No More Nudity in Playboy
The world’s most famous “nudie” magazine will no longer feature nude women. It’s all part of a new redesign for the print edition of Playboy in an attempt to recoup losses from a rapidly declining reader base. Though the new issues will still feature women in suggestive poses, they won’t be naked.
Playboy directors concede that its company has been surpassed by an industry that it helped create. “That battle has been fought and won,” Scott Flanders, the company’s chief executive, told the New York Times. “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”
In the past, getting a copy of Playboy was a rite of passage for many young men. Nowadays, anyone with an internet connection or smartphone can stream any type of porn they desire. Magazines like Playboy have long lost their cultural and commercial relevance.
At the height of Playboy’s popularity, it had 5.6 million subscribers in 1975, but has since dropped to 800,000 in 2015 according to the Alliance for Audited Media. Many similar magazines have since disappeared altogether. A prime example when Penthouse went under after failing to retain their circulation by becoming even more graphic.
As the publication aims to compete with latter-day outlets, Mr. Flanders said, it strived to solve an important quandary: “if you take nudity out, what’s left?”
For an outlet as infamous as Playboy, history. It published pieces written by Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami among others, and interviewed notable people like Malcolm X, Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Luther King Jr. and President Jimmy Carter. Madonna, Sharon Stone, Drew Barrymore and Naomi Campbell posed for the magazine at the height of their fame. And who can forget Marilyn Monroe posing for the cover of Playboy’s debut issue in 1953. Its best-selling issue sold more than seven million copies in November 1972.
Marilyn Monroe’s first spread in Playboy. Courtesy of Goldin Auctions
Even those who opposed it contributed to its infamy. One of the most famous examples was when prominent feminist, Gloria Steinem, posed as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 in one of Mr. Hefner’s spinoff clubs to write an exposé for Show Magazine.
Dian Hanson, author of a six-volume history of men’s magazines stated Mr. Hefner “just revolutionized the whole direction of how we live, of our lifestyles and the kind of sex you might have in America. But taking the nudity out of Playboy is going to leave what?”
The magazine had made some content safe for work in order to be allowed on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which are crucial sources of web traffic. In August of 2014, the website removed all nudity and, as a result, the average age of its reader went down to just over 30 from 47; though, it jumped to 16 million unique hits from four million per month.
Playboy plans on remaking their image into a cleaner, artsier, more modern, and PG-13 direction. The sex column will be written from a “sex-positive female” perspective and the magazine still plans on continuing its tradition of investigative journalism, intimate interviews, and fiction stories. The target demographic will be young, city-dwelling men. “The difference between us and Vice,” says Flanders, “is that we’re going after the guy with a job.”
The changes come after extensive focus-group testing aimed at attracting the much-coveted millennial demographic. The publication currently makes most of its profit from licensing its universal logo (from clothing, to bath products, and jewelry) around the world
In 2011, Playboy was acquired by Rizvi Traverse Management, an investment firm owned by Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Suhail Rizvi. Hugh Hefner now only only 30 percent of Playboy, while Rizvi owns over 60 percent.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Mr. Jones said of the decision to do away with nudity, “12-year-old me is very disappointed in current me. But it’s the right thing to do.”
Only time will tell if Playboy’s new plan to gain more profits by cutting out the “skin” will be successful; until then, we’ll always have YouPorn.
Do you think Playboy is doomed to fail?
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