Playboy Philosophy, Installment 18

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The Playboy Philosophy

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Editorial by Hugh M. Hefner

The eighteenth part of a statement in which playboy's editor-publisher spells out—for friends and critics alike—our guiding principles and editorial credo

George Bernard Shaw had this to say on the subject of immorality: "Whatever is contrary to established manner and customs is immoral. An immoral act or doctrine is not necessarily a sinful one: On the contract, every advance in thought and conduct is by definition immoral until it has converted the majority. For this reason it is of the most enormous importance that immorality should be protected jealously against the attacks of those who have no standard except the standard of custom, and who regard any attack on custom—that is, on morals—as an attack on society, on religion, and on virtue....

"It is immorality, not morality, that needs protection: It is morality, not immorality, that needs restraint; for morality, with all the dead weight of human inertia and superstition to hang on the back of the pioneer, and all the malice of vulgarity and prejudice to threaten him, is responsible for many persecutions and many martyrdoms...."

In the February and April installments of The Playboy Philosophy, we examined the extent to which our own society has attempted to control sexual "immortality" by governmental edict; we discussed in detail the degree to which the United States perpetuates, through its laws, the extreme antisexualism of our Puritan religious heritage.

In addition to the legitimate statutes established to protect the individual from uninvited and unwelcome acts of sexual abuse, aggression and attack, there are laws in all 50 of the separate states prohibiting—under penalty of fine and/or imprisonment—various forms of sexual intimacy between consenting adults, even within the privacy of a person's own bedroom and when the intimacy may reflect the considered wishes of both partners.

Our democratic government, dedicated to the doctrine of individual freedom and the establishment of a permissive society, nevertheless invades out most private domain and dictates the details of our most personal behavior. The government boldly asserts that our very bodies do not belong to us—that we cannot use them in our own way, and at our own discretion, but only when and how the state permits. In matters of sex, we have already reached Orwell's world of 1984!

The legislators, judges and minor minions of the law are allowed to lurk in the shadows of our bedrooms, to pull away the covers—revealing our nakedness—and to direct the very kisses and caresses we may and may not use in our lovemaking.

Though we are free citizen in most other respects, in sex we are the slaves of among the most restrictive of any country's in the world; and they have helped in sustaining what is surely one of the most sexually repressed societies of the 20th century.

Drs. Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen wrote, in a concluding chapter of their book Sex Histories of American College Men: "We cannot help but feel that the present state of sexual confusion and its resulting miseries which most of us in the Western world have grown accustomed to enduring are not necessarily the most desirable and certainly not the only possible experience of which humanity is capable."

Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his associates of the Institute for Sex Research of Indiana University, in a summarizing statement in their comprehensive study Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, observed: "The law specifies the right of the married adult to have regular intercourse, but it makes no provision whatsoever for the approximately 40 percent of the population which is sexually mature but unmarried. Many...unmarried females and males are seriously disturbed because the only sources of sexual outlet available to them are either legally or socially disapproved. Kinsey added, "In nearly every culture in the world except our own, there is at least some acceptance of coital activities among [the] unmarried...."

The late Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, who has been described by others in the field of social science as one of the foremost clinicians of our time, commented, in The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry: "Our culture is the least adequate in preparing one for meeting the eventualities of sexual maturity, which is another way of saying we are the most sex-ridden people on the face of the globe."

Sex and Marriage

A majority of U.S. sex laws are predicated on the religious dogma that sex is immoral outside of marriage. The marriage license thus becomes a church state sanction to engage in sex. Without it, in most parts of the country, a couple that engages in coitus is committing a crime.