Slashdot Mirror
Playboy Drops Nudity As Internet Fills Demand
HughPickens.com writes: Ravi Somaiya reports in the NY Times that as part of a redesign that will be unveiled next March, the print edition of Playboy Magazine will still feature women in provocative poses but they will no longer be fully nude. "That battle has been fought and won," says CEO Scott Flanders. "You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it's just passé at this juncture." According to Somaiya, for a generation of American men, reading Playboy was a cultural rite, an illicit thrill consumed by flashlight. Now every teenage boy has an Internet-connected phone instead. Pornographic magazines, even those as storied as Playboy, have lost their shock value, their commercial value and their cultural relevance. The magazine will adopt a cleaner, more modern style. There will still be a Playmate of the Month, but the pictures will be "PG-13" and less produced — more like the racier sections of Instagram. "A little more accessible, a little more intimate," says Flancers. It is not yet decided whether there will still be a centerfold.
So after 60+ years Playboy is going to make themselves completely irrelevant? I mean, who is actually going to buy it now?
Sure, the internet is full of smut, but Playboy was always a little classier.
Now they're, what exactly? I just don't see people wanting to buy Playboy with no nudity. At that point, get a Victoria's Secret catalog.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
;P~
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
The internet is also full of "provocative poses" (facebook anyone?).
So as I see it they will continue with the same problem...
I got playboy for the articles ... Really .... for the articles .. i need to know how to make a perfect vodka martini.
Now you really will be reading it for the articles!
Hef's circling the drain and he knows it. Becoming Maxim with slightly better writers on staff isn't going to fix it.
I think something other than a flag will be at half mast...
The last 30 years of Playmates have been a minor variations of Heff's diversity-free ideal woman - white, bleached blonde, fake tits, brazilian, and bland, bland, bland. 70s Playmates OTOH... hoo boy!
...because of the internet. It was because it (somewhat prudish, overly hyped, plasticy models/photographs) failed to keep pace with the actual SEXUALITY provided elsewhere, whether print or digital. Worse, their type of stuff became iconic, somewhat supplanting natural/living sexuality, and further confusing the already sexually embattled American male.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Oh well, I guess it was bound to happen with the availability of any type of smut on the internet.
Goodbye and farewell fond memories of the Swedish Bikini Team.
They always stated that it was about the women, but really it was the fantasies they sold it. The one thing they have missed out on for years is the lingerie.
This is an opportunity for them to work with lingerie companies. At least this way "reader" will know what each model/actress is wearing and by that for their partners.
Just took her three decades.
The problem is that due to the new Puritan SJW "all male sex is bad"
All-male sex IS bad! If you're straight...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Was there an era where buying playboy was considered conservative and respectable?
We need more of these examples instead of bailouts. Keep up or get out.
Damn - now I will have to read it for the articles.
Was there an era where buying playboy was considered conservative and respectable?
We need a new time form for things that people now claim were ok back then ;-). I suspect than may now 50ish man will have bought Playboy 30 years ago, but only now realise that everyone did, and thus may be less prudish about it.
Stephan
With likes of apple dictating what can be put on the apple store (nudity bad) and playboy not wanting to maintain two editions, it makes sense financially for Playboy to streamlines its product lines.
stock prices for implant manufacturers dropped 50% today.
They are down from 4.5 million subscribers to 800,000.
Is it even note-worthy that they finally admit defeat?
Old farts everywhere are saying to themselves "golly, maybe it is time to learn how to work one of these com puter doohickies."
What are often missing from the porn images are the curves. The model's genitalia is presented very well, but the emotional reactions from pleasure and desire are often left out. The photography should emphasis more of the reproduction related measurements from the hip and waist in addition to the standard stuff , bring out the model affection to the one looking at her through the camera and create a story from the images. This can be made with or without the clothing, which, in addition to the make-up should also fit the story. I'm personally tired of looking a pink pussy surrounded by baby blue nail polish.
We dont read as much about his romances anymore. There was an interesting documentary a few years ago about how he regained control of the magazine after letting other people manage it for while and goign off directions he didnt like.
Thanks for explaining the joke, Captain.
Try just laughing and moving on next time instead of trying to prove how clever you aren't.
All-male sex IS bad! If you're straight...
Well...that's not exactly true. For hetro-women it's one of their biggest draws, same reason why women are the biggest consumers yaoi and slashfiction.
Om, nomnomnom...
jerking off to a hd display or jerking to a classy mag that has a centerfold... hmmm. and where will the pixels stick together. what about people who dont have internet? i remember the alure of classy pb when it was behind the counter at a drug store and thinking someday i might score one of those. or finding the mag thrown out in the trash by some person and thinking What a goldmine! just not the same sensation as alt.binaries meets jpg for sure. whats a parent going to discover when searching through your secret stash!!! lol just clear your browser history.
Playboy in Brazil is mostly models, sub-celebrities and even tv stars to its pages, so at least it has that incentive to keep selling magazines. Sure there is tons of porn and nudes on the internet, but not from these women we fantasize.
Playboy has been putting out monthly glossy "books" and other products (e.g. videos, etc.) of classy nudes for decades now, in addition to their flagship magazine. I suspect that it is just that magazine that is going PG, and that their other revenue streams from nudes will be preserved.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
... in the next half year.
Being nude in the Playboy is just about a badge of honor for a woman, and far from being shady these days. I can get a Playboy and read it / look at the pictures and people won't even turn a head or raise an eyebrow. You have upper class straight ladies reading the Playboy in public, if perhaps only for the articles, interviews and the jokes.
That all including todays generally favourable global public perception of the Playboy is pretty much a unique selling point.
I really don't get this decision and it probably makes no sense in the real world either.
Releasing less volumes perhaps and upping the quality a little more might have been a better move.
Or were they just talking about the US Playboy?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I notice than in our local newsagents it is still ok to buy explicit gay men's magazines. When did the naked female form become so shocking/upsetting that we have to hide from it in print form? Sure you can go and see it online, but it is somehow too disturbing for just *anyone* to see in print. I know that business is business, but I would argue that what this is actually doing is letting the bastards win. I mean the religious right, the stranger branches of the feminist movement (I am a big fan of those in favour of workplace equality, personal safety, freedom of expression and reproductive rights, I might add) and their ilk. Do we forget why we had the sexual revolution in the first place? I did not think that I would see a time like the again '50's in my lifetime, but there we are.
If there's anything I DON'T want to see, it's nude slashdotters.
The new SJWs are the anti-SJW crowd. For fuck's sake - Playboy is dying because you can watch women act out your most depraved fantasies and seemingly enjoy them for FREE!!!!
You need to get off your high horse and relax. Perhaps some free porn might help.
So having internet connected phones in teen hands has upset their business model to the point that they're dropping out of the pornography game altogether?
If teens looking at pornography via flashlight is where you get your money, seems to me that you've just admitted to some pretty serious criminal activity.
Yes, we all know that teens look at porn. I had plenty of those magazines when I was younger, but to admit that you have been intentionally putting porn into the hands of minors is a pretty dumb thing to do.
whats a parent going to discover when searching through your secret stash!!! lol just clear your browser history.
Nothing, which is why I run a transparent HTTP proxy, a DNS cache and block HTTPS, HTTP and DNS at the firewall on my home network.... You can run, but deleting the browser history won't let you hide unless you have pretty good network skills. If the son learns enough to bypass that setup, he's on his own, (and well on his way to a good paying job in IT).
$15 mo for 1 channel that does not have porn anymore?
HBO / MAX still has some and they have good TV shows and movies. With like 8+ channels.
I already had a subscription to Maxim that I cancelled after 6 months..... What makes Playboy think they have anything better to offer than Maxim? The non-explicit content in Playboy has been little more than pretentious garbage for a long time now. How do they think that they can compete in a market that already fills the void they are trying to jump into?
So after 60+ years Playboy is going to make themselves completely irrelevant?
As per the article, the Playboy website ditched nudity a while ago. The traffic to the site increased fourfold...
The key to understanding what they are doing is that they were always a lifestyle brand, nudity not even being the primary reason why people paid attention to them. That was just one aspect of forward thinking based around personal freedom they embraced.
Playboy is shedding nudity to reach a broader audience and it's plainly working. Too many these days want to shun expression of sexuality altogether, and Playboy is perfectly positioned to rebel against this prudish movement (currently led by feminists).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Try just laughing and moving on next time instead of trying to prove how clever you aren't
I don't think anyone has bought Playboy for the nudes in a long time. For over a decade, anyone literate bought Playboy for the articles. In the '70s, it was nice to check out Miss November, but by the time I was in college, and I found the stories by Nabokov, Marquez, DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and articles by the top essayists, journalists and fiction-writers in the world (and coincidentally found out about web porn), the nudes in Playboy had ceased to be much of a draw.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Don't need any nudie pics.
I only read it for the articles, you know.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Hugh Hefner handed top control spot of the company to his daughter Christie in 1988. She resigned on the 2008/2009 new year boundary.
The magazine's market performance has apparently been gradually declining since then, starting by dropping back to 11 issues per year in 2009. (What mix, if any, of Chistie leaving because the writing was already on the wall, the third generation's changes resulting in a slide, and/or other factors may be a good subject for a post-mortem analysis and publication, some time in the future.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I can't believe it took this long for some cuck to blame "SJWs" for this story.
MRAs, you are slipping. A story like this should have been an "all hands on deck" moment for you, and the best you can come up with is one pitiful anonymous coward who thinks this is "anti-masculinity".
You are welcome on my lawn.
LOL! As a poster above already mentioned, Playboy's ideal of female beauty was plastic, airbrushed bullshit. No man can ever have such a woman in reality because they don't exist.
Go to the appropriate GGW subbreddit of your choosing and you will find exactly the sort of beautiful real women than PB would never think to show you.
Obligatory: WoW "The Internet is for Porn"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Then again, the only thing more pathetic than buying Playboy for their tepid, over-airbrushed nudes would be Playboy with "clothed women in provocative poses"
Seriously, isn't that Maxim? Who the hell buys their circulation of 2.5 million?
-Styopa
You're gonna block all Internet access to your house pretty soon with a total block on HTTPS.
Also IT won't pay well under any circumstances for much longer, since Facebook and MS have fooled the US' politicians into believing in a "STEM shortage."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The SI swimsuit edition is always a blockbuster, even though there's no actual nudity (though lately it's become pretty darn close.)
So there's still a huge market of guys [I assume it's 99.99% guys] who pathetically pay to ogle sexy women in magazines, even if the women are partly clad.
What will be the difference between Playboy and Maxim (or any other Maxim clone) now?
Esquire was more racey pre Playboy. In response to Playboy, Esquire tuned down it prurient appeal and survived. Nothing new here just the usual course of the revolutionary becoming established and being displaced by the new revolution. Playboy may or may not survive but it is wise to try to adapt.
Hugh Hefner based Playboy on the idea of revealing the sexy side of "the girl next door." It was an innocent notion, part fantasy, part reality, presented with taste and class over several interesting decades of changing social values.
Well done, Hef. The internet has made you obsolete, but will never replace you.
Agreed.
Isn't the better approach to install a certificate on the clients that allows him to MITM the HTTPS connections? Don't corporate networks often do this?
Because they present men with feels?
"traitors"? Seriously? Whats gotten into the /. code?
I suspect than may now 50ish man will have bought Playboy 30 years ago
I'm in my 50s, and I have never bought Playboy (but did buy Hustler a few times). Straight porn is a must, for when I travel without my wife, but it's all digital movies nowadays...
For decades we've sworn we buy it just for the articles. Sales may actually improve with the last wives objection gone.
Without the expectation of nudity, no the forced lack of it, the parties will be a like a day at the beach. The vegas style pool parties will now always be better. oh so sad.
Yeah, I'm going to come right out and say it: Playboy has been on a fairly steady decline ever since Hef let his daughter start running the joint. They not only failed to gain a significant place in the online world, they also failed to deal with the wave of competition they had from the likes of Perfect 10 back in the 1980s.
If you look at any of their videos from the last 15 years or so, you'll want to slap their directors and cameramen and tell them to quit it with the artsy shit and actually hold a shot that shows bare breasts for more than five seconds at a time.
I wouldn't hire a man to run a women's magazine, and it's just as asinine to let a woman run a men's magazine.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It will open up a lot of new distribution channels for them. You'll see them up front in airports and reputable gas stations and the like. The brand is the main thing that will separate it from GQ type magazines, but you won't be a pervert for picking one up for the plane ride.
X
I wonder what role Sexting plays in all of this, are the teenagers of today too busy fapping over each other to worry about the airbrushed images of a print magazine?
Thanks for the mammaries.
I'm looking at you, The Oil Industry.
A better approach than blocking HTTPS in terms of surveillance effectiveness, yes :-P and many corporate networks indeed do this.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
She resigned on the 2008/2009 new year boundary.
Correction: Jan 31 2009
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I like how SJWs always respond with namecalling and mocking whenever accused of anything, instead of actually refuting anything that's said.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
"We're Playboy, and we're embracing our own irrelevance!"
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Playboy without nudes would be like Sports Illustrated without swimsuits. Wait, maybe I need to rephrase that.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"High end" porn like Playboy (used to) exist because they can afford to pay for the people we really want to see naked. Basically: Famous and real-life hot chicks... or generally people that otherwise wouldn't pose nude(*). You know, instead of the usual plague infested, fugly, fake (fake, everything), street-walker types that make mannequins look good that we see in typical porn.
(*) Come on ladies, you absolutely will never be hotter than you are in your early 20's; use it and profit or lose it; this is biology. This applies more to famous women than anyone else. Fucking hell, just make the god damn sex tape. I can't even count how many hot famous people I would have payed to see naked but are past my interest. Morons!
It's called "Goatse" and any other porno links someone can provide.
As a former investor in Playboy Enterprises, I got to see first-hand that the basic problem with the company is Hef. No matter what is on the masthead of the magazine, NO decision of any import happens without Hef signing off on it.
As the creator of the brand, certainly he is due some consideration.
But I have to be extremely blunt and say that Hef is simply out of touch with what readers wanted, and it's been this way for years. Hef has yes or no approval on every centerfold, so if it seems like a lot of them look similar, that's because Hef is choosing them. Even as editors stand there and offer up candidates, Hef has final say. Note that he has almost nothing else to do with the magazine, has no interest in financial stats and figures or reader feedback. If Hef wants a skinny blonde (and that is usually his type), Hef gets it. Month after month.
Taking this even farther, most years the magazine and website had reader voting to choose the Playmate of the Year. They make somewhat of a big deal about the voting process, at least online. None of it means anything. Hef has final say. He alone picks the PMOY. The editors can suggest their own ideas and they can present the public's vote. But Hef makes the call. End of story. It tends to be whatever playmate he is interested in that day. There is a lot more I can say about what keeps him interested, that but it's third party stuff. Some of the ladies have written their own books about it.
Hef meddles in other ways as well and it had been driving the editorial staff up a wall as they watch the magazine dying and the brand struggling and they cannot do anything about it.
The TV channel, oh god I don't even want to talk about it. It's a bunch of awful game shows.
Taking the company private a few years ago cutoff what little outside input there was. I got a nifty little Bunny logo pin as my thanks for being an investor and my shares were deemed worthless. I don't mind the loss of the money. I invested because I believed the company had huge growth potential if they simply monetized their unique brand. They've done some of it with fragrances and other novelties. They NEED to monetize the Playboy Bunny image, i.e. the Bunny girl. That is iconic and basically Playboy's alone the world over, except Japan where it's been embraced outside of Playboy. So there is an opportunity to take the brand and the bunny girl likeness global, as a sexy but safe image which Playboy can promote as uniquely theirs. Nah. Hef didn't want to hear it. They've done very little with it except for occasional publicity events, like putting a bunch of bunnies on a bus and driving them around Hollywood. Then they don't even promote it. How is THAT supposed to build the brand? These ladies look amazing and the costumes really show off what makes the brand unique. They need to be everywhere.
Fine. It's his company. I know.
I used to have a lifetime subscription to the magazine but I called them a couple years ago and had it stopped. It was getting my blood pressure up seeing some of the things that happened after the company went private.
The new editor, whom I do not know, has his work cut out for him. He got Hef to agree to this change. It is a good sign that he may in fact be allowed to reinvent things. I wish him well.
Sig for hire.
Playboy is rebranding itself into a Maxim clone.
If you can't beat them, join them. I hear prostitution is pretty profitable. That's the way to go.
As Playboy removes nudity from its magazines, subscriptions to National Geographic suddenly skyrockets! Or for those who can't afford National Geographic, there's always the Sears catalogue. :P Recall Moe on the Simpsons?
As a former Playboy photographer, I can attest to the change in Playboy in the past 20 years. It went from being a magazine that provided some of the most stunning figure photography of the most stunning females to average photography of mostly average females. I was once told by a snot nosed twenty-something photo editor that the image editing department could make a Polaroid photo look like it was shot by Pompeo Posar. So much for the hours spent getting perfect lighting, flawless makeup, and just the right poses. A bevy of Mac computers and Photoshop were the end of it. I can remember one centerfold that mysteriously lacked a navel, and another that had five fingers and a thumb, thanks to the Photoshop geniuses.
I can honestly say that I have never looked at an issue since quitting Playboy more than twenty years ago.
If you want nudity, at least there's still Playgirl.
As a 28-year-old male, I personally prefer the models from the 50s and 60s, and some from the early 70s. They have a certain charm about them.
The newer ones are all looks at no substance.
Well, there goes Playboy. Unless this is a joke?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Playboy has lost its focus. The appeal of the girl in the centerfold is that there was enough story and enough photos of her living her life (even if sometimes fabricated) for you to imagine her as someone you could actually meet in real life. The "girl next door" used to be a not-very-explicit photo series of someone you would want to get to know. But now Playmates, with the occasional exception, are as generic as blow-up dolls. As generic as --- porn on the internet. With which the magazine can't possibly compete.
It'll be interesting to see where they take this. If "no more nudes" means generic starlet wannabes only a little more covered up, they're not getting it, and readership will suffer further. Because let's face it, the articles are usually not worth reading.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If someone comes and starts complaining that there's a lizard conspiracy behind all governments, how do you refute that? They see proofs of their beliefs everywhere and won't be convinced. Anything is part of the conspiracy. So it's better to ignore them, or mock them if you want to have some fun.