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Many works we consider masterpieces were originally considered at least titillating or shocking, if not obscene.

What's your point? My point was that magazines like Playboy allowed ordinary men and boys to have their own private stash of readily available porn, which is enormously destructive both mentally and spiritually. Having a collection of oil paintings of naked chicks in your house was simply not feasible for the average person--and indeed, even a rich guy who did so would have rightly been considered in the same light as the Marquis d'Sade.

Certainly, you can see the direct, straight line down that leads from "scandalous" works of art like Manet's Olympia through "humorous" nudie mags like the early Playboy to utterly vile publications and websites like what exist today in tremendous proliferation within easy reach of the youngest boy with any kind of web savvy.

Celebrating Playboy is like celebrating a way station along the road to the cultural destruction of the Christian West.

I don't see where I did celebrate it, but to equate Hugh Hefner with Osama bin Laden in terms of destruction of the west is a little too melodramatic for me. :)