid reader of fictional novels in his early teenage years. All of which paint the picture of someone who was very much in his own head (a trait typically more akin to an N type than an Se type). He was very eclectic (moreso in the ideational sense) in his interests, ranging from theories from Freud to Darwin to Alfred Kinsey to Ayn Rand to psychology to pop media and so on, all of which were an offset for shaping his worldview (sounds more Ne than Se, even if it doesn't fully disprove Se).
Transcendentally Oriented:
Now I’ll move on to the functional approach to determining type. According to IDRlabs, “Ne is bound to always be dissatisfied with the world in its current state. In the words of Isabel Myers, the Ne types ‘regard the immediate situation as a prison from which escape is urgently necessary.’ … The escape from the status quo is worth more to the Ne type than the world as we know it. For his interest is not in the world as it is, but in the world as it could be.” Now, I must preface by saying that any type can be discontent with the status quo, as that can also be a subject of upbringing, beliefs, ambitions, etc. (factors outside of typological functions) but, all else being equal, Ne types are more likely to want to "escape" their current context and be attuned to issues that transcend the here and now compared to Se types. One could say that the combination of Ne and Fi causes the ENFP to often, as IDRlabs puts it, “undertake a crusade in order to help the marginalized or the underdogs in society. [They] will naturally see things from the point of view of the outsiders and seek to champion their cause” and be "tireless in your pursuit of the untested, the untried, and the fight against the status quo." And with the aid of tertiary Te, ENFPs, as Michael Goist in the IDRlabs "Why Ludwig van Beethoven Is INFP" puts it, "can often be surprisingly entrepreneurial with regards to motivating real-world movements and pushing for specific values and outcomes to be applied to the sphere of real-world affairs." Here are some quotes by and about Hefner that exemplify the aforementioned characteristics:
Rolling Stone: “His metamorphosis into Mr. Playboy in 1962, for all its PR value to the magazine, was never just a self-serving effort. It was also an attempt to change American ideas about sexuality, a way to challenge the stigma of sexual freedom. When Hef took on his role, blending his political rhetoric with a promiscuous lifestyle, he was trying to challenge the idea that casual sex was immoral.”
CBS: “‘I felt from a very early age that there were things in society
that were wrong, and that I might play some small part in changing
them,’ Hefner said. … Hefner was … a man on a mission to alter society's
conservative views on sex, politics and social equality. Playboy would
be his tool. ‘Playboy was the first mainstream club, non-black club that
actually put on stage black comedians,’ Hefner said. … From abortion to
capital punishment to the Vietnam War, Playboy was the forum for
Hefner's concerns in society.”
NY Times: "The Playboy Philosophy advocated freedom of speech in all
its aspects, for which Mr. Hefner won civil liberties awards. He
supported progressive social causes and lost some sponsors by inviting
black guests to his televised parties at a time when much of the nation
still had Jim Crow laws. The magazine was [also] a forum for serious
interviews, the subjects including Jimmy Carter (who famously confessed,
'I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times'), Bertrand Russell,
Jean-Paul Sartre and Malcolm X."
Rolling Stone: “Hefner explains that, during this time, he was ‘exploring the outer limits of what it really meant to be moral.’ … He was stifled by the traditional values that, up until that point, choreographed his life, and that he is purposefully discarding them.”
Hefner: “I’ve always … was able to see the inequalities in power
relationships, and have always felt connected to the underdog whether it
was in a sexual situation or political or anything else.”
Hefner: “[If you] eliminate the importance of self [and] drag everyone
else down to the common denominator, [then] you are walking right into
the society that George Orwell warned us about in 1984.”
Hefner: “There's always been a little bit of the crusader in me, and you know, you need dragons to slay.”
Hefner: “I was fighting the same kind of things on the playground when I
was a kid that I do in the magazine now. In other words, the kind of
social inequalities and things that bothered me then [are] going on and
grown and disturb me now.”
Introspection:
Introspection is, as Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines it, “the observation of one’s own mental states or processes." IDRlabs has said that “using a person’s measure comfort with introspection as a parameter for S/N is at least not an incidental parameter, but rather one that pertains directly to the nature of the dichotomy.” Now I must preface by saying that having fantasies doesn’t equate N and nor does being aware of one’s fantasies equate N but these quotes do show some indication of Hefner being prone to introspection:
Hefner: “I still fight some of those same Puritan things in myself that I'm fighting in society.”
Interviewer: “Do you find yourself at all uneasy fighting those things?”
Hefner: “No, no, I'm just, you know, aware of it. I'm a very introspective person.”
Hefner: “I withdrew into … a lot of my own dreams and fantasies. … I think that anyone who is interested in the creative arts, to some extent, needs that sort of detachment and that kind of introspection … and you know that led me into all kinds of [things like] writing and cartooning.”
Now, having fantasies or being aware of one’s fantasies doesn’t mean that one
has an N preference but these quotes do indicate someone who is close
to the raw stream of mental life and if we take his word for it then
Intuition is unlikely to be Hefner’s repressed function, thus speaking
against Se dominant. One might say that his self-reporting might be inaccurate but based on the previous evidence, he likely isn’t being glib or fully inaccurate here, at least in this specific context.
Manner of communication:
The quotes I will be presenting in this section all involve bringing together different perspectives to an illustrate abstract idea which, all else being equal, suggests more Ne than Se which tends to be more straightforward about the point it wants to make. Another thing to note is that while reading these quotes, we should also
keep in mind the point I made earlier of Ne regarding the status quo
"as a prison from which escape is urgently necessary [and] it's interest
in not the world as it is, but as it could be" as those tend to also be a theme in these quotes, all of which are from the same interview (warning, many of them are long):
Hefner: “Puritanism is not there for the puritan, by it's nature Puritanism is there as a set of values that you must live by, however you feel about them and that of course is the authoritarian scary part of it. … The fact that women in their quest for a liberation should also include in their agenda the notion of taking some of the personal freedom away from another part of society is very puritan, and you can call it a radical or liberal or left agenda, but of course it isn't and the labels become very confused. And once again you have to go to Orwell to see how the labels of things change the perception of things, I mean that's what Orwellian Newspeak was really all about, the notion that you could change the labels and the language of things and you would change the perception, and we have seen that certainly in terms of sex in really dramatic form in the last twenty years in which sexual images that were perceived in the past as simply pin-up pictures were then perceived and called exploitation and then eventually called pornography, and they are the same innocent pin-up pictures, and I think that that is the way you change the perception of things and you change of course the perception of sex itself, when you begin to define it as sexual harassment and date rape and increasingly you start to think that sex is really the ugly part of life. Now that is … not to say that … sex [doesn’t have] its darker side, but I think that … one of the things I tried to do with the philosophy was to suggest that the one area of human activity that we don't have truly moral perceptions on is sex. We were raised in a time in which what was called moral in the sexual arena was simply a set of thou shall nots, taboos that were not necessarily good for the people, and in … all other areas of human activity, what is called moral is what benefits people and is good for people, and I hope that we can begin to, and what I called back in the sixties, [form] a new morality, that we begin to find a form of situation ethics that would define sexual values not as a set of absolutes but [as] things that really were good for people. … Because sex is more than simple procreation. … We have to … try to define a set of sexual values that don't perceive that sex itself and the attraction between the sexes is, is somehow equivalent to violence, because after all sex and violence are the polar opposites. One is the life force, the warming force and the other is death and destruction and war and murder.”
[Interviewer: "The nineteen sixties were a period of great change, what do you think overall were the causes of this change."]
Hefner: "Well I think we came out of a very conservative time in the fifties, part of it raised by the political climate at the time but also reflected in conservatism, in lifestyle and I think that a new generation was growing up that was responding to that. To some extent you see a kind of cause effect that is like a pendulum, it swings back and forth. I think that the conservatism that occurred in the nineteen eighties was a direct reaction to and response to the liberal changes that took place in the sixties and seventies. … With all of this kind of thing we get two steps forward and one step back and you know one hopes we’re coming out of the tunnel again. Always we find reasons to thwart and work against the personal freedom with some other explanation. During the fifties it was the cold war much of the repression that occurred, the sexual repression in particular that occurred during the eighties, they related it to Aids. The politicization of the disease … was cause and effect [but] backwards, because it's not really the disease that caused the conservative agenda, the conservative agenda was there already and we have had in America a rather dramatic rise in the Christian right, in America. they actually elected Reagan and gave us for one of the first times … in my lifetime a rather unholy alliance that existed between religion and the state, and that in turn gave us the Mise commission and the Mise commission was nothing more than a cross country witch hunt that had nothing to do with … research related to sex and there are many other evidences of it. … It’s very difficult for me to believe - when I was a kid I grew up, fascinated with Darwin and fascinated with the monkey trial [that took place] in nineteen twenties - … that that controversy would still exist. That creationism would still be perceived in some quarters as a viable perception and there would be controversy as there is in American schools, with evolution on the one hand, with science on the one hand and religious state of superstition on the other, in the form of creationism is strange, but this is the nature of the way we are, we and I don't just mean America I mean, I mean the world, we you know we have in this century you know reached the moon and the stars, our technology and our science is at such an incredible level and in so many other ways we are still superstitious savages in the jungle with some of our social and religious values."
[Interviewer: "How would you describe your own role in the sexual revolution in the 1960's and onwards."]
Hefner: "Well I think that I was very influenced by the, … to some extent the sexual revolution part two, that came after world war two, began really for me with Kinsey, and the research that he did in the books that he published, which were very unpopular, in particular the second book, was scandalous because it involved women, but it made a tremendous impact on me. The first book came out when I was in university in Illinois and I wrote an editorial about it at the time, and then mentioned … the second book in my introduction to the first issue of Playboy. I do think that there were other things going on at the same time and you see those interconnections, but I do think that we were one of the first to voice a set of values, a point of view that in turn became the sexual revolution, so I guess I'm one [of] the founders of that portion of it and I take a great deal of pride in that, but I think it's related to other things that were going on at the time, one can see the change in censorship laws related to some books in the sixties, in the fifties, and I think that you could look to rock and roll as a … part of what this is all about, I think the arrival of Presley a couple of years after the beginning of Playboy. ... to a new set of, more possibilities with personal sex, and when I started doing the philosophy. in 1959 Arnold Gingridge who was the editor of Esquire at the time did an editorial in which he talked about an arrival that he anticipated called the new Victorianism, and he thought it was going to be a more conservative time and he welcomed it, but he was a little older than I was and I think that the generation gap was … showing at the time, and there is something else that you can't separate at the time also, the pill was invented in 1960 and could you have a sexual revolution without the pill. It's all sort of kind of interconnected."
Additional Notes:
While this section may be my weakest, it is still important to consider.
Viewing "possibilities" and "willingness to break the boundaries" as inherently positive may at best circumstantial evidence for Intuition, but when combined with a plethora of other evidence, it can
strengthen a case, even if it is just a small addition:
Hefner: “I didn't want to repeat my parents' life. I saw in their lives a routine and a lack of dreaming, a lack of the possibilities, a lack of passion.”
Hefner: “[George Carlin] as with Lenny [Bruce was special because of] the combination of the insights and the willingness to break the boundaries.”
