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Show The Hefner Set "The New Morality" would be incomplete without at least a glance at the avant-garde Playboy. As a magazine, and as a philosophy, it has been characterized character-ized by unprecedented popularity and enthusiastic acceptance. Today almost every young man looks to Playboy for advice and comfort : how to dress, what to eat, where to go, and who to date. Playboy seems to be the leader. We often wonder where it leads. "The Playboy Philosophy," an extended monologue by Hugh Hefner, advocating free love (but NOT children), has dragged on for 18 installments, yet it doesn't seem to give any indication of the Playboy Philosophy as practiced in the Playboy Clubs. You will find no free love (with or without babies) in the Playboy Clubs. Hefner brags that customers cannot even touch the "bunnies." It would seem that the real "Playboy Philosophy" is a philosophy philoso-phy of catering to public morality, railing against it, and pocketing the change. And the change is a lot of money. We have no opposition to either exclusive nightclubs night-clubs or to making money. The former seem to be a harmless pleasure, and the latter seems to be an honest objective. We do object to Hefner's railing against the public morality, and we question his motives in aiming at an age group that is often in the process of questioning question-ing all bases for life. The public morality is not perfect, per-fect, and in many respects not Christian. However, we cannot see any vestige of Christian love in any of the "Playboy Philosophy." Free love is only another term for using another person as a means to an end, one's own pleasure. It does not recognize the other person as an end in himself, but as a tool. This subjugates the other person to a level less than human, to the level of a thing, and we object to this. This blatant refusal to recognize another as flesh, blood, and feelings as a unique individual capable of being hurt and deserving of being loved as another human being, not used as a sex machine this refusal is un-Christian and should be condemned as such. We are not objecting to all cases, at all times, where some love of the other as another an-other is present, but to the blatant anarchy of Mr. Hefner. As Deane William Ferm has said, "There is no Eternal Yardstick that can decide every situation . . . It now seems that to treat sex as cheap is just as wrong as to treat sex as dirty." -NEW WINESKINS |