“I don’t know how to feel about the guy”
He was definitely a mixed bag.However, along with the Kinsey reports, Peyton Place etc he contributed mightily to ending the bogus hypocritical faux puritanism that plagued the country from the beginning. Ultra self righteous worthies such as the Jimmy Swaggert, Jim Bakker, Mike Murdoch types exposed. In short, since all the prurience and debauchery was going on sub rosa, Hef and other factors liberated us all.
Really now! So how do explain the fact that Mr. Anti-Puritanism had his girls under a STRICT CURFEW then? Eh?
I despise Puritanism (I'm Catholic so they would have despised me right back), but the fact that Americans...heck...FREEPERS can't even tell the difference between starched-collar uptight Puritanism and JUST BASIC SEXUAL MORALITY which even flipping pagan civilizations demanded of their citizens for hundreds of years makes me convinced we are going to crash and burn like no country has ever done before.
Keep putting your full faith and credit in the Sexual Revolution (TM) there buddy. See where it gets you at the end of your life. Meanwhile the rest of us who are trying to crawl out of this hellhole think that whatever hypocrisy and Puritanism existed in the 1950s was still light years better than this soul-shattering, family-destroying orgy of narcissism we got going on right now.
I see the sexual revolution primarily as a byproduct of the massive, incalculable carnage and human waste of WWII, a war that Hugh Hefner was a part of. This shifting of priorities and moral values in the face of such arbitrary death and destruction paved the way for an environment conducive to Playboy magazine. Indeed, it would be battle-hardened war veterans, many still in their 20s when the first issue hit the newsstands in 1953, who would make Hef a cultural icon.