'Playboy' to stop publishing nude photos

Mary Bowerman | USA TODAY Network

Show Caption Hide Caption Playboy magazine rated PG-13? After 62 years of naked women inside the magazine, starting March 2016 Playboy magazine will no longer publish nude photographs of women.

Opening a copy of Playboy magazine on an airplane or at a hair salon may no longer have people raising their eyebrows.

Playboy will no longer publish images of fully nude women in its magazine beginning this spring. The move comes as part of a redesign that will be unveiled next March, Playboy Enterprises, Inc., announced Tuesday. The magazine will still feature women in provocative poses, but they will no longer bare all when the March issue is released in February, according to a statement from Playboy.

The onslaught of Internet pornography has made the nude images in Playboy "passé," Scott Flanders, the company's chief executive, told the New York Times.

"That battle has been fought and won," Flanders told the newspaper. "You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free."

The new Playboy will continue to aim for a target audience of millennials between the ages of 18 and 30-something.

The move to robe the magazine's Playmates is similar to Playboy's digital strategy over the last few years. In 2013, the Playboy app was touted as a more work-friendly version of the magazine with "best articles" and non-nude images. Likewise, a 2015 app implemented the same strategy with a mobile-first focus on the magazine's written content.

When Playboy.com re-launched sans nudity in 2015, the publication said in a statement that "tens of millions of readers" continued to come to the "non-nude website and app every month for, yes, photos of beautiful women, but also for articles and videos from our humor, sex and culture ... sections." Since launching the new site, the median age of visitors has "shrunk from 47 to 30-years of age," according to the company.

While publishing has ebbed and flowed throughout the magazine's lifetime, as with most print publications numbers have steadily declined over the past few decades. According to Alliance for Audited Media, the magazine sold 5.6 million in 1975 and has dropped to about 800,000 today, the Times reported.

Gallery: Playboy through the years

The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, and featured Marilyn Monroe on the cover. The centerfolds in the magazine have been a sort of rite-of-passage for many young men, and the company notes that it may be a "risk" to go "non-nude."

"This is a company ... that has risk in its DNA ... Our journalism, art, photos and fiction have challenged norms, defied expectations and set a new tone for decades. So we say: Why stop now," Playboy staff wrote in an online post.

On social media, many questioned the move away from publishing photos of nude women. Others, noted that those who have said they only read the magazine for "the articles," will now be telling the truth.

husbands the world over have some how convinced everyone at playboy they really do just read it for the articles — k e e t (@KeetPotato) October 13, 2015

BREAKING: Playboy to stop publishing nude pictures, leaving men with only 79,895,442 places to access photos of naked women — Rex Huppke (@RexHuppke) October 13, 2015

Playboy no longer printing nude photos is the equivalent of Instagram no longer allowing latte art pictures. — Adam Besvinick (@Besvinick) October 13, 2015

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