Yesterday I joined several dozen teens, parents, and abstinence educators to protest outside of Playboy magazine’s headquarters in downtown Chicago. It’s not as if we needed a particular reason to protest outside the Playboy offices, but after learning what was scheduled to take place there, I would have felt guilty had I not taken part. We were there to protest a fundraiser benefiting the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health — a group that has recently partnered with Planned Parenthood of Greater Chicagoland to form a coalition whose goal is to strip all funding of abstinence-only education for Illinois schools and instead require them to use condom-based sex education programs. They recently succeeded in doing so in the Chicago Public Schools. It’s fitting, then, that CPS students played a major role in yesterday’s protest. 
This fundraiser tells us everything we need to know about the advocates of so-called comprehensive sex education. (You can view the invitation to the event here [PDF].) Folks willing out to shell out $75 for a ticket were promised “a night of provacative performance” featuring a selection from the “hit show S-e-x-Oh!” by a group called Teatro Luna. Those willing to cough up another fifty bucks had the chance to participate in an “intimate Q & A with [Time Out Chicago] sex columnist Debby Herbeneck”. The extra $50 also entitled one to “a tour of the Playboy offices and art collection[!]” … and, last but not least, a VIP reception with Christie Hefner. Christie Hefner, daughter of Hugh Hefner, who founded Playboy in 1953, has been its CEO since 1982. She was the one who decided that the company could make more money by producing increasingly harder-core pornography — something that even her father was reluctant to do for a long time. (See here, here, and here for references.) In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times in 2003, Christie Hefner said:
Playboy readers don’t see a difference between desiring women and respecting women. They have no problem reading a magazine that tells them that lesbians should have custody rights, and when a woman says “no” — even if her panties are off — it means “no,” and looking at Cindy Crawford and saying: ‘God, she’s beautiful.”
Playboy has readers? Apparently Christie Hefner hasn’t learned much about the connection between pornography and violence against women. To her, Playboy and other forms of pornography, as well as all so-called free expressions of sexuality, are not only harmless, but good. It’s no surprise, then, that she was chosen by Illinois’ leading advocates of “comprehensive sex education” to be the guest of honor at their annual fundraiser.
