Playboy, the magazine, has made an announcement that has made many sit up and take notice. It will stop featuring photos of nude women.
The magazine, about which a judge once ruled that denying blind people a Braille version of it violated their First Amendment rights, has seen its circulation drop from 5.6 million in 1975 to about 800,000 now, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. Many of the magazines that followed it have disappeared, reported New York Times. Many of those that remain exist in severely diminished form, available mostly in specialist stores. Penthouse, perhaps the most famous Playboy competitor, responded to the threat from digital pornography by turning even more explicit. It never recovered, said NY Times.
Following the announcement reactions on social media came quick and fast. E.Q.Taft wrote in Snopes under the thread Wabbit Twobles,” To me, this is a little like a cooking magazine announcing that it’s going to stop running those silly recipes.”
Crius of CoH wrote,”I’ve never been a Playboy reader, except in the traditional “12 year old kid steals some from his dad’s ‘hidden’ collection” kind of way, but, Playboy was, in it’s first couple of decades at least, considered a style guide for men, kind of like GQ. If you wanted to be a ‘playboy’, you could turn to Playboy and get suggestions on clothing, music, stereo equipment, drinks to stock your home bar, recipes for drinks, etc. etc. It wasn’t just a nudie magazine. And it really never was, though that’s what people tend to focus on. It was something of an honor for a writer to have a short story published in Playboy; you can find paperback anthologies of Playboy science fiction stories, for example. So going more “Maxim” style in the pictorial content is, in some very basic ways, not really altering some of the “why” of buying a Playboy… for certain readers, at least.”
“Don’t get me wrong, 12-year-old me is very disappointed in current me. But it’s the right thing to do.” — Cory Jones, a top editor at Playboy, wrote on facebook, about the magazine’s decision to dispense with nudity, for cultural and business reasons.
Rizvi Traverse Management, an investment firm founded by Suhail Rizvi, who has interests in Twitter, Square and Snapchat among others, owns over 60 percent of Playboy. Mr. Hefner owns about 30 percent (some shares are held by Playboy management). In August of last year, Playboy’s website dispensed with nudity. As a result, Playboy executives said, the average age of its reader dropped from 47 to just over 30, and its web traffic jumped to about 16 million from about four million unique users per month.
All the changes have been tested in focus groups with an eye toward attracting millennials — people between the ages of 18 and 30-something, highly coveted by publishers. The magazine will feature visual artists, with their work dotted through the pages, in part because research revealed that younger people are drawn to art.
Playboy.com gave us a preview of what the magazien is planning for 2016.
Lane Williams Wooten wrote on Playboy’s facebook page, “Waiting around to see how many people think these are the actual covers…..”