Beginning in March of 2016 Playboy will no longer feature fully nude women in its magazine. While this seems surprising on the surface, it’s not. Nudity is everywhere on the internet and there is no need to spend money on a magazine to see nakedness.
Playboy actually began this transition in August of 2014, removing nude pictures form its website to improve access to users on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. There was a significant increase in web traffic following this change.
When we first heard the news..
- We were hoping that Playboy would re-kindle its focus on quality journalism
- After all, the magazine won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 and has published a long list of well-regarded articles and interviews (I remember having to cite Playboy in more than one college paper).
- Perhaps a move closer to Maxim magazine with some intellectually challenging content to counterbalance the toned down but provocative visuals would do the trick?
However, it looks like Playboy is going to court “people between the ages of 18 and 30-something – highly coveted by publishers. The magazine will feature visual artists, with their work dotted through the pages, in part because research revealed that younger people are drawn to art.” Well, good luck with that Playboy!
ForMen Take: Finding, viewing, sharing and experiencing Playboy was a rite of passage for millions of teenagers and it’s worth a quick pause to reflect on the cause of the magazine’s shift. Only 20 years ago, boys were looking up “sex” in the dictionary and sneaking peaks at National Geographic for excitement. Finding a discarded Playboy was like hitting the lottery and today….anything you can imagine sexually is only a few clicks away.
Change is inevitable, but Playboy with no nudity really punctuates how fast things are moving.
Curated article and photo from NY Times
