Hefner’s Views on Pornography

Fifteen years ago, the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography issued a report concluding that there is no link between explicit sexual material and anti-social behavior.

After 10 years of research, a study commissioned by Canada’s Department of Justice reached the same conclusion.

Denmark decided to legalize pornography in 1969. Last year, at a conference convened to discuss the effects of that decision, University of Copenhagen criminologist Bern Kutchinsky reported, “The conclusion is very clear that pornography is not a danger--neither to society, nor to children or adults. It doesn’t lead to sex offenses; it doesn’t lead to sexual deviations . . . People’s attitudes toward sexuality, and therefore toward pornography, are almost 100% determined by their religious convictions and so are not altered by facts.�

Apparently Laura J. Lederer is one of those people whose beliefs are not altered by facts. Her article (Editorial Pages, Oct. 9), “Pornography Is a Social Carcinogen,� exhibits cloudy thinking, sincere--but unsupportable--convictions, and hostility toward the First Amendment.

Lederer seems to accept the false premise that sexual images, by their very existence, exploit and degrade women. She seems to believe that enjoying Playboy makes one a conspirator in women’s degradation. Strangely, this is the same Laura Lederer who wrote to the Playboy Foundation in 1977:

“Playboy magazine has always been in front lines in the battle against this country’s social problems. We (Women Against Violence in Pornography & Media) feel there is another battle on the horizon that touches Playboy rather directly, and that is the constant linking of sexuality and violence which has leapt into our mass media (and especially into Playboy’s competitors and imitators) . . . Playboy has always been interested in healthy, happy relations between the sexes, and we hope that you will find the work we have been doing important . . . “

Since then, it seems, Lederer has moved to the forefront of the anti-pornography movement. One of the heroines of her article is Judith Reisman. Reisman, before accepting a grant from President Reagan’s Justice Department to “study� porn, revealed her own prejudices in an issue of New York University’s Review of Law and Social Change. She argued that “defense of pornography is based on the spurious notion that freedom of speech actually exists. Freedom of speech, however, does not exist . . . Once this concept has been disproved, the pornographic business community can be challenged without raising cries of censorship.� In another concept, she claimed that Hugh Hefner is as dangerous as Adolf Hitler.

In her current work for the Justice Department, Reisman is poring over three magazines--Hustler, Penthouse and Playboy--for evidence of sexual violence.

I cannot speak for Playboy’s competitors and imitators, but Playboy, as Prof. Joseph Scott of Ohio State University has demonstrated, is far less violent than the average PG-rated movie. Reisman’s expensive, tax-supported project is duplicating a previous study done by Scott and Cuvelier, who found Playboy’s “violence� rate to be .02%--one five-thousandth of the magazine’s content. In five of the 30 years Scott and Cuvelier examined, Playboy did not contain a single sexually “violent� cartoon or pictorial, the average was three per year.

Lederer and Reisman believe that Playboy contributes to the social dangers women face, though the President’s Commission, the Canadian Justice Department’s Commission and the Denmark experience all demonstrate that even hard-core pornography is not the cause of our country’s social ills. Are Lederer and Reisman prepared to set themselves up as censors? If so, they need to take a refresher course in world history.

Censorship is the tool of totalitarianism and repression. If it is used today to prohibit sexually explicit words and images, it might be used tomorrow to prohibit other forms of expression. It might be used to justify the oppression of women in such areas as abortion rights, and to foil other efforts to bring about equality between the sexes. Censorship is insatiable. It can erode the freedom of expression until there is only one acceptable point of view left. If that were to happen in our society, whose point of view would survive? Laura Lederer’s? Jerry Falwell’s? Feminists who are willing to ally themselves with the fundamentalist right for short-term political gain should remember that politics makes unequal bedfellows.

Playboy celebrates sex because sex is one of the good things in life. The freedom to express oneself without fear of censorship is another. Sexual imagery is not a social carcinogen, but censorship is.

HUGH M. HEFNER

Los Angeles