Opting Out

I once subscribed to Playboy Magazine.  I subscribed to the magazine for much of the 1990s and continued to do so until the early 2000s.  I enjoyed the articles.

Seriously, I did.

I was not alone in enjoying the magazine.  On occasion, I had to retrieve the magazine from my daughter’s room once she matured enough to appreciate and understand the articles presented—especially the in-depth interviews with important figures of the day.  My wife normally finished most of the articles before I did.  While most of the “men’s” magazines transformed into softcore and then hardcore pornography, Playboy held to a far less revealing form of nudity.

Playboy recently announced (with the blessings of Hugh Hefner himself) that the magazine will no longer feature photographs of fully nude women.  The pervasive nature of sex and nudity on the internet and in all other media has made the once provocative and revolutionary magazine passé.  This is an astounding change for a magazine that exploded onto the American (and world) stage in 1953 featuring nude photographs of Marilyn Monroe inside.

In a sense, Playboy is a victim of its own success in broadening the acceptance and demand for sex and nudity.

According to a story in the New York Times written by Ravi Somaiya, Playboy Magazine has seen circulation plunge from 5.6 million in 1975 to 800,000 at present.  The November 1972 issue sold over 7 million copies, making it the best-selling issue in the magazine’s history.  In August of last year Playboy’s website dispensed with nudity and saw unique user traffic jump from 4 million to 16 million per month.  More astoundingly, the average age of the readers dropped from 47 to just a bit over the age of 30.

That Playboy should opt out of nudity is no small shift.  In a very real sense—for better or worse—Playboy Magazine acted as the flagship fetching nudity into the American daylight.  Hugh Hefner pushed against censorship and fought to protect First Amendment rights.  The move to dispense with nudity is nothing less than provocative.

--Mitchell Hegman