Why Playboy Is Saying Goodbye to Nude Photos (and why I have mixed feeling about that)

Playboy magazine’s editorial team has just announced they will no longer be featuring nudity.

I know what you’re thinking: “Um, what’s a magazine?”

Playboy just had its 62nd birthday this month. On October 1, 1953, the 27-year-old Hugh Hefner incorporated HMH Publishing Co., and just a couple months later, the first edition of Playboy magazine was published—with none other than the iconic Marylyn Monroe gracing its cover.

At the time, Hefner (“Hef”) didn’t even know whether his magazine would survive. But survive it did. The first issue sold out within weeks. Hef, 89, is now a self-made millionaire. The Playboy brand is now one of the most recognized in the world. Playboy Enterprises has spawned its own premium cable channel, whole network of pay-per-view channels, and a host of of websites. Its activist arm, the Playboy Foundation, has donated more than $20 million to fight censorship and promote research on human sexuality.

For many, this recent no-nudes move by Playboy seems out of step. In reality, it couldn’t make more business sense, and it’s hardly a win for those who support conservative sexual ethics.

The Mainstreaming of Pornography

A lot has changed in 62 years.

Pornography used to be a cultural taboo, an underground industry, but with Playboy came the first example of porn distributed through the main channels of American capitalism. And this was part of the commercial genius of Playboy. Hef created not just a pornographic magazine but a “lifestyle” magazine for upwardly mobile men. He created an identity for them—the image of the playboy. It was a magazine filled with articles about how to mix cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, how to set the mood with music, and how to engage a woman in quiet discussion about Picasso, philosophy, jazz, and, of course, sex. All of this pretense was placed alongside pictures of naked women. Thus the mainstreaming of adult media was born.

Today we live in a world where pornography is now largely accepted, especially by Millennials. According to a 2007 study among college students, 66.5% of young men and 48.7% of young women say viewing pornographic materials is an acceptable way to express one’s sexuality. Moreover, just as pornography has become normalized, so ordinary films, television, theater, music, and advertising have become more porn-like. Brian McNair of the Queensland University of Technology calls this “the pornographication of the mainstream.”

For all the jokes about “reading Playboy for the articles,” the magazine already boasts an impressive history of interviews from culture leaders: jazz legend Miles Davis, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., reclusive film director Stanley Kubrick, movie critics Siskel and Ebert, Apple founder Steve Jobs, and Beatles legend John Lennon. Award-winning writers have written for the magazine over the years, including children’s author Roald Dahl, James Bond‘s Ian Flemming, journalist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Fahrenheit 451‘s Ray Bradbury.

In other words, Playboy has always been a lifestyle magazine. Pornographic, yes, but the heart and soul of the magazine has always been to promote the life of the playboy—a life of sex, style, and pop intellectualism. The photos were, of course, what kept consumers coming back—which is what kept sponsors happy—but it was the magazine’s messaging and style that made it the bridge between pop culture and porn.

The Death of the Porno Mag

Playboy Enterprises CEO Scott Flanders says the political and sexual climate has dramatically changed in the last 62 years—and so has technology. “We are more free to express ourselves politically, sexually and culturally today, and that’s in large part thanks to Hef’s heroic mission to expand those freedoms,” Flander’s commented. Playboy has now been outdone by the changes it spearheaded—porn magazines are thing of the past. “That battle has been fought and won,” said Flanders. “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”

The new magazine will feature what they call more accessible and less airbrushed “PG-13” photos. It will have more a collectible look and feel, targeting urban young adult men. Sort of like Vice magazine, says Flanders, except “we’re going after the guy with a job.”

This recent move reflects the changing times. Way down from its peak subscriber base of 5.6 million in 1975, Playboy now has only 800,000. In some way, Playboy magazine is lucky its still around, since many nudity-filled “lads mags” have died in recent years—Nuts, Zoo Weekly, Gear, Front, and Loaded, to name a few.

It was only last year Playboy Enterprises decided to rebrand its website as a safe-for-work site and immediately saw explosive growth, averaging a 400% increase in monthly unique visitors and lowering the median age of its visitors from 47 to 30. Doing this allowed for greater sharability on social media, and so far this tactic has been working.

The magazine is now following suit in the hopes of resurrecting some of its former glory—and, of course, doing so in an age which might be very ripe for its messages.

Why This Isn’t a Moral Victory

It has been said that the real problem with pornography isn’t that it shows us too much sex, but that it doesn’t show us enough—enough of what real sex actually is. When you boil down the human person and sexual expression into a two-dimensional collection of pixels, this isn’t a celebration of sex. Instead, we are cheapening it. This is at the heart of why Judeo-Christian folks like me are opposed to porn—not because we hate sex but because we think its just too good be commercialized.

With these values in mind, what can we say about Playboy‘s changes? No doubt, having less crude and nude photos in the world is good for the human race, but there are several reasons why this isn’t exactly a victory for those with more conservative perspective.

1. This will only serve to boost the Playboy brand.

This rebranded image is, in some fashion, exactly what a “matured” Playboy would naturally look like in today’s sexualized culture. There’s no sense in trying to recreate the envelope-pushing magazine of yesteryear or trying to compete with hardcore video material available for free online. The porn industry, thanks in large part to Playboy, won the culture war already, and now they can bask in it.

Only time will tell how well Playboy‘s distribution will be impacted, but I think they have more than a fair shot at becoming the magazine they’ve always dreamed of being—a mainstream publication that promotes the playboy philosophy. As a progenitor of the Sexual Revolution, Playboy‘s brand has the benefit of more than half a century of nostalgia to buttress its business goals. Unlike the lads mags of our own day, Playboy Enterprises has always been more than just a juvenile fixation on prolonged adolescence and naked women. It is, at its heart, a consumer’s magazine—the naked girls are just one of the high priced commodities being sold to a class of lascivious, professional bachelors.

And like a good consumer’s magazine, if done well, it stands to make a lot of money.

2. This will inject Playboy content and messaging into an already pornographic youth culture.

The idea that Playboy would try to make itself more palatable to a younger crowd shouldn’t be a shock to anyone, but with this change, Playboy will likely be able to more easily market itself indirectly to underage consumers.

Now, this is nothing new for Playboy—the same magazine that featured the cartoon image of scantily-clad Marge Simpson on its cover back in 2009, the same business that had their mansion featured in the children’s movie Hop in 2011, and the same company that has placed its recognizable bunny-head logo on products attractive to children (Playmate Pink glitter cream and Bunny Pink lipstick are big hits with preteen girls).

3. This will serve as a clever cover for Playboy’s perverted past.

Saying Playboy has a perverse past is not to suggest its current plans are somehow innocent—far from it. Rather, as one might expect of a magazine that treats women like sexual trophies, Playboy‘s libido has taken its readers in very dark directions.

In the past, Playboy loved to eroticize the vulnerability of youth. In 1984, the U.S. Department of Justice funded a study examining the images of children in popular pornographic magazines. Over 3,000 child images, such as photos or cartoons, were found on the pages of Playboy, and 14% of these featured children in a happy or neutral sex scene with adults, implying incest or molestation. Most children portrayed were between six and eleven years of age. Moreover, more than 30% of Playboy images overall were found to be designed as “child magnets.”

This should hardly come as a surprise when we look back at what fueled Hefner’s creation of his magazine in the first place. Hef credits the work of Dr. Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s, which changed his whole perception of sex.

For anyone familiar with Dr. Kinsey’s work, he hardly needs (or deserves) introduction, but for those of us fortunate not to know, Kinsey’s influence on the field of sexology can hardly be overestimated. Kinsey’s work in the field of human sexuality was not only fraudulent but frightening. Up to 2,034 children were used in Kinsey’s experiments, though many are unaccounted for in the official research documents. Some children—even those documented in his books—were as young as 4 years old.

This was the deviant research that moved Hef to create a magazine that championed a new sexual ethic. He called himself “Kinsey’s Pamphleteer”—and indeed, that is exactly what he became.

4. Nudity isn’t the only way promote a misogynist message.

This new Maxim-for-professionals type of Playboy will hardly be a step in the right direction.

Psychologists from the University of Surrey and Middlesex University did an experiment where they took quotes about women from convicted rapists and then took quotes from men’s lifestyle magazines. They asked participants to label which ones came from sex offenders and which ones came from the men’s magazines, and most people could not distinguish the sources of the quotes. At best they were just guessing.

This is because the messaging of these kinds of magazines is clear, regardless how much nudity is present: women are objects to be used for the pleasure of men.

What Is a Playboy?

The move away from nudity in Playboy is, of course, a big shift in the identity of the magazine. But I will be saving my applause.

After all, what is a playboy? Before the word was associated with the brand, it was chiefly defined as a man who lives a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of pleasure. Regardless of how they do it—whether it is through nude centerfolds or pop intellectual drivel—the world doesn’t need more hedonist men. At least not more like Hef.