A few decades back full nudity was considered to be unacceptable and shameless. That was until the first issue of Playboy Magazine appeared back in 1953. Then, people realized that nudity is not necessarily bad in itself and people begun to become more and more interested in picturing the beauty of the human body. Of course, thing did not stop at Playboy, the nudes started taking over the place. There were a great number of men’s lifestyle magazines that started printing nude pictures. And then came the internet and it seems that it really took over the sex industry.
As Playboy representative stated, everyone is now only a mouse click away from any kind of sexual act they would like to see. So nude pictures shown in magazines have lost a lot of their value. It’s easier for internet users to access a porn site than buy a magazine. It’s free and it also offers millions of options instead of only a few pictorials a month. This is why Playboy decided to drop nudity and turn both the printed magazine and their website into a more accessible version of the famous magazine. Content, not nudity will the center element of the Playboy from now on.
This is not entirely new, since Playboy already made some changes in the past few years and started to include content that was safe for work. Also, nude pictures were eliminated from the website starting 2014. After this move, the medium age of Playboy readers dropped from 47 to 30. An there was also an increase in the number of website visitors. But still, who would have thought that Playboy, the poster boy of nudity will ever turn away from it? Of course, there will still be a Playmate of the month section, but it definitely won’t be as explicit as Playboy issues used to be in the past.
Since internet porn is widely available, it seems that people are not interested anymore in the nude pictures Playboy had to offer. This is why we think that the decision to focus on content rather than nudity might be a solution to save Playboy. If Hugh Hefner is also on board with the change, it means that nudity as we know it through the first men’s magazine is now officially history. Whether the fact that internet porn is widespread enough to kill off the magazines that used to be globally sold is a good thing or not is still debatable. What do you prefer? A good old fashioned Playboy pictorial, or the free internet porn available?