from society. so could you lean up for a second? one, two, three, four, five. you've got about seven, a dozen 4. one, two, three, four. on my staff -- eight, okay. soon to be five. no, i am kidding. i think it's interesting that i think i saw more female hands up on the negative side . we have a slight bias in favor of dedicating a room to hugh hefner so we're going to have a bit of a debate and see if we can change any minds and we're going to start with professor watts, the author of mister playboy. [applause] >> thank you very much for attending, i think we'll have an interesting exchange of views here. wrens, americans, countrymen, lend me your ears. i come here to bury hefner, not to praise him. maybe a little bit of surreptitious praise. i'm not mark anthony and mister shakespeare's play. you hefner died september 27, 2017, and occurrence widely noted and commented on in the media around the united states. and regarding his achievements and his legacy, i think it's fair to say the reaction was mixed by the critics. in a few minutes you'll hear from a person whose assessment in the new york times was i think it's fair to say decidedly unmixed. he described hefner and these are his words as wicked and destructive, a grinning of sexual liberation, a pretentious huckster, a lecherous lowbrow and assess his impact on american society as terrible, as a kind of not besetting american values. one certainly knows where mister dowd stands on this issue. now, while i admire his work greatly and often find myself in agreement with him, speaking us hefner's biographer today, i would respectfully disagree on this issue and offer a different perspective. hefner, i argue, was one of the most influential figures in american culture in the last half of the 20th century . his ideas and delight in many ways i think both mirrored and promoted some very significant developments in our modern society and i think you in particular deserved attention. first of all, most famously as i'm sure allof you know at least somewhat, hefner was a pioneering figure in the sexual revolution . that fall to relax mores, protections, behaviors regarding sexuality. with playboy in 1953 emerged as a leading figure in the loosening of restrictions on sexual activity movement that gathered much force over the next several decades. along with developments such as the birth control pill which made sex much less risky for young women, both married and unmarried and the kinsey report which suggested that americans sexual flow proclivities were much more varied and less confined than people may have expected back in the 1950s . hefner and playboy moved to the crusade for sexual liberation, for generations in the american past, sexual expression and display of all kinds had been restrained by traditions, i think fundamentally rooted in religious values now hefner pushed very hardfor relax of those restraints . he was as i described often a cop kind of thomas paine for the sexual revolution, a pamphleteer who used striking images of both visual and verbal to redefine sex as a matter of fun, as a matter of fulfillment, even as a matter of recreation. hefner made the monthly centerfold of playmate into a symbol of his crusade for sexual liberation and he took pains to present her not as a kind of unapproachable movie star or an exotic model of some kind but as in a famous phrase, a girl next door. insisting that nice girls like sex to, as hefner put it in countless interviews, he shaped the playmate into an enticing if certainly intensified emergent of the liberated young american woman who was adventurous, interested in romance and seduction. the playmate soon became an object of wonderment for red-blooded young american males so i guess not so young as well. the fact that i think prompted the comedian mort saul to quit that a couple generations of american men came to maturity believing that women had a staple implanted in their stomach. second and just as crucial if less well-recognized was hefner's cutting edge role in the consumer revolution that remade america in the last half of the 20th century. in the 1950s as i'm sure many of you know, the american economy entered a boom period where great waves of consumer products went washing out over the american population. this took place after the private asians of the great depression in the 1930s, the restrictions of world war ii in the 1940s . the rapid growth of consumer prosperity in the 1950s which of course was linked to the rise of the suburban middle-class, promoted an ethic which said that the purchase of automobiles, normal houses, two car garages, lawnmowers and washing machines and televisions and barbecue grills, leisure activities of all kinds. this is a key part of the american way of life. it was a signal of abundance and abundance was the key to the good life in america. playboy from the very first issue in late 1953 was heavily invested in this new consumer ethic. it really offered guidance to young men , a kind of guidebook for young men. many of whom had a good job and a good salary for the first time as they face this new consumer cornucopia of goods. and instructed them as a kind of a guidebook on stylish clothing, fine liquor , good restaurants, the newest kind of sports cars. the hippest kind of books and movies and music that one should be familiar with. and of course, how to create a fashionable bachelorpad . back in this period as well with the latest hi-fi equipment andrecessed lighting and fine art prints and the like . this mindset i will confess is pretty easy to make fun of . as a critic did in the early 1960s where he wrote a very funny little vignette, sort of imagining a conversation between the swinging playboy bachelor and a young woman that he was dating and in the vignette went something like this. the young woman turns down miles davis is kind of blue on a stereo and she says the following. are you personally persuaded by nietzsche's critique of christian ethics and his genealogy of morals? by the way, this was a picasso lithograph by your hi-fi and the swinging playboy bachelor says yes, can you take off your blouse now. nonetheless, what you have is a kind of vision of sexual fulfillment and material affluence that really came together i think as key components in what americans understood as the good life in the postwar world. the main point and i suspect the main point of contention between us is what to make of these crucial developments and hefner's historical role. you'll hear from mister ross douthat as he noted in his review, finds them mostly appalling. i do not. the sexual revolution in my opinion while disquieting in certain ways when it veers into access it has largely been a salutary thing. hefner is easy to forget first presented his message in an age when for many people what you had was a kind of stifling stifling of sexual mores. shame it, evaluation were common fair or anyone who dared to engage in premarital sex. the legal and political system censored almost everything on sexual information even in public males and in tvland it was mandated that even married couples had to sleep in twin beds and that they had to keep two feet on the floor at all times, even when they werekissing or embracing . as much as any other individual i think in this period, hefner was responsible for expanding the range of human choice regarding sexuality. opening it up to individual decision-making and liberating in many ways this most basic of human activities from a kind of excessive repression in this period. and he did so i would especially note sort of encouraging a more relaxed and candid attitude about sex , he did so i think and this is very important to note in the age we are in that is solely sullied by the likes of the despicable harvey weinstein, he did so by urging a kind of standard of urbain gentlemanly behavior. on the part of the readers of his magazine. now it's regarded the consumer revolution i see things similarly when taken to extreme where it leads to a set of unrestrained read and a kind of suffocating materialism as it has on occasion the pursuit of abundance can be a corrosive thing. i think ethical behavior to virtuous behavior but as a whole i think the rising american standard of living after world war ii was the envy of the world and rightly so. it broke the want in american society among large swaths of the population. not only in the middle class but in the working class as well. having a comfortable material existence which allows people to delve into other areas, travel, leisure, education, recreation, 1000 things now available to americans to read a richer and follow life. these things i think on the whole have been a positive development, encouraged by hefner and others, america's consumer prosperity largely defined the good life , as societies around the globe seek to emulate and for good reason. it is, i think, able walk of our society, of ourstability . so in closing, i would contend that hefner and his magazine have played a significant and mostly positive role in the historical process of redefining the american dream over the last half century or so. in the 1950s, he was on the cutting edge of this development but in succeeding decades, he moved deadly into the mainstream while the mainstream moved closer to him and he has become i think i kind of bulwark of america's consumer culture of happiness seeking so for good or for ill and i think hugh hefner would have been the first to insist that each individual should be the person to make the judgment about this, we live in a playboy world in modern america. what we think of you hefner in other words is what we think of us and on the whole, i don't think we're so bad. thank you. [applause] >> first of all, thank you all for coming. there's really no better place to have this debate then las vegas, so i'm very grateful to freedom fest for conceiving of this idea and having us both here and it's something i'll be able to tell my grandkids about that after you have nurse legacy, i debated his life at a place that is at the heart of it. i want to thank the professor for agreeing to participate and being kind enough to bring his expertise about the life of hugh hefner into an argument with someone who as you heard from the quoted remarks, was rather intemperate about the hefner legacy about his demise. and to begin with agreement, i think it's at the level of analysis rather than moral judgment, there is very little daylight between the two of us. i think it's absolutely the case that hefner and the philosophy that you might call aphorism, this combination of a vision of sexual liberation and the pursuit of sexual fulfillment as perhaps the highest human good joint to a general consumerist model of being in the world and being an american in the 21st century, those were tremendously important forcesin midcentury america . hefner was at the heart of them and his influence over subsequent developments was as significant as a single entrepreneurs influence can be. and i don't think there's any question that as an entrepreneur, he was a remarkable figure. a remarkable success in many different ways and someone worthy of study and biography in the past, present and future so these are the points of agreement. the points of disagreement are probably pretty obvious and they do append as the professor suggested on your analysis of where america has ended up in the 40 or 50 years since hefner's cutting edge big vision effectively took over the american mainstream and a sense freedom fest is a libertarian liberty oriented event, i want to frame my argument or attempt to frame it in those terms. i'm a roman catholic some conservative sort and obviously you can predict some of my views on pornography and sexual liberation based on my religious commitment , but i'm going to try to make the argument in a slightly different framework. really, in two different but overlapping frameworks because there are a couple ways to think about what it means to be a sort of pro-liberty libertarian american and how to think of those in connection with hefner's life and the legacy and the easiest way to make this case against hefner's legacy is to argue that the broad tradition of thinking about american liberty going back all the way to the founding fathers all the way back to the 18th injury is that there is a necessary balance between a vision of human freedom and human liberty and a vision of human virtue and restraint and thus as a society based on principles of limited government, strong personal liberty, strong economic liberty depends for its very freedoms on a public that is in somesense capable of practicing virtue and restraint . in that sense, what hefner did effectively was to divorce those two component parts of the american small l liberal tradition and basically to assert and argue that you could have personal and the political freedom without real virtue and restraint . that you could essentially throw yourself into consumer culture, leaving behind all puritanical ideas about threats and throw yourself into a liberated sexual culture, leaving behind all puritanical ideas about monogamy and lifelong ability and chastity as some kind of sexual virtue and that in doing so you would fulfill american liberty rather than betray it and that's a view that almost nobody in 1789 or 1865 or any prior period you want to point to in the american experiment would have endorsed and to the extent that american libertarianism tries to represent a kind of fusion between public freedom and private morality, hefner was an explicit enemy of that tradition. and i think the trajectory of american life has import borne out that original perspective on what liberty requires. if you look at the state of american society 60 years after that initial sexual revolution, what you see is a society that is weaker and a government that is at once stronger and more corrupt than was the case in the 1940s and 1950s. you see a society characterized by more loneliness, isolation, personal unhappiness. you see a society where the rate of sexual activity has been going down over the last 10 or 15 years. you see a society where men and women find it harder to relate to one another and you see a society with declining birth rates, lower family formation and a society of people who are in a sense living out the form of individualism and our overall on happier for it and then in the civic and economic realm, you see a society that embraced the affluence of the postwar period that was a great achievement, one of the greatest achievements in human history but in the process and it up effectively corrupted by it to a point where if you look at from the basically 1970s onward, the american economy enters into a long period we are still living with today of economic stagnation in which further progress isn't achieved and over the same period, you have a government that claims more and more control over the economy to compensate for the collapse of the family, the collapse of older forms of life and so on and you end up in a landscape that while it's not a hellish dystopia, it has many and the great wealth remains and we all benefit from it. from the perspective of 1955 or 1960, if you predicted many of these ends you would have been accused of being alarmist and exaggerating the effects of the sexual revolution, exaggerating the effects of the social breakdown and the fact that we are used to it today, doesn't make it any more of an indictment ofthe world . a world that hefner did a lot to usher in. that i think is sort of the, that's what you might call the virtue oriented case for hefner, that your life and legacy proves the american founders and made people after them were right.life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness depend on sort of structures and ideas about human virtue that you can't just throw overboard in the pursuit of personal freedom at the highest good and many of the problems we are living with a indicative of the extent to which that separation makes people unhappy or in certain ways because long-term economic growth declines and also more subservient to government and the state. and more obsessed with politics, i would add because politics become the only source of community and solidarity as familial relationships fray and decline. but i can also imagine and i know very well forms of libertarianism reject that older synthesis and to say no, that was wrong and actually sort of personal freedom, self-expression, read him from the older shackles of religion and traditional morality is as important or more important a form of liberty and the political and economic liberty that earlier generations of americans indicate and so in that sense, hefner remains a champion, a herald of this sort of newer, more personally exciting form of libertarianism and if there are downsides, they are more than worth the cost of, they are more than worth the cost required to achieve this level of personal freedom and to that argument, i'm going to leave you here before we go back and forth a bit with a thought experiment goes i think you can make a strong and plausible case that the america of the 1940s and 1950s was too harsh on personal liberty, was too confining and too constraining, it was to morally oppressive but that can be the case and it can also be the case that in the end, hugh hefner's own life tori and the story of everyone around him represents a kind of advertisement for the problem with access treated as an end unto itself so the thought experiment i will suggest and as mike found ridiculous, i imagine a society that bans fast food. i think we could all make a reasonable argument that such a society was overly restrictive, harsh on freedom, denying people the pleasures of a juicy big mac, the wonders of a mcdonald's milkshake, everything else and suppose someone came along and the first thing they did was argue that bans on fast food to fall and there were lots of people making similar cases but they became the champion of this. but then they spent the rest of their career are doing not just that people should have the right to eat fast food but that eating fast food was the highest human good, that it was the center of the good life and everything else, diet, exercise, good health should fall by the wayside for the pursuit of this one good, the good of eating as much fast food as possible and this society and person won the cultural battle and as a result, this society became the most obese society in human history. it became the equivalent of that spacecraft in wall-e. and this person's own life, this person obviously also followed suit and became exorbitantly obese, so obese he could barely move from their chair, so defined right up until their death to their dying day, they spent all their time and energy organizing their life around making sure they always had a mcdonald's happy meal in their right hand and a wendy's shaken their left hand. i would argue that that is in fact the story of hugh hefner with sex and i say this as someone who watched, it was my wife's idea, multiple seasons of the girls next door, the reality show that depicted hefner's final years in which to the end he had organized his life around making sure that he can have as many viagra fueled, perhaps quaaludes influenced orgies with as many attractive 22-year-olds as possible, even as the society around him in many ways mirrored those excesses and i think even the libertarians who believe deeply that the initial liberation was necessary, even though libertarian who believes you can't have a good society unless people are free to read playboy and look at internet porn, in the same way a person might say the legacy of that guy, the fast food was good but the world he made and the way helived his life should be celebrated, i think we should be able to say the same thing about hefner , even if you think his initial intervention was a good and necessary thing. i'll end there. thank you so much . >> the taller people always winelections and debates . i think it's lovely to talk about this in terms of ideas rather than what happens with these type of things where people start yelling at each other. i guess a couple of replies to the arguments that were made. he talks about hefner's life of excess and it would be foolish of me to deny that that was the case . in many ways he did lead a life of excess, sort of the actual equivalent of the good big mac and the slurpie or whatever in the other hand as well but i guess my position is this. you hefner could say anything in the world about fast food, sex or what have you and the ultimate situation seems to be that as he himself said, people are free to choose. if you don't want to eat big macs all the time, you don't have to. if you don't want to eat wendy's milkshakes, you don't have to as well and i think how he let his life was not necessarily as he himself popped and said what he would impose on other people. i think what he tried to do in the magazine as he made clear in the first editorials thathe wrote , was simply to give people a choice, a broader range of possibilities for making decisions about how they wanted to leave their lives. the other point that miss staff had made is a very substantial one and as an old madisonian myself, i take it very seriously. this business about balancing liberty and restraint, that's an age-old problem in a democraticrepublic . i guess i would argue that in spite of the image that was projected of hefner being an advocate of being unlimited liberty, unrestrained freedom, etc. sort of bleeding over into licentiousness was a problem. i think it was a little indifferent and i give you two examples. in the 1970s , the success of hefner's magazine, hefner was challenged by a number of other magazines that rose up to take advantage of the market. he had established. people like larry flynt and hustler and penthouse and all of these and hefner was horrified by. and he got into very well publicized public staff with the larry flynt's of the world and the editor of penthouse and the like for going too far. as a critic wrote in the 50s, in many ways hefner's view of sex never really got that far beyond a naughty methodist boy which is what he was in fact so the and restraint of liberty is a little perhaps overstated. the other thing i tell you is i interviewed hefner a lot for this book probably 50, 60 hours of taped interviews and a lotmore than that in informal talks . have you not opened the floodgates for sort of sexual craziness to sweep over the land and what do you think about that?do you feel responsible? i found it interesting as i expected him to be defensive about that issue and in fact, what he told me izzy said well, i worked in new york city in the 1980s and i went to times square and he said i was absolutelyhorrified at what i saw . this sort of cd, lack of any kind of control. just the nastiest sort of stuff you could imagine. he said i never intended that in any way to beat what the message of playboy to be. i challenge you, he said, to go into my magazine and find anything in it which promotes that kind of stuff. so i know the image of hugh hefner as a madisonian may be a bit jarring but there is a little bit of truth to that. [applause] >> it's interesting that you say that about hefner. the last time i had this version of this argument i went on bill moller's show a couple of months ago and bill of course was a famous friend of hefner and he was very visibly as with my op-ed and he accused me of speaking ill of the dead but we had a long back and forth at some point i don't remember if it was on camera or not, he said the board that's on the internet now, that's terrible. even i think that stuff is terrible but hefner had nothing to do with that. and in certain ways he may have even said as you say that hefner himself was and would have been horrified by that aspect of the pornographic revolution and in part i think that some of how you interpret this debate and how you interpret his influence depends on whether you buy that distinction because i think it's true that he had a vision different from bob guccione's vision, different from the vision of sexual liberation internet pornography has produced, kind of custom tailored fetish kink porn and so on. and there are ways in which playboy in hindsight does look staid and mid century and naughty methodist. and i guess my view is that philosophy matters and that sex is incredibly powerful and that when you put the two of those together, that hefner's philosophy and i think you give him in certain ways too little credit by saying he was just out of presenting what worked for him and other people, everybody was free to choose. hefner was self selling a vision of the good life and if you're selling a vision of the good life, you're trying to get peopleto adopt it . the vision of the good life placed sex closer to the heart of human happiness and fulfillment than had previously been the case in most human civilizations and i think that decision, that focus is a big part of what then in turn unleashed all the things that hefner in certain ways may have even admirably been horrified by. and in fact, penthouse and hustler in the 70s and internet board in the 2020 tens is what you get when this is unleashed and i'll close, the one issue we haven't talked about although you alluded to it is the issue of sexism and misogyny and i think there's a similar pattern there where hefner was a genteel sexist. he wasn't a misogynist, he obviously loved women but he had a vision of sort of female sexuality as something that existed to satisfy a particular kind of genteel picasso male fantasy. and that's not the worst thingthat ever existed in human history . sexism is a common feature of human society long before hugh hefner to the extent that that vision one, it ensured the sexual revolution would not just be about ensuring female equality in the workplace and changing various laws. in ensured the sexual revolution would be dominated by a particularly male vision of sexuality which in a similar way, once unleashed, takes you toward harvey weinstein masturbating into a plant because male sexuality is complicated and unpleasant in certain ways and it actually requires a certain kind of restraint, a certain kind of control in order for men and women to get along together. and without getting into some of the debates about playboy parties in the 70s and bill cosby, i think hugh hefner was no harvey weinstein but the kind of sexual revolution he ushered in by placing sexuality and sex itself and sexual gratification and the orgasm though close to the heart of what the good life was supposed to be, it was not a restriction coincidence that that led in directions that have many women sitting up and wondering whether this is all that was cracked up to be. i'll leave things there. thank you. >> we're going to be able to take a couple of, maybe one question from the audience. we have five minutes left but i did want to vis-c-vis your last point which was talking about philosophy and one quote that i took away from iran's interview in playboy was she was talking about obviously hefner was unabashed, unequivocal, explicit component of hedonism and when i randy was asked about hedonism, she said the good is whatever gives you pleasure and therefore pleasure is your standard of morality. objectivism holds that the good must be defined by a rational standard of value so in a way, if hedonism is your standard, whatever gives you pleasure maybe is not inescapably going to end in the gutter but certainly there isn't a reason to restrain it. so john lange, what's your question? >> in a way, this is a little bit difficult to grapple with in terms of the philosophies of liberty . that is, yes, there's hedonism and liberty before that but i think it goes deeper. it's more like pornography is to men and women as sugar is to the tongue. it's as if, and i think you are getting at that point, that the baton reacts to salt, grease, sugar and the industrial food establishment delivered and we have obesity and diabetes and etc. and it begins in the 1600s with the sugar islands in the caribbean. and the slavery, etc. then you have industrial glossy magazine printing as the technology that's available that delivers something, it's a similar kind of over exploitation of the human weakness. that is, we want to eat that grease and her and we eat it to the point of weakness and to have a northeastern protestant or a catholic attitude towards it is -- kind of misses the point. you can't control it. it's like telling an addict they should resist that opioid addiction. it's a bell curve kind of thing. some people are susceptible, others aren't and you wind up with people with a sex addiction to pornography. over 10,000 years ago, even before agriculture, there were pornographic clay dolls. anyway, it's this exploitation of our lizard brain. >> is that -- okay. >> one thing you could say and this gets into the great man of history debate, that a lot of these trends we're talking about would have happened with or without hugh hefner and they are mediated by technological changes. the internet turned out to be a great medium for distributing pornography and similarly, the rise of glossy magazines in mass media culture andeverything else made older patterns of censorship harder to sustain . but my general view, i'm sort of a moderate technological determinist and that i think some version of the sexual revolution and of the pornographic revolution was inevitable but that doesn't mean the people who said let's lean into this fully don't deserve some criticism for some of, just as the people who push pain medication to the point of access deserve criticism in the area of the opioid epidemic. >> i'm going to give professor watts the last word on this and unfortunately we're not going to be able to take additional questions but we're going to ask the question again whether you hefner was responsible for a cultural advance or cultural decline . >> i take a point that you made but i would challenge the notion as i'm sure mister hefner would have as wellthat sexuality is something ,a product of our lizardlike brain . a drug that is nasty and leads us down theprimrose path . actuality is thing that ought to be viewed in more positive ways as being a vibrant human activity. in many ways, it's the absence of a life force that we all have and we have disagreements about how to use it, control it and so on but i think a fundamentally negative view of it is one way to look at it but there's another way to lookat it that is to my way of looking , much more positiveand persuasive . >> i'm going to defer to mark, do we have time for another question? >> i heard a question about thomas paine and i wanted to make the point that pain had a debate with edmund burke about the french revolution where he was teaching the french people how to be a citizeninstead of a subject . a real liberation like hafner and edmund burke was like, i agree, men have rights but we have to remember the laws and the traditions and he sounds alot like you . >> i think my critique of hefner is that he was a pain who became a robespierre, if that makes sense. >> taking the balance of the entire life, the entire impact on our culture, i'm going to ask again or all of those who would vote in the affirmative that hugh hefner does deserve a room or does deserve an honor in terms of his role as being part of a cultural advance, could i see a show of hands again? >> ic 10 for the advance. and then that he has been -- you lost a couple there, i don't know. and in terms ofthe decline , that he hasbeen overall bad . 10, okay. >> perfect. [applause] >> people need to do more research. >> c-span launched book td 20 years ago on c-span2 and since then we've covered more than 15,000 authors spanning more than 1000 weekends. best-selling author malcolm gladwell hasappeared on book td 17 times.in 2000, he talked about his book the tipping point . >> it's a familiar thing in intelligence but one of the cool things about this is that an incredible amount of research about television and ideas about how to make television works starts with sesame street and moves into the mainstream from it. you could argue i think legitimately that this is the most important television show ever in terms of its impact on the way television is structured. >> watch this and other programs from the past 20 years on the line at booktv.org. search the authors name in the book intothe search bar at the top of the page . >> roberts, we're showing the cover of the book you edited, francis and the caringsociety . what are we going to find in here? >> the book is written mainly by economists and we are writing in response to the and cyclical that came out on the care of our comm

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