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Playboy Drops Nudity As Internet Fills Demand

Posted by timothy on from the staying-classy dept.

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.

5 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Going out of business ... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Going out of business ... by jason.sweet · · Score: 3, Insightful

      the standards that Playboy has traditionally airbrushed in

    2. Re:Going out of business ... by cdrudge · · Score: 4, Insightful

      the quality of the women in online porn videos is rarely, if ever, up to the standards that Playboy has traditionally upheld.

      Standards? Maybe that was true a decade or two or more ago. Any more pictures are so heavily airbrushed/photoshopped/whatever that the picture is just an digital artist's representation of the actual person. The only standard that is there is not real.

      Spend some time in a gonewild subreddit or an amateur photographer's portfolio that includes nudes and you'll see far more beautiful women of all different shapes and sizes then what's ever appeared in Playboy, often with little or no retouching.

  2. You really, really need to RTFA by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

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    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  3. Sports Illustrated by dskoll · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.