Playboy To Stop Showing Nude Women

Trending News: End Of An Era As Playboy Banishes Naked Women From Its Pages

Why Is This Important?

Because whether you love or loathe it, a cultural touchstone is changing for good.

Long Story Short

Playboy will stop publishing images of naked women. You read that correctly. Playboy will stop publishing images of naked women. This is not a drill.

Long Story

In a headline that could surely only be ripped from The Onion, Playboy is set to cease publishing images of naked women. That’s right: Playboy, the magazine that basically made everyone realize they were really, really into the nudes, will no longer be about the nudes.

The New York Times reported overnight on the bold plan from the magazine’s chief content officer, Cory Jones, and backed by editor-in-chief Hugh Hefner. And the more you read into the story, the more it makes sense. 1) Pornography, and the type that is much, much harder than you’ll ever find in Playboy, is now only one click away (and it’s usually free), and 2) Playboy needs to family-friend its business so it can actually turn some clicks online.

via GIPHY

The Times reports that the magazine’s physical circulation has dropped from 5.6 million at its peak in the mid-70s, when it was one of only a handful of rodeos in town, to just 800,000 in 2015. Those numbers are unsustainable, but the pick-up in web traffic hasn’t been enough to offset the decline — well not until August, when Playboy.com dispensed with the nudity and witnessed a whopping quadrupling of traffic.

So, what will the magazine look like? Well, something along the lines of GQ and Men’s Style, by the sounds of it. Fashion, liquor, interviews and in-depth features. Women will still feature, but in decidedly more PG-13 presentations.

Key, of course, is that despite its lagging magazine sales, Playboy is one of the most recognizable brands in the world. Jones and Hefner want to cash in on that prominence. And that’s where this move makes sense (compared to Penthouse, anyway, who as the NYT points out, tried to go all hardcore and dropped the ball), aligning the physical publication with a brand that already does a roaring international trade in clothing, fragrances and jewellery, among other merchandise.

Still, that nagging question remains: is this really the way forward? Perhaps the choicest quote from the NYT piece comes courtesy of Taschen editor, Dian Hanson, when he said 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?”

I guess we're about to find out. Check out the full New York Times story here.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question

Will this succeed? Because there might be a few copycats if it does.

Disrupt Your Feed

Is Playboy just a symptom of the wider problem of the porn industry eating itself, popularizing a medium (the internet) that has ultimately undercut its business model?

Drop This Fact

Playboy did not put a date on the cover of the first issue of the magazine in case there was never a second.