By creating one of the biggest success stories in American magazine publishing, entrepreneur and editor Hugh M. Hefner has wielded a major influence on both the publishing industry and the mores of his native country as well as the fantasy lives of millions of males. The controversial founder of Playboy has been described variously as a philosopher, a philanthropist, a reformer of "remarkable social conscience," the founder of a "new puritanism," the creator of an adult Disneyland, and a crusader against censorship and repressive sex-related laws. One commentator even called Playboy a twentieth-century version of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859). More-critical observers have called Hefner a male chauvinist, an aging hippie and a perpetual flower child, a hedonist, a "guilt killer," and a pornographer bereft of social conscience who publishes a dehumanizing and exploitative magazine.

Hefner's depiction of unclothed females and his expressed attitude that sex should be...