From ‘Playboy’ to Purity: Reversing the Sexual Revolution

Editor’s Note: Dr. Brown requested a new article replace the one originally run on Sept. 28 at 11 a.m. Below is the updated column.

Hugh Hefner has died at the age of 91. I hope he found grace and repentance before leaving this world. I also hope that his death will signify the end of the sexual revolution. It has failed miserably on every front. May it never rise again.

The sexual revolution promised freedom but produced bondage. It promised excitement but produced emptiness. It promised thrills and produced STDs. It was destined to crash and burn from the very first day.

It’s a terrible shame it took so long.

Although Alfred Kinsey’s perverted sex studies, first released in 1948, helped pave the way for the sexual revolution, the real seeds were planted with Playboy‘s nude photoshoot of Marilyn Monroe in 1953. Then, those seeds grew with explosive force in the counterculture revolution of the 1960s. And the rest, as they say, is history—a very sad history, for sure.

Today, 8-year-olds are being exposed to hardcore pornography.

Children as young as 10 are learning the relative health risks of anal vs. oral vs. vaginal intercourse.

Twelve-year-olds are sending inappropriate messages to each other, sometimes committing suicide when their naked pictures circulate through their school.

Condoms have been made available to first-graders.

Healthy young men cannot perform without Viagra because of their porn addictions.

Married couples in their 20s no longer have sex because it has become so meaningless to them.

Half of all babies born to first-time mothers are now conceived out of wedlock.

Thanks for nothing, sexual revolution. You have brought nothing but destruction.

Last year, for a short period of time, Playboy announced it would no longer carry nude pictures in its magazine or on its website.

But Playboy did not temporarily abandon nude pictorials because society had become more moral. It was abandoning these pictorials because society had become so immoral that Playboy‘s relatively mild pornography was no longer a draw.

Pornography of the most sordid kind was freely available everywhere, so who needed pictures of nude women in Playboy? Porn was now ubiquitous.

And what does this porn glut produce? Broken marriages. Sexual addictions. Perverse fleshly appetites. Deadly STDs. The degrading of women. Lots of bad and lots of evil. Absolutely nothing good.

Consider these stats from a government website: “Adolescents ages 15-24 account for nearly half of the 20 million new cases of STD’s each year. Today, two in five sexually active teen girls have had an STD that can cause infertility and even death. Also, though rates of HIV are very low among adolescents, males make up more than 80 percent of HIV diagnoses among 13- to 19-year-olds.”

This is the reality of the sexual revolution.

Sir, that smiling beauty calling to you from your laptop makes you feel wanted. She has what you need. Let your dreams come true!

But here’s what those flirtations will get you. An increased desire for more of the same, followed by an increased desire for something more intense, followed by an embarrassing addiction to hard-core perversion. And it started with that beautiful smile!

Young lady, when that photographer told you were beautiful, he did it for one reason only. Money. And that fleeting high you got the first time men paid to look at you was tinged with embarrassment, then hardness, then drugs to ease the pain.

It’s a trap. It’s a lie. Get out while you can!

And there, in a nutshell, is the bankruptcy of the sexual revolution: It destroys our sons and daughters.

But all hope is not lost. The sexual revolution can be reversed. There is a better way. A much better way. God’s way.

I’ve read a number of studies that all say the same thing: Singles who engage in one-night stands and have multiple sexual partners are the least satisfied sexually. Committed, married couples are the most satisfied sexually.

That’s because we are not just physical animals, fulfilling a bodily function. We are human beings with emotions and values and desires, and sexual intimacy divorced from relational fidelity produces frustration and shame and guilt in the end.

That’s why, in more than 41 years of marriage, it has never dawned on me once to envy the likes of Hugh Hefner, a man who slept with more gorgeous women in a week than most of us have met in a lifetime.

What a pitiful, lost soul, and what a tragic, ugly legacy.

And this brings me back to where we started. I hope he found grace and repentance before leaving this world. I also hope that his death will signify the end of the sexual revolution.

(For supporting data for some of the information cited in this article, see the chapter, “From Playboy to Purity: Reversing the Sexual Revolution,” in Saving a Sick America: A Prescription for Moral and Cultural Transformation.)