Why I don't think Hugh Hefner is Se dominant

The following argument's aim is to explain why I don't think Hefner is a Se type as opposed to advocating for another type that I think better fits. That is to say, the main purpose of this argument is mostly a case against Se dominant.

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? 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 … when determining his type.” In other words, we cannot conclude that Hefner is an Se type because he lived a lavish lifestyle 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 using quotes from people who were either close to him or knew him personally:

 

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 [Lownes], 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."

 

So while Victor Lownes naturally had a lot of the (stereotypical) Se type traits, Hugh Hefner arguably ran counter to the Se stereotype in a lot of ways. As shown, in contrast with Victor Lownes', people who were close to Hefner described him as "shy and cerebral" and very different from Lownes. All of which, paints the picture of someone who was more reserved and in his head than lively.

Now I'll move on why I don't think Hefner fits Se *dominant* specifically. The dominant function is one's bread and butter, their modus operandi. Hefner was not someone who was married to the empirical world (as Se types wont to do), so to speak, but rather had a tendency to neglect it:

 

Steven Watts: “He 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. ... 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: "[His mother] Grace was repeatedly struck by Hugh’s insular creativity. 'As a child, he found it very difficult to make new friends. When he was in school, he was a dreamer, and sort of lived his own life in his own mind,' she observed. 'I would ask him who some of his classmates were, and he wouldn’t know the names of very many of them. ... You couldn’t always tell what was making Hugh feel unhappy, because he was very much a loner,' a baffled Grace admitted. 'He always lived in a fantasy world.' ... Often shy and insecure with other people, the boy did not like venturing out. ... Even as a kid, noted [his brother Keith], Hugh wanted 'his world to stay exactly as he made it, and doesn’t want to go anywhere else where that isn’t the reality.'"

 

Hefner: "I withdrew into ... a lot of my own dreams and fantasies, and that's what led me to writing. ... 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 [stuff like] writing and cartooning."

 

As shown, Hefner 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; was an avid reader of fictional novels in his teenage years ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to H. G. Wells. All of which paint the picture of someone who was very much in his own head (a trait not typically associated with the Se type) rather than someone who is at home in reality as it exists.

 

Moving on to introspection, 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.” The type of introspection IDRlabs alludes to is "synonymous with a sort of meta-awareness or reflective awareness." Se types repress N, so they typically don't have this predilection for introspection. Here is some quotes that indicate that Hefner did have an inclination towards introspection:

 

Hefner: "The boy is the father of the man and so 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 can see now that 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 have simply going on and grown and disturb me now.”

Hefner: “I think my [parents] were rather typical of their generation, they really believed the Horatio Alger sort of American fundamentalist values and I responded to it in a way I think that is rather typical of my own generation and the insights that it produced I think are responsible for where I've taken my own life and for Playboy.”

 

Hefner: "The whole idea behind Playboy was to try and put sex back into the total fabric of the interest of man because traditionally in our society we've kept them separate. We've created a whole concept of the devil in the flesh in competition with the spirit of man, body pitted against mind and spirit, this earth and its pleasures pitted against the hereafter, it was that fundamentally that I was really fighting and it's something tha, even today, is not clearly understood."

 

 

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.”

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: “There's always been a little bit of the crusader in me, and you know, you need dragons to slay.”

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.”

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.”