Hugh Hefner turned 85 on Saturday; Daniel J. Flynn of the American Spectator has a damning profile of how the promise of “free love” warped Hef’s lifestyle:

Nobody told Izabella St. James that sexual liberation came with curfews, monitors, and allowances. A former live-in girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, St. James has come clean on the dirty life inside the Playboy mansion. The Hefner girlfriends log-out upon departing the mansion and log-in upon returning. Security personnel monitor their movements, with a strict 9 p.m. curfew imposed. Weekly allowances of $1,000, and gratis plastic surgery, keep the ladies in line. The busty blonde reflected in the Daily Mail earlier this year, “Little did I realize that by moving into the mansion I was losing all the freedom I associated with the Playboy lifestyle.”

The picture painted of the Playboy mansion by St. James and other playmates is one of joyless, obligatory orgies, dog-mess littered carpets, hall-monitor snitches, and a control-freak master of the house. Reality-television star Kendra Wilkinson, a five-year resident of the mansion, recalls: “It was way more strict than my parents had ever been.”

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An authoritarian libertine is not as unusual as one might think. American history is littered with immoral moralists seeking gratification through the domination of others. As Chesterton put it, “A man must be something of a moralist if he is to preach, even if he is to preach immorality.”

Hugh Hefner is one in a long line of preachy perverts.

Not to be confused with pervert preachers of course, but then anarcho-authoritarianism is nothing new. But read the whole thing, which is reminiscent of Paul Johnson’s darkly subversive classic Intellectuals in miniature form. (And yes, Johnson certainly had feet of clay in this department himself, but then, he wasn’t trying to create his own anti-establishment establishment cult of personality.)