Less than two years after announcing to much fanfare that it was ending the tradition of featuring nude pictorials on its pages, Playboy announced yesterday that it’s bringing back the nudity:
Playboy is returning to the bare essentials.
A year after the famed but struggling men’s magazine stopped featuring photographs of naked women, it has apparently had a change of heart. From now on, women will shed much of the scanty clothing that had been covering them up.
The next issue, which hits newsstands at the end of the month, will feature women who are topless and almost fully exposed. (Think strategically placed leaf, hand or leg.)
Cooper Hefner, a son of the Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, signaled the change in a Twitter post on Monday: “I’ll be the first to admit that the way in which the magazine portrayed nudity was dated, but removing it entirely was a mistake,” he said in a quotation superimposed over a photograph of himself. “Nudity was never the problem because nudity isn’t a problem. Today we’re taking our identity back and reclaiming who we are.”
Playboy announced in October 2015 that it would stop publishing images of naked women, seeking to attract more advertisers and secure better placement on newsstands. For the past year, women in the magazine were not shown topless, and there was no explicit nudity.
Cooper Hefner, who returned to Playboy last year as its chief creative officer, had been openly critical of the magazine’s decision to ban nudes. In an interview last February with Business Insider, he said in no uncertain terms that he thought the choice did not make sense.
“When you have a company, and the founder is responsible for kick-starting the sexual revolution, and then you pluck out that aspect of the company’s DNA by removing the nudity, it makes a lot of people, including me, sit and say, ‘What the hell is the company doing?’” he said.
As The Washington Post notes, the effort to rebrand the magazine as something other than what it has been from the day Hugh Hefner founded it wasn’t very well received from the start:
Playboy’s first issue without nude photos came out in February 2016, ending a more than six-decade run of glossy centerfolds featuring young women baring it all. The magazine still featured “sexy, seductive pictorials of the world’s most beautiful women, including its iconic Playmates,” as Playboy put it at the time. Generally speaking, the goal was to attract a younger demographic of readers and more mainstream advertisers.
The move was met with a mix of ridicule and confusion.
“Old Playboy was a lifestyle bible,” BuzzFeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen jabbed. “Current Playboy is a caricature of itself.”
Bringing back nudity may not solve all the magazine’s problems, Samir Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi, told the Associated Press on Monday.
“The people who grew up with Playboy magazine are starting to fade away,” Husni said, “so they will have to figure out what the millennial generation wants in the 21st century if they are going to survive.”
In a post on the Playboy website, Hefner outlined a “new Playboy philosophy,” in which he suggested that the decision to embrace nudity again was partly rooted in the country’s political and cultural climate. He ticked off a list of “collective accomplishments” from the past few years: the election of the first “mixed-race” president (his term), a Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization in some places, the nomination of a woman by a major political party.
“But after so much progress,” Hefner wrote, “our hard-won victories are in peril. Just as the social and political pendulum had swung in liberals’ favor, as history has shown time after time, the pendulum swings back.”
The current climate, Hefner said, is out of step with Playboy’s “tradition of tenaciously advocating for civil liberties and freedom of expression.”
“One thing is clear that both my dad and I understand at its simplest form, and that is what Playboy and the United States strive to represent in their greatest forms: freedom,” Hefner wrote.
The company announced other changes to the magazine as well, including the fact that the “Entertainment For Men” tag that had been on the cover for decades would be dropped as part of a broader effort to market the magazine and the brand beyond people who are drawn to it because of the pictorials. Additionally, from the descriptions that have been released, it appears that the return of nudity to the pages of Playboy doesn’t necessarily mean a return to the way things were prior to February of last year. Rather than the full-frontal nudity that was a part of the magazines in recent decades, these pictorials will at least at first feature topless women who are obviously nude but without the full-front shots that were common in centerfolds until last year. How long that will last is an open question, of course, since it seems apparent that the magazine is willing to admit that it made a mistake in making such a radical change in format. In the end, demand and the expectations of those who still purchase Playboy will likely force them to return to the way things were in the past, especially since it’s apparent that toning down the sexuality didn’t do very much to spare the magazine from the same fate that print magazines of all types are suffering in the wake of the rise of the Internet. Indeed, given the widespread availability of nude images, and more explicit material, that are available for free on the Internet, one wonders if this will do anything at all to stem the tide of what seems like the inevitable continued fading away of print magazines much in the same manner that cable news and online news outlets have hit the print newspaper business.
Whatever the future holds, though, it’s clear that this was an experiment that ended in failure, something I hinted about when the announcement was made back in 2015:
The real question, of course, is whether this move, which is obviously being done as much to draw attention to the magazine as anything else, will be enough to revive a floundering magazine. Even taking into account the fact that Playboy has continued to be source of the kind of writing that distinguished it from other “men’s” magazines from almost its beginning, the competitive pressures of online content will remain and it’s hard to see how this move will do much to boost the magazines sagging circulation numbers, which now stand somewhere near 800,000 copies per year after having reached over 5,000,000 per month at its peak. Just as there are plenty of places out there to find pictures of nude women, there are plenty of places to find quality writing and reporting. So, starting in March we will find out whether it really is true that people only read Playboy for the articles.
Of course the bad news is that, once again, you can’t claim that you’re just reading Playboy for the articles.
