Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, died this week at age 91. He was extraordinarily innovative and influential, and he was reviled by a lot of people for exactly those reasons.
When the 27-year-old Hefner started Playboy in 1953, America was a sexually sick country.
As a lifelong “liberal” it breaks my heart to say this, but “liberals” and “progressives” are making it harder and harder to write about things that matter. Here are examples of facts that I and others hesitate to write about:
I was interviewed about this on Public Radio yesterday. Since it’s a subject I hadn’t given a lot of thought, I prepared by reading up on it just a bit. And I was shocked. It’s actually against the law to touch yourself sexually—in private—if you’re in jail. Sounds barbaric, doesn’t it? OK, you’re behind bars, your body is no longer your own. But if you’re not allowed to masturbate, neither is your soul. Worse, if there’s any disagreement about whether you’ve done it, you automatically lose the argument. There are many cases in which guards either misinterpret prisoner activity and…
Like a bad penny—or like an abusive ex-husband, or a public policy cancer—abstinence is back, just when we thought it was gone. Through the 1970s, U.S. policy was to reduce teen pregnancy. In 1981 the goal was changed, to funding programs to reduce teen sexual activity. During the Bush Administration, $1.5 billion was spent trying to get kids to have less sex. These programs failed completely (other than transferring federal case to Bush supporters). In 2009 the federal government ended most funding for abstinence (although states and school districts continued funding abstinence programs locally), and began funding comprehensive sex ed.…
Here’s an old therapy joke: A new patient comes to see a psychiatrist. The doc decides to give the patient a Rorshach Test, and shows him a series of cards with different inkblots on them. “What do you see on the first one?” asks the shrink. “That’s a man and a woman making love.” “And the second one?” “That’s a couple who just finished making love.” “And the third one?” “That’s a man asking a woman to make love, and she’s deciding what to do.” The shrink asks, “Don’t you think it’s interesting that you see sex in every card?”…
Today was World Contraception Day. Sponsored by organizations from most parts of the globe, its goal is straightforward: to create a world in which every pregnancy is wanted. So simple. So life-affirming and life-enhancing. Such a dramatic, proven program for reducing poverty and domestic violence. Who could be against such a thing? Unfortunately, way too many people: * Religious adherents who think their god is against it; * People who don’t want women to have more power in their relationships, families, and lives; * People who see children as a source of family labor or national wealth; * People so…