Playboy Without Nudity: Does This Mean No More Secret Stash?
Don’t grasp your pearls just yet, dear. I think Playboy will be even sexier.
By Alexa Day
I’ve often said that I’ll know I’ve made it when I get a Playboy interview.
So I wasn’t really sure how I felt about the news that Playboy is about to stop publishing nude photos in its print editions. (That transition has already occurred online.)
Don’t misunderstand me, now. My appearance in Playboy was never going to include the nude pictorial. As freewheeling as I am, nudity is a hard limit for me. The rest of the world can be as naked as they want in front of as many people as they want, but I tend to be very, very choosy about who gets to see me in a state of undress.
No nude pictorial for me. Just the interview, with that row of black and white photos at the bottom of the page.
See, I really was reading Playboy for the articles. I enjoyed the short fiction, and the lifestyle pieces were like getting a peek at a different world. If the Playmates of the Month were intended to be the typical “girls next door” (before that image achieved a sort of weird vulgarity), then the prose seemed to come from a place of glossy sophistication, slick and silvery and populated by only the most fascinating people.
So why was I so conflicted about losing the nudity?
Well, without that sort of sexual content, what is left for Playboy? In her Salon article, my Lady Smut colleague Rachel Kramer Bussel explores this question. Isn’t nudity what sets Playboy apart from GQ and Esquire and any number of other lifestyle magazines?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
The motive for removing the nudes makes a great deal of sense. The world is full of nudity, in all its various sexual permutations, for better or for worse. It’s average. It’s even — dare I say it? — a little boring.
By pulling the nudes, Playboy endeavors to set itself apart from a sex-saturated world, while better establishing a foothold among its literary peers.
We will soon, in essence, all be reading it for the articles. Playboy is counting on it.
But what will become of that juvenile rite of passage? Is the internet the home of today’s secret initiation into a world of explicit content?
Should we look on it and despair? I think so. Seriously, aside from the occasional bright spot to be found with Cindy Gallop’s Make Love Not Porn, there is little cause for hope.
But by removing itself from that race to the bottom and joining a different class of publications, Playboy stands ready to win big. Indeed, if the increase in online readership is any indication, Playboy is winning already.
click to buy
What say you? Does the thought of sneaking a peek at the nude pictorial make you feel a little nostalgic? Is the end of an era, the start of something big, or both?
Did you ever want to bare it all for the camera? Sound off in the comments.
And follow Lady Smut. We make it so, so good to be bad.
For bad behavior with the best results, get yourself in line for Off the Rails by Isabelle Drake. If a little misbehavior gets a girl a long way … what might a lot of misbehavior get her?
