The abbandonment of Patriarchy for the Playboy philosophy is what started the gender war, it's just that the playboys have been very good at ducking and the patriarchs have take the shellacking.
Playboy appeared when, in 1952? Ten years before Betty Friedan's screed appeared, The Feminine Mystique. Do you for an instant think she'd not have written it, if only Hefner had never published his rag, nor opened a club?
The nexus between Gloria Steinem and Hefner's club chain (which was still growing in 1965, and not yet what it became later) is an interesting collision of feminism with the "Playboy philosophy" (excuse the oxymoron), but it isn't definitive, and it doesn't describe cause and effect. Feminism was a reaction to middle-class family life, not to Hefner and his clubs. A better hornbook for the dissatisfaction of middle-class married life was made by Paul Newman and his RW wife in the film Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, which I confess I've yet to see. But that was what feminism was about -- that, and Friedan's having given up a place in college to pursue a boyfriend who later jilted her. Hers was a tale a million times told by people of both genders, of promises made and then broken -- but her monumental ego had to transmogrify it into a national cause celebre, spitefully to repay the male gender a thousand times for her hurt, her disappointment, and her annoyance. In the end, the tale will lie where it belongs, at her feet.
Steinem has given us a key by marrying late in life, and giving the lie to her infamous mots like "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." The correct answer to which is that, she may not, but her children damn sure do.
In the end, I think history will remember feminism as the wonderful organizationally-magnified realization of Friedan's monumental tantrum, and Steinem's dissatisfaction with her boyfriends.
Hefner was merely the errupting pimple of a the underlying change in attitude occurring accross America. His enterprise would have landed him in jail if the underlying attitude had not changed before he launched his flagship
This isn't the first time in history men have abandoned moral leadership and self control. It's a pretty recurrent biblical theme. The cure is always the same.
There is no free lunch, you cannot have "sexual freedom" apart from marriage. The cost in human misery and social disease eventually spurs a return to a stricter morality, or war and disease reshape the cultural landscape.
Is there any doubt that if BJClinton had been morally self controlled and sexually continent, he might have actually paid attention to American security needs?
A nation of sexually incontinent men, is a nation of moral cripples who can not lead, nor can they provide women and children with the security and nurture that is their God ordained responsibility.
Men can blame angry feminazi sluts all they want, but it doesn't change the fact that leadership was given to men, and that leadership begins with self control, not self indulgence and the use of others.
And those causes are usually represented by men like Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton and Brock Adams and Jim Wright and Bob Packwood, none of whom are particulary known for their compassionate treatment of women.