Word: hefners
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...CHRISTIE HEFNER resigns as Playboy CEO. What, did she actually look at the magazine...
...import racy material from Europe, the industry was blunted in the U.S. by the Comstock Act, an 1873 federal statute that restricted the transport of obscene literature through the mail. (Anthony Comstock, the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was perhaps the anti-Hefner, a Puritanical zealot who is said to have bragged of the number of "libertines" he drove to suicide by prosecuting their sins...
...Compared to these early efforts, the magazine Hefner hammered out in the living room of his Chicago apartment was a paragon of high culture. Nudity aside, Hef conceived of Playboy as an aspirational publication - one which rightly framed sex as an all-American pursuit and sexual conquest as a badge of honor. The first issue of the magazine - which would have been called Stag Party but for threats of copyright infringement - sold about 54,000 copies, cementing the allure of Hef's smoking-jacket sensibility. By the swinging 1970s, the magazine's circulation surpassed seven million...
...competitors aimed to stoke readers' prurient desires, and in winning the battle, they ended up transforming American culture. By marketing sex as a normal, healthy pursuit, Playboy prodded the country to dispense with "old-fashioned moral strictures on one of the most powerful of human urges," according to Hefner biographer Steven Watts. But their efforts may ultimately have been too successful for their own good. A nation receptive to porn and wired for the Web has been a dangerous combination for print magazines. With pornography comprising 25% of all Internet searches, according to GOOD magazine's estimate, magazines have seen...
Read TIME's Skimmer of the New Hefner Biography, "Mr. Playboy...