There are a million words to be written about the misogyny of Hugh Hefner's mission, many already being jotted down. There's a lot of humor and contempt to be had still for a grown man that liked hanging around in PJs far into adulthood. There's something to be said for his early civil rights support, as testified by Dick Gregory and others. And that lead me to the territory I'd like to address, as it goes to the crux of our recent NFL morass, the need for BLM, last year's election, and a host of other issues.

Hefner founded the Playboy Club in 1953, not in tinseltown as we recall today but in Chicago, the thriving center of the Midwest.in our still glorious post-war phase. It was a conservative place in a conservative era. It's easy to think of the 50's as some Happy Days thing, Richie Cunningham all fresh and speckled, I like Ike kind of lovely romance with paradise and God-given but deserved success. But most here know that dream of the suburbs and the lucky trip to Vegas was a hyped-up myth, that the house didn't pay out nearly as often as stated, that half the "lucky ones" strolling in and out were shills. And instead of carefully crafted Walt Disney features and Elvis rockumentaries, it was as much about Lenny Bruce and Last Exit to Brooklyn and Naked Lunch and the  National Guard called out to LIttle Rock to enforce integration and McCarthyism and tons of other foul stuff covered with a sanctimonious wholesome totally marketed image in a Golden age of marketing. This was "Family Values", aka "we're Christian and you're not".

And then there's Holden Caulfield's attempt to reconcile his naïve nice guy outlook with his own sublimated but developing sexuality and coming of age, reflective of the same cultural conflict that split the 50's - nice young man? lecher and scoundrel? or somehow both?

There were other movements afoot, the flirtation with Buddhism of the Glass family, the new restless nomads and uprooted people as seen in Kerouac, a greater understanding of sexuality as researched by Kinsey, great leaps forward in genetics, a lot of concern about Communism including fear of "the other" at home, and a lot of what would be referred to as "cultural relativism", said bitterly, not embracing those Victorian moral tenets that were still expected to be carried out in its somewhat diluted American version, that Norman Rockwell vision of what we thought we looked like.

Hefner's club and magazine were a strike into the heart of America's religiosity, its "moral compass", its "way things should be". While it was certainly geared towards males, it was straight to what males shouldn't be doing, what Christ and the Church and any morally sensible person would condemn. Even though the Hays Code held sway to a great extent, this and other affronts were largely a chink in the monolithic morality code left to the 50's - sex as entertainment rather than procreation; nudity beyond the midriff; mention of body parts and bodily functions...

It was during this time that Lenny Bruce was arrested for saying Eleanor Roosevelt had nice tits. As Lenny changed humor and comedy, Hefner changed attitudes towards publicly acknowledged sex and nudity. While the infantile humor in the magazines was always about the male pleasure and voyeurism, it was inevitable that it would spill over into what women wanted, both in sex and out, which is again an abomination in conservative circles and the traditional values clan..

In a large way, Hefner pissed off the guys we associate with the uptight J Edgar Hoover, the Billy Graham followers and instead was one with the new Hollywood and Vegas casino types that epitomized so much of 60's glitz and sleaze that was so threatening and horrid to the values set.

To some extent, this milieu was the origins of the culture wars that have raged ever since, that fueled so much of Goldwater's and Reagan's (hypocritically contrived in actor Ronnie's case), that got solidified in tolerance for rampant sex and blacks and gays and drugs and later segued into non-support for the Vietnam war and long hair and protests and everything else.

The God-fearing types were not amused, and while the now LA-bound Playboy empire took off, in tune with both "the new hedonism" and people who simply were following the growth and turns in literature & science & psychology/sociology & new religion. One was rooted heavily in the Bible, recasting everything in that light through stretched metaphors and hopeful thinking as needed to match a 6000 year old codex with a rapidly evolving world outside, and the other was on an often excitable and fast-paced journey into the future with no specific limits, where 2001: A Space Odyssey and Electric Koolaid Acid Test and the Woodstock Festival could hold as much religious feeling and relevance as Sodom and The Flood or Pope Pius' canon on birth control or potent cultural/religious mixed strictures against miscegenation.

Hefner helped set this wheel rolling - the steady trend towards atheism or universalism, the other freedoms and liberal attitudes that follow when a major proscription on enjoying your and other bodies is lifted, including free speech and liberated outlook. It's certainly not the whole story, but if you think of Hefner's urban chic club and persona and ideals of monied sex-and-drug fueled decadence, it's like a flaming affront to the traditional hard-nosed Christian, the rural God-family-country type that can't get hs or her head around the fact that a country ballooned to 320 million will have more than one face, more than one ideal, and certainly will go by more than one book.

So when we think of our political fight with the Jerry Falwells and Newt Gingriches and Paul Ryans, think a bit in terms of what Hugh Hefner created and how that was a prototype for much of what they'd rail against however hypocritically for the next 65 years.

And for the female side of things, 1 anecdote highlights the inevitably depressing lobsided nature of this struggle. While comedians like Lenny Bruce, with Hefner and others' help, were able to usher in new freedoms in comedy for cursing and coarse & taboo subjects, and writers like Burroughs and Ginsberg used their censorship trials to help push book speech in new directions, and directors like Ross Meyer moved sexploitation subject matter  into the main stream that influences our tastes today, it wasn't until *2014* that Amy Schumer was able to get Comedy Central to allow her to say the word "pussy" in a show. "Dick", no problem. And then 2 years later, Donald Trump comes along and you can say "pussy" anywhere. Life's funny like that, eh? But without Playboy, it's hard to see the Cosmo Girl happening, and the fading of the whole virgin before marriage nonsense, and it played an important role as a forum to discuss important issues, perhaps through its unifying i(f sometimes covert) attraction to men of all political persuasions. 

And what's also funny is that besides the often excellent writing  and interviews of early Playboy, we're also seeing the dumbing down of our culture as the breadth of knowledge and ability to express oneself takes a hit to 1/5th the eloquence and insight of any self-respecting artist 50-60 years ago. I was comparing George Michael's original Freedom - tastefully done with that era's supermodels, dark, meditative, provocative, moody - with a post-mortem remake that substitutes lots of nervous jiggle for everything that made the original great. Because not only do we have a culture war with the "family values" set, we have a continual culture war with ourselves. It's not about whether people appreciate what happened 60 years ago - it's whether they substitute it with something of equal or more importance. And while the struggle with the old south or the moral majority or other factions may eventually fade, our struggle to healthily and interestingly recreate ourselves, to break unneeded and artificial bounds, will always be with us.

However mixed Hugh Hefner's views and methods and results were, he did help us take a step towards freedom, self-knowledge, an advance in the culture wars. If you'd asked me 2 days ago who were the top 1000 important people of the last 50 years, I wouldn't have even thought of him, but somehow in retrospect he seems like an important catalyst for change, even if that change seems a bit stymied and awkward and misdirected at this point.

It's also the flawed matter we have to work with. I was invited to a professional business networking group at a local Playboy Club not long ago, and I futilely tried to express that this would be insulting and uncomfortable to female professionals, and that I couldn't see inviting any female colleagues to such a milieu - to no avail. To paraphrase the great Dorothy Parker, "you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make him think". And these days we seem to have more whores and pimps than culture, but perhaps it's just a lack of appreciation or a passing phase. We've passed through droughts and hidden springs before.