Two million American citizens came down with fresh spells of syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia in 2016. If you factor in herpes and other diseases that can’t be so easily tracked, the CDC estimates there were something like 20 million new cases. This seems like it should be bigger news. You can picture Hefner’s ghost with a twinkle in its eye as it reads this item in one of the more fiery sectors in Purgatory.

Now, Hefner can’t be held personally responsible for every stricken genital in America, but it is not insane to connect the two stories. Reading many of the Hefner obituaries, you could get the impression that he was an apostle of sexual liberation. He was Sex Moses, coming down from Sex Mountain, bearing new Sex Commandments engraved on stone tablets. And the first Sex Commandment was: there are no sex commandments.