Did Hugh Hefner's Porn Empire Change the World?

Just hours after Hugh Hefner died, the first think-pieces about his legacy and his impact on popular culture appeared. Some argued that Hefner and Playboy magazine were central to sexual liberation; others took the position that Hefner was a lecherous misogynist who exploited women to make his fortune.

I'm not going to rehash these here - you-ll have read them. What interests me is that they were so very divisive. The reason why so many people got into heated exchanges about a man most of us had never met, who started a magazine that nobody reads anymore, is because we do not live in a sexually liberated world. Whatever role Hefner may have played - for good or for bad - sexual liberation is an incomplete project.

Just because you can buy condoms and have a one-night stand if you choose doesn't mean we live in a world where sexual freedom is a given. Let's look at the evidence.

In Ireland we don't have the reproductive rights available in the United States and the UK. However, while we are marching and debating repealing the 8th Amendment, access to abortion services are being rolled back, or increasingly difficult to access, in both the UK and the US.

In September it was reported that hundreds of women in the UK had been buying illegal abortion pills online, because of difficulty getting a termination through the NHS. These women turned to services like Women on Web because of the obstacles imposed by distance and long waiting times.

In the US, a number of States have enacted punitive laws that have forced many family planning clinics to close. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Americans have access to abortion in name only.

Around the world, 25 million unsafe abortions take place every year. That's according to research from the World Health Organisation. Most of these take place in Africa, Asia and South America - continents where poverty is rife.

Now let's look at the issue of LGBTQ+ rights. Australia is currently debating the merits of same-sex marriage. Like America, Oz has pockets of evangelical Christians, plus deeply conservative leaders. Same-sex marriage should be a no-brainer - instead it has turned into a political bun-fight and it is unclear yet who is going to win.

Despite the fight for equal marriage rights, LGBTQ+ Australians probably count themselves lucky. Same-sex relationships are illegal across much of the world. You can be imprisoned for life, or even put to death, in no less than 74 countries for being gay.

There's more. Sex education is a hugely controversial issue across most of the world; rape cases are rarely prosecuted and victim-blaming is common; revenge porn is an unwelcome, and thoroughly despicable new trend; slut-shaming has not gone away; the inclusion of birth control pills on health insurance is a massively controversial issue in the US; trans women are murdered at horrific rates; sex trafficking is an increasing problem; and the idea that you need to get verbal consent from a partner is regarded as an onerous task by a frightening number of people. I could go on, but you get the idea.

The world may be more sexually liberal than it was in 1953, when Playboy first hit the newsstands - but not by a lot. However, whatever one thinks of Hefner and his brand of porn, it is fair to say that he made sex and sexuality a topic of mainstream conversation - although he wasn't the only one.

The first issue of Playboy was published in December 1953 - the same year that Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female was released. The latter tome, like Kinsey's 1948 publication, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, was hugely controversial. Both books examined sexual behaviours that had previously been considered taboo. Worse still (allegedly), his findings were often at odds with conventional beliefs about sexuality.

Kinsey's studies may have been shocking for their frankness, but plenty of changes were afoot in tandem. Margaret Sanger opened her first birth control clinic around the end of the First World War. Diaphragms, as well as advice on preventing pregnancy, were not that hard to access. Sexual morals had relaxed during the Second World War years - at least in terms of what people did, though not necessarily what they said and wrote publicly. Then, the early 1960s gave us the birth control pill and second-wave feminism. It is impossible to separate each historical strand from its cultural context and to say exactly what it achieved. Culture is always in dialogue with itself. If Playboy provided an avenue to talk about sex, the magazine's stance was oppositional to the rights and freedoms sex-positive feminists hoped to gain.

Playboy told men that they could be sexual adventurers; feminists told women that did not have to be sexual objects like the smiling passive centrefolds, but sexual agents who could pursue sex on their own terms. Although he supported efforts to make birth control and abortion services widely available - both feminist aims - in 1970, Hefner ordered a hit piece on the feminist movement, writing that, "These chicks are our natural enemy."

While some of the second-wave felt that porn could offer a woman the chance to express her sexual agency, others argued that it was de-humanising. Those arguments are ongoing. Despite the ubiquity of porn, there is still no agreement whether taking part in it, or merely consuming it, is degrading or empowering. Hefner helped popularise adult content, but it would almost certainly have happened without him. You can certainly argue that the explosion of the print and film industries would have inevitably made porn available, whether or not Playboy paved the way.

We could argue the merits or faults of Hugh Hefner for years. But what's the point? We have inherited a world that is not of our making, but we have the chance to make our own impact. Let's not squander that - a truly sexually liberated world would be better for all of us. That really should be our common goal.