Playboy, the magazine that made oodles of boys literally come of age and Hugh Hefner rich enough to justify to his being a serial bigamist of women young enough to be his granddaughters, is to drop its nude images of women.
But it’s not through a change of heart about the decency of having a magazine full of clothed men being funny and intelligent and women only present to be naked and coy. Nor is it because it’s sort of debasing to consistently compare women to bunnies because, as Hugh once said: ‘It’s a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping – sexy. First it smells you, then it escapes, then it comes back, and you feel like caressing it, playing with it. A girl resembles a bunny. Joyful, joking.’
The change of heart is simply because internet porn is the male spaff-manual of choice these days. It means sales of* Playboy* have dropped from 5.6 million in the 1970s to 800,000 nowadays. Another factor contributing to the demise of the brand could be the fact it doesn’t do the hard-hitting journalism and groundbreaking interviews it used to back in the day.
The decision to drop nudes – but still feature provocative images of women – came after a meeting held last month that 89-year-old editor-in-chief Hefner attended.
In a report in *The New York Times, *chief executive Scott Flanders said: ‘That battle has been fought and won. You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passe at this juncture.’
Oddly enough, since dropping the nudes to escape social media censorship, Playboy’s website is in fact flourishing. Plus, with so many celebrities putting their nudes up for free on Instagram under the guise of #freethenipple, the most bloke-friendly feminist hashtag there ever was, maybe it’s easier to just report on those with a strategic blurring out of the nipple than to actually pay the celeb to go naked!
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
Picture: David Westing
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.