Thank Hugh Hefner’s funding for today’s warped sex education lessons
The sponsor of the first-ever season of ABC’s “The Flintstones,” in 1960, was Winston Cigarettes.
Every episode of the first and second seasons ends with Fred lighting a cigarette for Wilma and singing the Winston jingle.
No cigarette manufacturer would get away with this today. But those who make bank from addiction and vice have always known it’s best to get ’em young.
So no one should be surprised to learn the first sponsor of modern “comprehensive sex education” was Big Porn.
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner was an early funder of SIECUS, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.
And SIECUS has, since Hefner’s grant in the 1960s, become a power player in shaping what American kids learn about sex in public schools.
Under its guidance, lessons that once focused narrowly on the mechanics of reproduction have taken on an activist streak: “Comprehensive sex education” covers gender identity, STIs, pornography, masturbation, plus a whole bunch of acts that have nothing to do with making babies.
Kinsey’s claims
The idealists behind this movement thought freeing desire would make the world a better place.
Beginning with sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s onward, they claimed human sexuality is normal, natural and best out in the open.
Kinsey’s own motives were always suspect, though. A notorious pervert, Kinsey published research gathered by dodgy methods to prove that Americans were all as depraved as he was.
And it worked: His followers came to think those who wanted to limit sexual morality were frigid, uptight, outdated and oppressive.
This must have been music to the ears of a pornographer. So Hefner presented his smutty magazines as part of the same movement. Writing in Playboy’s first issue, he said: “We believe . . . we are filling a publishing need only slightly less important than one just taken care of by the Kinsey Report.”
It was a happy coincidence this public service made Hefner a ton of money. And the same went for sex ed, too.
The main obstacle to Hefner’s profit margins was uptight sexual norms — especially when these got him sued for obscenity. Who can blame him for wanting to help make the next generation less uptight?
It wasn’t just SIECUS. Hefner also donated to Planned Parenthood, the Kinsey Institute itself, and the sex researchers Masters and Johnson. Big Porn helped bankroll the unzipping of America — all the way down into schools.
Since then, as generation after generation has grown up with Big Porn’s preferred sexual codes, the boundaries between sex education and porn have slowly dissolved.
Today, a running battle in the educational culture war pits progressive sex advocates against parents shocked to find school libraries stocking books too explicit to read out in school-board meetings.
And as sex ed has grown pornographic, Big Porn has claimed the mantle of education: Playboy’s online successor Pornhub offers “sex ed” content, while Pornhub execs present it as an educational resource for sexual self discovery — even as the company faces lawsuits over trafficking and rape of minors.
None of this should surprise us. From Kinsey on, the ultimate prize for sexual “liberators” has always been kids. Kinsey himself published research involving adults manipulating young children repeatedly to orgasm — in effect, child molestation in the name of science — and claimed on this basis that even infants are naturally sexual.
Dangerous path
SIECUS founder Mary Calderone suggested on a 1985 panel that sexual relationships between children and adults could be “warm and seductive and tender.”
No shock then to find Planned Parenthood (another beneficiary of Big Porn) blurring the boundary between childhood innocence and sexual experience. In its “Sexuality 101” videos, styled like classroom lectures, kids are told that virginity is “complete nonsense” because “sex means different things to different people.”
So it’s all just personal choice!
Great news, then, for adults with sexual designs on kids: or “minor-attracted persons” as progressives now want us to call them.
We surely need to tell kids something about sex. But a libertine school sex-ed curriculum, geared to shaping the next generation of customers for Big Porn? That ain’t it.
The only people who stand to gain from saturating little kids with sex propaganda are adults who should not be within half a mile of a school. We must, as the progressives say, do better.
Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd and author of “Feminism Against Progress.”