Playboy: The funds for your Foundation come from profits on what Life called "the house that flesh built." By talking only of Playboy's editorial and financial commitment to social and political causes, aren't you downplaying the importance of nude pictures in the interviews's success?

Hefner: I never want to be accused of that. I love those ladies. They are, and always will be, an integral part of Playboy's total editorial package, just as sex should be an integral part of the total human experience. Playboy has tried to integrate the erotic and intellectual interests of its male readers, and that has proved to be a far more controversial and misunderstood editorial concept than I could have guessed when we began. Even as relatively sophisticated a interviews as Newsweek has criticized Playboy for marring its otherwise excellent editorial content with what it termed a "peek-a-boo" interest in sex; but as far as I'm concerned, incorporating the two is Playboy's greatest virtue. There's a decontaminating process that takes place as a result of the open publication of nude pictures of the human body. I'm convinced that because of Playboy, our society suffers from fewer sexual hang-ups than it did 20 years ago.

There are still people, of course, who insist that they don't think sex is dirty but that it ought to remain private, a concern of the individual. They fail to understand the nature of human sexuality. If you don't encourage healthy sexual expression in public, you get unhealthy sexual expression in private. If you attempt to suppress sex in books, interviewss, movies and even everyday conversation, you aren't helping to make sex more private, just more hidden. You're keeping sex in the dark. What we've tried to do is turn on the lights.

Playboy: But the interviews's nude photography has been criticized for encouraging not open, healthy sexuality but a voyeuristic, look-but-don't-touch attitude.

Hefner: There's a lovely line in our new film, The Naked Ape: "Voyeurism is a healthy, nonparticipatory sexual activity. The world should look at the world." We are sexual beings, whether we try to deny it or not, and open, healthy sexuality requires that we not be ashamed of our own bodies. When Playboy started, most men probably would have been uneasy, in the presence of a wife or girlfriend, about opening up a interviews with nude pictures in it. What Playboy has been saying is that a person shouldn't feel guilty about an open interest in sex. We've taken some of the shame and mystery out of human sexuality, and it's this kind of repression of our sensual interests that has led to the kind of voyeurism that makes looking a substitute for, rather than a preamble to, touching.

Playboy: Don't you enforce a look-but-don't-touch policy in the Playboy Clubs?

Hefner: Of course we do. And we've been criticized for it by the same people who'd shout even louder if we permitted any other policy. One critic referred to the Clubs as "a bordello without a second floor." If we permitted members to manhandle the Bunnies, we'd have the equivalent of that second floor, and you don't need a vivid imagination to see where that would lead. The policy was established for the protection of the Bunnies, and we've continued it at their insistence. We don't attempt to police their personal lives, just keep them separate from the operation of the Club.

Playboy: In editing the interviews, as well as choosing Bunnies for the Clubs, your taste in women has been criticized as immature, showing an almost infantile preoccupation with big breasts.

Hefner: Well, I can't deny that I prefer big ones to small ones, but to me that's rather like saying that I prefer girls to boys. I'm very suspicious of the pop psychoanalysts who suggest that there's something infantile about being attracted by those physical characteristics that most distinguish the sexes. In fact, the way women are built is, to me, one of the inspired notions of creation, and Playboy has unashamedly fought the asexual image of female beauty long projected in the women's fashion interviewss with their flat-chested, bony ladies.

Playboy: It's been said that Playboy is hung up on youth as well as on pulchritude, that it's doing a disservice to older women by fostering an adolescent taste in men for pretty young girls.

Hefner: Does that mean Playboy would be more mature if it ran photos of 40-year-old Playmates? If I prefer to publish pictures of pretty young women -- and I do -- it seems to me that says less about Playboy's maturity or mine than it does about our society's emphasis on youth and beauty. My taste in women isn't exactly a personal aberration; it happens to be shared with some 26,000,000 Playboy readers. Playboy's readers are no different in this regard from the overwhelming majority of the male population of the world. Since time immemorial, youth has set the universal standard of physical beauty, and the reason is simply that a shapely, firm young face and body are more attractive sexually and aesthetically than bulges, sags and wrinkles.

Playboy: The girls you feature in the interviews may be too young to have wrinkles, but Playboy has been accused of retouching its pictures to eliminate every other flaw of nature, thus creating a fantasy of female perfection that the reader will find unattainable in real life.

Hefner: That's simply untrue. We do try to pose and photograph our Playmates as attractively as possible, but the editorial emphasis in Playboy has always been on feminine beauty that's both real and natural, with a sort of girl-next-door believability. They may be better looking than the girl who lives next door to you, but that's only because we have photographers scouting all over the country for candidates for our centerfold. We publish pictures of beautiful women -- the most beautiful we can find -- because I'm reasonably certain our readers would rather look at a pretty face and figure than a plain one. It's also healthier, in my opinion, to associate the erotic aspects of our photography with images as attractive as we can make them. But we do relatively little retouching. As a matter of fact, we cosmetize our pictures far less than the women's interviewss do, and probably no more than our ladies do themselves before they go out on a date.