The women's movement came about precisely because of the events that occurred in women's personal lives - events like harassment, pervasive discrimination and rape. During the '70s, during Playboy's heyday and before sexual harassment in the workplace became illegal, women had to tolerate some really unpleasant and degrading behavior from which there was no protection and no recourse. If you never had to experience it you won't understand why Hefner's "Playboy" mentality was and is so offensive.
Here's one event that occurred in my personal life, which contributed considerably to my loathing of Hefner and everything about the whole Playboy business: In the early '70s, I was recently married and had a lousy full-time job, while my then-husband was in grad school. We were really broke, so I looked around for an extra part-time job, and learned about a local restaurant/night club that was looking for cocktail waitresses, and the skinny was that you could earn really good tips. So I got myself hired right away, and they gave me my "uniform," which turned out to be a skimpy Playboy bunny-like costume. I was taken aback by this, and felt really foolish and uncomfortable in it, but we really needed the money and I figured I could put up with it for a few nights a week.
So I was sent out onto the floor to be trained in. The place was clearly trying to cultivate a Playboy Club ambience, although it wasn't actually a so-called "gentlemen's club." The clientele was mainly middle-aged men in polyester suits, accompanied for the most part by wives or girlfriends - but it was awful. Those guys took the Playboy mentality as far as they could with their clothes on; I managed to get a years' worth of 70s-era workplace sexual harassment packed into one evening. I could hardly take an order without being leered at, patted, groped, propositioned or otherwise hassled in a sexual way. And I was supposed to act like I enjoyed it. I guess if you were stuffed into a costume that was a cross between a corset and a bathing suit as a condition of your employment, it was presumed that it was perfectly OK to touch you anywhere and say anything to you. It was a completely degrading experience and I quit as soon as my first night was over. Some women were obviously willing to put up with it; I wasn't.
Compared to the experiences many other women have had and which helped form the ideas you found so offensive and extreme in your women's studies class, this was pretty minor stuff. But it sure opened my eyes to the attitudes some men had toward women in those days, and maybe still - that we are just meat, things that exist for their pleasure. Hefner and his Playboy were instrumental in bringing that crap mainstream, giving fat middle-aged men in leisure suits, as well as zitty, wanking teenagers, permission to treat women as objects.
So I don't give a crap about Hefner as a so-called civil rights hero. He was a sexist pig. Fuck him and the silk pajamas he slithered in on.
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