Playboy is known for two things: its articles and its nude women—and it turns out nobody really cares about the former unless it’s written by Hunter S. Thompson.
Evidently, the management at Playboy took the joke about “reading Playboy for the articles” too seriously and did away with all the magazine’s nude content in October 2015 in an effort to rebrand the magazine as something less objectifying to women and more social justice-friendly. Last year, the magazine even featured a fully-clothed model in a hijab for the first time in its 50-year history.
When it decided to “dress up”, Playboy Enterprises CEO Scott Flanders said that the political and sexual climate of 1953, when Hugh Hefner first founded the magazine, bore little resemblance to today. The magazine had lost much of its audience — who typically bought it for the porn— to free and far more explicit porn on the Internet. It was, as Fortune noted, “buried by the very culture it created.”
But of the magazine’s decision to de-pornify itself, family friendly retailers still refused to pick it up, and what little audience it had left evaporated. It was a mistake—Playboy had already entrenched itself as the world’s most recognizable porn mag, and it was cutting the content that built its popularity.
The nudes will be making their return in the March/April 2017 issue with topless Playmate Elizabeth Elam as the month’s centerfold. It carries the headline “Naked is normal.”
“I’ll be the first to admit that the way in which the magazine portrayed nudity was dated, but nudity was never the problem because nudity isn’t a problem,” said Playboy’s Chief Creative Officer Cooper Hefner, and son of Hugh Hefner. “Today we’re taking our identity back and reclaiming who we are.”
Given the magazine’s failure to rebrand itself as an alternative to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other high-brow glossy magazines preferred by coastal elites, the magazine’s effort to return to its roots are a welcome change—and it’s better than playing third wheel to the other publications.
“This is a remarkably special moment personally and professionally that I get to share this issue of Playboy magazine with my Dad, as well as with readers,” said Hefner. “It is a reflection of how the brand can best connect with my generation and generations to come.”
However, the magazine will continue its attempts to court a wider demographic than straight men. It is doing away with the phrase “Entertainment for Men” from its covers, and the latest issue includes an essay about female empowerment by Playmate Scarlett Byrne, who writes “on the importance of owning female sexuality.”
More power to her. At the very least, Playboy is no longer pandering to neo-Puritans.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
