Like Hugh Hefner’s Viagra prescription, eventually Playboy’s luck had to run out. With smartphones and laptops and cable TV proving to be a more discreet (and sanitary) alternative to a moldy back issue somebody’s best friend’s neighbor found behind a rotting log down by the sewage treatment plant, the need for print magazines to disseminate pictures of naked women to America’s adolescents has declined sharply in recent years. Thus, a spray-tanned, bikini-waxed, and airbrushed era has come to an end as The New York Times reports that as of March 2016, Playboy will no longer publish nude photographs.
The move is part of a redesign of the magazine that will leave just slightly more to the imagination, featuring “PG-13” pictures of women in “provocative” poses “more like the racier sections of Instagram”—somebody’s got to do it now that American Apparel is bankrupt, we guess—along with Playboy’s signature interviews, investigative reports, and short fiction. (Whether the magazine will still run a centerfold is unclear.) Playboy actually stopped running naked pictures on its website last summer, and saw an increase in traffic from four to 16 million visitors a month as a result. Presumably, the hope is to do the same for the magazine, which currently has a circulation of approximately 800,000, down from 5.6 million in 1975.
[via The Hollywood Reporter]