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What pornography needed to be profitable on a mass scale was to be removed from the sexual ghetto and brought into the living room. It needed someone to adopt it, domesticate it, and teach it manners. As a mythmaker on the scale of Walt Disney, Hugh Hefner did for porn what Henry Higgins did for Eliza Doolittle.

As an adman, Hefner saw the need to package sexuality into aspirational categories, to tell a story about it that placed men in the narrative itself in a way that was not just acceptable but downright desirable. Thus he packaged himself as a Victorian gentleman at the hunting lodge.

Credit Hefner with popularizing the mythology that this was "adult" entertainment for "men," adding the same aura of pseudo-sophistication that is still exploited 50 years later by bars that call themselves "A Gentleman's Club."

"In launching Playboy, perhaps the smartest thing Hugh Hefner did was in establishing his personality as that of a witty, urbane sophisticate who enjoyed the company of many, many young women," writes Tim Carvell on McSweeneys.net. "After all, who knows how many fewer copies the magazine might have sold, had he instead depicted himself as a solitary masturbator?"

Later, when Playboy started to succeed financially, Hefner further gentrified the perception of sexuality by hiring writers like Norman Mailer and John Updike to offer intellectual essays on the cultured life.

Hefner's medium also reinforced his message. Compared to other transmission models of the time, Playboy had several distinct advantages. First, it could be easily purchased or subscribed to—and thus enjoyed privately in the home. Second, it was positioned as a mass-market magazine—communicating in one stroke the idea that commercialized sex was acceptable in mainstream America. Third, it could attract advertisers for upscale products that had nothing to do with sex, except as an accessory to creating the ultimate bachelor's pad. Advertising was not merely a revenue stream for Playboy; by surrounding his pinups with sophisticated products, Hefner clothed the nudity in one more layer of legitimacy.

As one critic put it, "The 'brilliance' of Playboy was that it combined the commodification of sex with the sexualization of commodities."

For all his brilliance, it's worth noting that Hefner didn't actually have the guts to put his name anywhere in the first issue. Quoth the Playboy.com FAQ: "If the magazine failed, he felt it would be easier to find another job in the industry." In the era of blacklisting, he wanted to duck any moral outrage that came his way.

But he needn't have worried. Hefner's strategy included this brilliant Catch-22: any expression of moral outrage about Playboy would entail the admission that you had seen it. If it was so morally objectionable, why were you looking at it?

This is still the main reason that Christians of all stripes ignore or deny any knowledge of pornography, when it is believers who should be the most willing to discuss the glory and grandeur of sex as God designed it. Following Hefner's cue, apologists for the porn industry today love nothing more than pointing out the hypocrisy of expressing moral outrage about porn while so many—including many of the critics—are simultaneously consuming it. If everyone's secretly doing it, Hefner argued, why be so prudish and puritanical about it? Bring it out into the open and you'll feel a lot better.

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December 2003, Vol. 47, No. 12