Why Playboy hopes no nudes is good news
'Lifestyle' magazine eschews naked photos after decades, its critics say, of degrading women
No nudes is good news, Playboy is hoping.
Since its first issue 62 years ago featuring an unclothed Marilyn Monroe, the distinguishing feature of the magazine, founded by the flamboyant and peculiar Hugh Hefner, has been women disrobed.
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But no more. Playboy announced Tuesday that as of its March 2016 edition, which will hit newsstands in February, it will no longer carry photographs of anyone in the full flesh.
"The political and sexual climate of 1953, the year Hugh Hefner introduced Playboy to the world, bears almost no resemblance to today," Playboy Enterprises CEO Scott Flanders said in a statement on the company's website.
"You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it's just passé at this juncture," he told the New York Times, through which the magazine first announced the news. Flanders himself had telegraphed the no-nudity idea nearly a year ago.
But can the publication that built its brand in large part by baring the bosoms (and other parts) of celebrities like Bo Derek, Madonna, Sharon Stone and Naomi Campbell survive without the show-alls? Will people (mostly men) still subscribe to see A-listers if they're wearing G-strings?
"It seems pretty desperate, frankly. Take away the naked girls, what really do you have left?" wondered Mike Edison, a former correspondent and editor for various U.S. pin-up publications and author of Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!, a history of the genre.
"For years, Hugh Hefner has been saying, 'We're not a sex magazine, we're a lifestyle magazine,' but we know that's not true. It's an illusion, and it was always a great gimmick."
Circulation falling
The magazine, like nearly all periodicals, has suffered declining print circulation, from a single-issue peak of about seven million in the 1970s to less than one million today.
Struggling to counter that by growing its online readership, it eliminated nudity from its web presence last year. That allowed its bowdlerized content to be distributed to audience-multiplying social-media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram that normally censor explicit images.
The company says those changes triggered an "explosive," fourfold growth in its online audience and shifted its typical reader's age down to 30 from 47, considered a more lucrative demographic for advertisers.
The problem is, without the nudity, Playboy's mix of in-depth interviews and aspiringly urbane articles — on anything from Cubism to, somewhat self-referentially, feminist icon Naomi Wolf's analysis of pornography — might leave little to distinguish it from longtime mainstays of the so-called lad mag genre like GQ, Details and Esquire.
Meanwhile, its still-sultry photographs of women in sexually inviting poses will have it competing with Maxim and FHM.
"How long is it going to be before 'the boobs are back'?" Edison wondered.
Playboy Enterprises may also not even care about profitability at its magazine, which reportedly loses about $4 million a year. The real moneymakers these days are its branded products and licensing deals, for everything from shower gel, cologne and jewelry to the PlayboyTV network and global chain of Playboy Clubs.
The privately held company told CNBC earlier this year that global retail revenues are $1.9 billion — one-third of it from China where pornography, and thus Playboy magazine, are illegal.
'Weirdo and a fetishist'
Meanwhile, to the magazine's critics, its new PG rating culminates an inescapably sordid history of disempowering women with its portrayals of them — whether they're in sexually compliant Playboy bunny outfits, in degrading postures or otherwise.
"I always have considered him a weirdo and a fetishist, and no good for women," U.S. author and feminist Susan Brownmiller, who wrote the influential 1975 book about rape Against Our Will, said of Hefner in an interview Tuesday.
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(Brownmiller appeared on The Dick Cavett Show with Hefner in 1970, calling him "my enemy" and saying he had built an empire based on oppressing women. When he remonstrated, she retorted, to applause from the audience: "The day that you are willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end…")
She rejected Hefner's oft-asserted mantra that Playboy deserves laurels for having helped incite the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
"It's ridiculous. I don't know who considers him a hero, or [Penthouse magazine founder Bob] Guccione, or [Hustler founder] Larry Flynt. But they made a lot of money."
One of Brownmiller's contemporaries, Harvard and University of Michigan legal scholar and anti-pornography campaigner Catharine MacKinnon, said Playboy had served as the "entering wedge for the pornography industry" for decades. But the technology of the internet has enabled that industry to "saturate society with free nude women," rendering Playboy's platform obsolete.
MacKinnon said in an email that it could be a chance for Hefner's creation to grow in a different direction.
"Playboy magazine, at least in print, will now build on its strengths in politics and literature and actually contain free speech — which is welcome and long overdue. When someone says they subscribe to it for the articles, you can believe them."