It has been shown that porn addiction shows up very similarly in the brain as drug addiction. Hefner is merely a pusher being lionized as a progressive, a true (degenerate) leader for the disease of liberalism.
Hefner is an American icon. He changed the world forever, I think for the better.
It's not so much the porn the Hef himself has peddled, as Playboy has always been and remains soft-core, but the culture he, almost single-handedly created -- the girl-next-door pornoslut.
It's ironic that today people probably really do subscribe to Playboy for the articles. The pictorials barely register on the porn scale anymore.