No nudes is good news.
Playboy has decided to stop publishing images of nude women, ending the magazine's 62-year practice that made it a cultural icon.
The magazine's decision was first announced in a New York Times article on the magazine's upcoming redesign. The magazine will still feature women in a titillating fashion, according to Scott Flanders, the Playboy chief executive.
The decision comes as it struggles with a circulation decline that has hammered the overall magazine industry. Playboy, however, has not found the kind of online success as some of its peers. Flanders pointed to the ubiquity of pornography on the Internet, noting that the nudes that once stood out in Playboy are no longer rare.
The old joke goes that those caught looking at a Playboy was "reading it for the articles," and in a twist, that does now seem to be the magazine's strategy going forward. As noted by the Times, Playboy had once been a cultural institution not just for its nudity but also for publishing famous writers and conducting interviews with a variety of cultural and political players, from Miles Davis to Martin Luther King Jr. to Apple founder Steve Jobs.
Flanders floated the idea of a nudity-free Playboy in December, telling Entrepreneur: "You could argue that nudity is a distraction for us and actually shrinks our audience rather than expands it."
The company's website has been toying with a more safe-for-work sensibility since 2010, and has been nudity-free for more than a year now. That move has led to the site receiving a respectable 16 million unique users per month, four times its previous amount, according to the Times.
Indeed, a quick trip over to Playboy.com reveals a pretty tame environment.
Some foreign editions of the magazine, like the German one, will stay nude.
German Playboy to stay fully nude. https://t.co/xyCO5lxcWp— Cyrus Farivar (@cfarivar) October 13, 2015