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When she had this dark thought, Gloria Steinem was thinking of a very popular magazine called Playboy which first illuminated our world in 1953. She saw something that many others did not see.  She saw darkness where others saw light. She saw a meat market where others saw a flower garden. 

The source of that magazine was a man named Hugh Hefner who called himself “a very moral guy”, and made high claims. He said, “Playboy, very clearly, from the outset, has fought against the historical repression of women. The notion that we were anywhere else simply defies the reality.”  

That there was—and is—repression of women is of course true. But that the way to counter it is to select a few, take off their clothes, ignore their minds and then claim the moral high ground is perhaps not the most ethical nor the most effective way to deal with the human condition.

But Hefner had a lot of support, namely, from men, for the bodies of men gave Hefner a very successful magazine. Yet for many of those men there was conflict, for while their bodies approved of Hefner’s efforts to improve the world, their minds often did not, and they had to deal with internal struggle.  And sometimes there was another problem because some men would want to conceal their interest in Hefner’s world from various people in their own world. It’s an old story.

The story writ large is the story of humankind. It is the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, the struggle between what our human nature—in women as well as men—desires and seeks and what our minds tell us is a better way, a higher way.