Hefner did not force his ways on people, they gladly accepted them. He wasn’t devious or indirect, he was very direct. Which says Hefner didn’t corrupt anybody, they corrupted themselves.
Put it another way, if a mere magazine with images of nude women could corrupt an entire population of people then just how moral was that population in the first place?
Hefner corrupted people, and induced them to corrupt each other. It’s far more devastating to the soul, and far more insidious, than the use of brute force.
The model is as old as Eden ... and as deadly today as it was then.
Hefner was following in the footsteps (does a Serpent have footsteps?) of his master: a murderer from the Beginning, a liar and the father thereof.
Wilson and his ilk were and are bad. Very bad.
Hefner and his ilk were and are worse.
IMO.
Honestly, I don’t think it was specifically the imagery of nude women that was so corrupting. I believe it was the overall selling and promotion of a degenerate, self-absorbed lifestyle/worldview. Nekkid gals was mostly the come-on, the gateway.
Put it another way, if a mere magazine with images of nude women could corrupt an entire population of people then just how moral was that population in the first place?
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I disagree Code Toad. People are wired for sex and sometimes the wiring wins. It is not that they are happy about what they are doing, it is that the visuals overwhelm. Moral people sometimes do immoral things. That is why our culture had such a cap on this sort of issue for so long. Our forefathers knew the weakness of the human mind and body.