Despite its 50th anniversary, Playboy is in swifter decline than the virility of Hugh Hefner, its 77-year old founder. Its circulation has been in freefall since its 20th anniversary in 1973, and raising it again has proved impossible - in spite of its playmates' showing ever more. Nevertheless, the golden anniversary is drawing considerable media attention. Playboy is a well-known global brand. What Henry Ford was to transportation, Alexander Graham Bell to communication and Bill Gates to computerization, Hugh Hefner was to masturbation.

Playboy started in 1953 when Hefner acquired the rights to a nude picture of Marilyn Monroe (with her legs closed). She was the first in a long series of centerfolds that became the cherished possessions of millions of young men. Hefner built a media empire on the male adolescent's natural curiosity about female anatomy. He sees himself as a benefactor to humanity. "Every time you ask him/ The answer's the same/ Sex would never have happened/ Without Hef in the game," rhymed his former mistress Carrie Leigh.

When 27-year old "Hef" printed the 70,000 copies of the first Playboy in December 1953, he did not put much faith in his enterprise. The first issue bore no date because Hefner was not sure when, or if, there would be a second one. He thought it would take several months to sell. Much to his surprise, the first issue sold in less than a week. One month later Hefner had a second issue ready, and a few years later he was so rich that he could let others compile the magazine while he padded about in silk pajamas all day.

Playboy was an immediate success. "It was the right idea in the right place at the right time," Hefner stated in an anniversary interview in his magazine (January, 1974). "A great many of the traditional social and moral values of our society were changing, and Playboy was the first publication to reflect those changes. We offered an alternative lifestyle with a more permissive, more play-and-pleasure orientation. Playboy offered a new set of ethical values for the urban society. The editorial message came through loud and clear: Enjoy yourself."

Hefner noted correctly that the success of his magazine was due to changing values, and he made Playboy into an instrument to promote these changes and thus alter the traditional social and moral order.

"Playboy", said Hefner in January 1974, "is one of the most important and influential magazines in the world, in terms of the impact it's had not only on social mores but as a champion of individual rights. We've supported countless civil liberties organizations, political reform, sex research and education, abortion reform before it became popular, prison reform, and the continuing campaign to reform our repressive sex and drug laws, as well as any number of charities and community-fund efforts. Right now we're the biggest financial supporter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, because I think making criminals out of people who smoke marijuana is very damaging to the social fabric of society."

Changing the social fabric of society was the business America's masturbation mogul was most interested in. In July 1955 Hefner had the brilliant idea of asking an ordinary girl, Charlaine Karalus, Playboy's Subscription Manager, to pose. Until then, the playmates had been professional models. Hefner wanted to show "girl-next-door" types. In January 1994 he explained what the ideological aim was of the Karalus pictures: "If the girl next door would pose in such an erotic context, the significance seemed clear. If the girls-next-door were sexually aware and active, as depicted in a monthly pictorial feature in the center of an increasingly popular men's magazine, traditional Christian values might be perceived as being in serious jeopardy." Hefner said he had found his girl next door in the office next door. "Potential playmates are all around you," he wrote in the copy accompanying the Karalus pictures.

The readers loved it. Karalus became the most popular playmate of the '50s. But Hefner had changed her name. Charlaine Karalus did not serve his subversive agenda, but the pseudonym he provided - Janet Pilgrim - did. "I chose the name 'Pilgrim' precisely because of its puritan connotations, which I thought would help to deliver our editorial message - that nice girls were sexual beings, too, including a puritan daughter named Pilgrim. Rather quickly I realized that I had in this Playmate feature a symbol for attacking the double-standard hypocrisy of our society."

Karalus was one of Hefner's mistresses at that time ("I had sex with any of the female staff members who were interested") when his wife Millie was pregnant with his second child. Hefner, who already had a one-year old daughter, did not want another baby. He writes, "I wasn't thrilled, but Millie seemed resigned. It seemed to me that from the moment children were introduced into a marriage, the entire relationship was altered: Parenting replaced romance as the dominant theme in the relationship. In my youthful naïveté, I had envisioned marriage as the apex of romance for a couple in love. But that naïveté on my part had died a cruel death, and I was finding it increasingly difficult to honor the conventions of society rather than to follow my own convictions."

Hefner's son, who was born shortly afterwards, owed his life to Mommy's "resignation" and to the fact that, at that time, abortion was still illegal. But Daddy, who preferred "romance" to playing with the kids, decided to give other men the opportunity to "follow their convictions." The liberalization of abortion became the dominant theme in the social engineering project of the social activist in silk pajamas.

Playboy was the first widely distributed American magazine that openly promoted abortion on demand. It did so, the magazine wrote in a January 1979 article (aptly titled "A Chronology of Social Activism"), "on the grounds that women have the same rights as men to control their own bodies and to choose whether or not to bear children." Hefner provided funds and lawyers for women demanding their right to abortion in court. In this way he was involved in the cases brought before the American Supreme Court, thus forcing its decision legalizing abortion on Jan. 22, 1973.

Indeed, the annual report of the Playboy Foundation published in January 1974 starts in a triumphant vein: "The Playboy Foundation participated in a movement that won a major court victory. The victory came with last January's Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. This was especially gratifying because of the Foundation's long campaign for reform, which began in 1966. The Foundation will remain alert to attempts by anti-abortion forces in state or local governments to limit the availability of abortion through restrictive guidelines or policies."

Letters in the "Forum" section of the magazine indicated that Playboy's stance on abortion was the most controversial issue among its readers. They brought up the question over and over again. Up until the late-'80s, when "Forum" changed its outlook and the editors suppressed the debate, there had been a continuing argument over abortion.

Two things stand out: the first is the continuing attempt on the part of Playboy's editors to reduce all arguments against abortion to religious considerations, which, the magazine reasons, in a democratic society obviously cannot be forced upon those who do not share these spiritual sentiments. The second is the often hard-boiled, economic calculation of many pro-abortionists: an unwanted child is said to cost the welfare state too much.

In February 1982 an anonymous reader from New York wrote that "unwanted fetuses, upon reaching the age of 16 or so, may well be living off the great welfare teat." In the same issue Dr. Ezekiel Barber from Union, New Jersey, wrote: "Every child needs to be wanted and loved, lest he or she becomes a menace to the community. A random sample of those incarcerated in our prisons and mental institutions will reveal that most were unwanted children." In September 1983 Steve Kidder from Anchorage wrote "[i]t costs about $100,000 to raise a child to the age of 18 - probably a bit more in state (hence, taxpayer supported) institutions. An abortion costs less than $1,000." Consequently, he said, "abortion is a plus, socially and economically."

Not all readers agreed. In April 1979 an anonymous lady from Kansas wrote: "What miserable and self-serving people we have become to arrogantly declare that someone should not be born because he 'doesn't stand a good chance.' We're talking about life, damn it! It's the only sacred thing there is. Leave God, religion, the Bible and holy wars out of it. I've borne babies and all baby-related hassles. I've survived, they've survived and we've been graced by the simple fact that we're alive with one another in all our ups and downs. And I even share that with the baby I gave up for adoption 18 years ago."

Mark Hanson from British Columbia was also angered by the editors' claim in the september 1978 issue that their arguments were based on reason and not on passion. "Playboy accuses anti-abortionists of 'waging a modern-day holy war.' But surely the shoe is on the other foot. In a holy war, e.g. a Moslem jihad, innocent lives are taken. It is the pro-abortionists, not their opponents, who take innocent lives, and so it is they who wage a 'holy war' (to use your cliché). And guess what? Many of us are atheists."

In June 1979 a reader from Indiana wrote: "I'm tired of hearing how the anti-abortionists are stupid people. All we ask is that a woman be responsible for her own actions and her own body. Babies don't ask to be conceived and there are thousands of couples waiting to adopt the children." In addition, he wrote, there are the psychological effects of abortion: "More women's lives are ruined by abortion than by childbirth." The editors responded to this letter, by observing: "If you wish not to be labeled stupid, you should concede that a woman's responsibility for her own body includes the right to have sex without having to bear unwanted children and that the traumatic effects of abortion are a myth, except perhaps among women who have been taught from childhood that they do not have the right to control their own bodies."

A Canadian reader from Manitoba criticized this response in the October 1979 issue. He pointed out that birth control and not abortion is the appropriate method to avoid unwanted children. Playboy replied "[n]o ordinary form of contraception is so desirable or effective that it will avoid all unwanted pregnancies. Moreover, some people are too stupid to use contraceptives. But that would be no reason to make abortions illegal or for taxpayers to support more unwanted, unloved children."

In January 1982, reader John Zimmerman from Tucson, Ariz., attempted to develop a nonideological and reason-based argumentation against abortion. "Anything worthwhile and pleasurable involves risk," he wrote, "be it hang gliding, roller skating or sex." Abortion is a "method of 'changing the score' after the game has been played. Too many people are opting for merely the simplest way out. But the heavyweight rationalization is worse: that unwanted pregnancies can be tallied in dollars and cents and abortion spares an unwanted baby from being born into 'hostile conditions' or from being subjected to a 'living hell of inadequate food, housing and medical care and to actual physical and mental abuse.' Honestly, do you know a person who, because of the horrible conditions he or she was born into, seriously wishes that he or she had been aborted?"

The editors dismissed Zimmerman's arguments: "You've simply rephrased one side issue to rhetorically ask why more people don't commit suicide. Your own anti-abortion position is even stranger than the ones we have postulated. We can understand (while disagreeing with) the theological position that procreation is the ultimate purpose of sex and, therefore, abortion is sinful; but defending accidental pregnancy on the basis of risk strikes us as weird. And not even sporting when you consider that the risk is limited to the female players."

There was, however, one argument against abortion which the magazine did not counter. It was first employed by Richard Greene from Los Angeles in February 1973, the first issue after the legalization of abortion. It was a rational and non-religious argument. It was brief and to the point and was phrased in a language that Playboy could understand: dollars and cents. "Keep telling people that killing a fetus is moral and eventually there will be no one left to read your magazine."

Today, Playboy is the concern of 49-year old Christie Hefner, Hugh's daughter (and the only child that he had really wanted). She has been running the company since 1988, when her father retired with his seven blonde mistresses. Christie is a businessperson and not an ideologue, conducting her work in a suit and not in her nightgown. Nevertheless, over the past two decades, the company has only made meager profits and has even been losing money the past three years. Christie Hefner has been unable to revamp Playboy. Total sales of the magazine have slipped to 3.1 million copies - as opposed to the record 7.2 million copies sold in late 1972, when abortion was still illegal.

Some suspect that Playboy is losing its appeal because the girls in other skin magazines spread their legs wider. On cable TV, however, which is the company's main business today, Playboy has moved into hard-core porn without improving its figures. Hence, there might be another, more fundamental, reason for Playboy's flagging performance: perhaps Richard Greene was right.

There is some irony in comments Christie Hefner recently made to CNN that "our licensing division's primary audience is 18 to 25 years old" and that "we skew to a young demographic." Equally ironic is Business Week's assertion that "the demographic of men age 18 to 34" is what Playboy is after. If half the 1.6 million children aborted annually in the U.S. since 1973, are male, Playboy now lacks 12 million potential customers in the 15-30 year age group, and this company that advocated the annihilation of a large segment of its audience is now paying a high price for its social activism.