Hugh Hefner, William Buckley and Roger Ebert

“Hugh Hefner has been good for us’” is the title of a recent article by Roger Ebert on Hugh Hefner.  Obviously, Ebert likes Hefner; he considers Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy to be a major contributing force to sexual liberation in the 60s.  Anchoring Ebert’s analysis is a series of videos on which Hefner is interviewed.  Unquestionably, the most valuable of these videos is from William Buckley’s FIRING LINE  in which Buckley interrogates Hefner on just about all aspects of Hefner’s philosophy.  The kind of interchanges dealing with sexuality between Buckley and Hefner has been a rarity on American television.  Buckley does his best to defend the traditional view that pre-marital sexuality is immoral and unacceptable and that Hefner is in essence perverting/undermining the dominant and only acceptable sexual ethos in America.

From the dankprofessor’s perspective the series of  the five video segments of the Buckley/Hefner interchange provides the viewer with the anti-sexuality background of  our contemporary ethos.  Of course, in the 60s the acceptability of student prof sexual relationships was nil; they were effectively closeted in the context of their being no discussion of the matter and no bureaucratic apparatus designed to repress such relationships and to persecute those who were party to these relationships.  Now that has all changed.  The very survival of universities has been held to be at risk if such relationships flourish; such was similar to the fear that homosexuality if not criminalized would function to destroy society.  Such was also similar to the dynamic of fear that led to the passage of the Mann Act in the United States and the hysteria to save our young women from pre-marital sex and being seduced into prostitution.

Ebert puts the contribution of  Hefner and Playboy in therse terms:

Hefner and Playboy have been around so long that not everyone remembers what America used to be like. It was sexually repressed and socially restrictive. College students were expelled for having sex out of wedlock. Homosexuality and miscegenation were illegal. Freedom of choice was denied. McCarthyism still cast a pall over the freedom of speech. Many people joined in the fight against that unhealthy society. Hefner was one of them, and a case can can be made that Playboy had a greater influence on our society in its first half-century than any other magazine.

Take the time and view the the Buckley/Hefner interchange.  The dankprofessor guarantees you won’t regret doing so.

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