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Playboy Is Featuring Naked Women Again -- After Dropping Nudity a Year Ago Due To the Internet (nypost.com)

mi quotes a report from New York Post: The 63-year-old legendary men's magazine is bringing back nude models in its upcoming issue -- one year after banning naked photos in an effort to boost circulation and attract more mainstream advertisers. That effort obviously has failed. One of the main reasons why Playboy dropped nudity in the first place was because the internet filled the demand. Ravi Somaiya reports in the New York Times, "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 issues published under the no-nudes policy, which featured both scantily clad models and could-be naked women with strategic parts of their body covered up, will all change with the March/April issue now hitting newsstands. The issue trumpets the change with a cover headline: "Naked is normal."

10 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Free by quonset · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Has anyone here ever actually paid for porn?

    Companies wouldn't still be in business if people didn't.

  2. Glad they made amends by hambone142 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When I was young, my uncle left a Playboy Magazine at our house. I saw it and my mother said "go ahead and look at it, the people in them are all the same".

    No, they weren't. Even today, I have never seen a woman that is "the same".

    When a kid/teenager can't get the real thing, good ol' Playboy did the job. It opened the wonder of women and all of their "parts" that I had never seen before. It was good old home entertainment. I wore out some pages on my favorite issues (no, they didn't get stuck together but they came close.... oops, pardon the pun).

    When I read that Playboy eliminated the nudes, I couldn't believe it.

    I'm glad they went back to their roots.

    1. Re:Glad they made amends by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Sounds like you still haven't been laid... :)

    2. Re:Glad they made amends by Mashiki · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Anonymous Slashdot troll plays sports, gets pussy, tonight on Shit That Never Happened!

      Just because you weigh the size of a small calf, and smell of bitter cheese. Doesn't mean some of us, even with crippling injuries don't get out and play hockey a couple of times a week.

      Jabbing aside, the main reason why playboy dumped nudes was because they put a new "feminist editor" in who knew exactly what was needed for the magazine. And people stopped buying. GQ another men's magazine has for the last couple of years been pulling a "it's all white mens faults" bullshit after they put the same type of asshole in place, needless to say they're not doing very good. It's not limited to print, sites like Esquire are doing the same. And again, suffering for it. People don't like identity politics, and they even less like it when said identity politics tells one particular group of people they're responsible for *all* of the worlds ills and they're all rapists.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
    3. Re:Glad they made amends by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Ah, of course it was somehow a feminists fault...

      Actually it's just part of the general decline of magazines and of adult magazines in particular. There is an infinite supply of free smut on the internet, and sales of non-pornographic "lads mags" full of bikini clad women are falling too as we reach a kind of saturation, Most of them turned to novelty a while back, featuring celebrity exclusives as a way to provide something that the internet can't, but of course the images were circulated instantly.

      Playboy might be able to survive by evolving into something that people really want to read. Seems like nudity is a part of that, even if it limits the audience somewhat (can't really read it on that long flight).

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Re:Naked is normal?! by geek · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm sorry, but naked women are anything but natural.

    What fucking planet do you come from where being naked isn't natural? Are people on your planet born in scuba gear or something?

  4. Re:One thing still wrong... by cayenne8 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And just wait till after a kid or two if you want to see a 'real woman's body...

    Err...who wants to see that?!?!

    LOL, but seriously, guys are visual beings, they want to see and react to beautiful women which in general is not the majority of the female population.

    Hell, its getting worse and worse today, as that it is getting to where a majority of modern females not only are overweight and obese, but we are NOW actually telling everyone "this is ok"...and they're believing it.

    It is NOT ok to be obese, and not for the sake of aesthetics, BUT for health concerns.

    The looking hot part is just gravy that goes along with being fit and not fat.

    --
    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
  5. Re:Free by MBGMorden · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes. Not directly for quite a few years, but even in modern times I'll tip girls on cam sites and such. Not huge amounts (probably no more than $20 per month in total), but I try to support the content I like in some way. I also subscribe to a few Twitch streamers and am a Patreon of a handful of Youtubers.

    If you don't, eventually the content goes away.

    That said, while I think they'll certainly sell more issues with nudes, the whole concept of nude vs non-nude isn't Playboy's problem. The problem is that it's a magazine. While people might still be willing to pay for content, they're not willing to pay for content in that particular format anymore.

    To a large degree I the shift the in the market is just making huge companies with a big staff just not profitable. Sure some things like a blockbuster movie is hard to do at home, but what Playboy is selling can be provided by any pretty girl with a camera in her bedroom. She can provide the product with a LOT less overhead than a huge company.

    --
    "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  6. The reaon being... by OpenSourced · · Score: 3, Insightful

    One of the main reasons why Playboy dropped nudity in the first place was because the internet filled the demand

    Like the Internet didn't fill the demand for news and opinion articles.

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    Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
  7. Re:Off the rails for years by Baron_Yam · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Playboy Clubs should have been so entrenched in our culture that Hooters never happened. You'd have to tier the branding, but it should have been done.

    Same thing with Maxim - it never should have launched because Playboy should already have owned the space. Instead of taking their magazine no-nude, they should have had a 'skimpy clothing' variant years ago. (If they did, I never heard of it so that's a different kind of fail)

    Basically, if you are a guy with money in your pocket, you should have been seriously tempted to peruse a Playboy Men's Health magazine at lunch, eat dinner at a Playboy restaurant, and go for drinks at a Playboy bar and maybe later on go to a Playboy night club. While wearing Playboy cuff links.

    And women should have had 'Playboy for women' (Not Playgirl) as a Cosmo-alternative to let them know '6 tricks in bed to please your Playboy' or something.

    SO much marketing potential wasted.