Playboy Will Stop Featuring Nude Models, Blames The Abundance of Free Smut on The Internet.
It’s been a bad week for seedy blokes. First Zoo magazine ceased to exist and now playboy will stop publishing nude photos. Short of Jimmy Barnes announcing his immediate retirement from music, things couldn’t get much worse.
In an article in the New York Times on Monday playboy C.E.O Scott Flanders was quoted as saying ‘You’re now one click away from every sex act for free…and so it’s made them (nude centrefolds) passé at this point’. Yep the C.E.O of playboy just called nude centrefolds passé.
Of course Editor in Chief, founder, and silk pyjamas advocate Hugh Hefner was consulted and agreed with the suggestion originally put forward by top editor Cody Jones, who was quoted as saying ‘twelve year old me is very disappointed in current me, but its the right thing to do’.
Despite its reputation, Playboy has historically displayed some very good journalism. In the past it has featured interviews with the likes of John Lennon, Fidel Castro and Martin Luther King Jr. However it has always been rather difficult to claim that you buy the magazine for the articles until now.
Whether or not a centrefold will be featured at all is still up in the air, Jones also told the Times. He did reveal that Playboy’s sex columnist would be ‘a woman who writes enthusiastically about sex.’ Whatever that means.
Since Marilyn Monroe featured on the first ever cover in 1953, Playboy has come under fire from all angles. Right wing lobbyists attacked the magazine for its lewd images and lack of censorship. At the same time the magazine would also be attacked by left wing groups for objectifying women as sex objects.
Whatever you think of Playboy it has somehow stood the test of time. With charismatic editor and founder Hugh Hefner at the wheel it has grown into a global brand and its iconic ‘bunny’ logo graces just about any product you could think of from perfume to car seat covers.
No matter were you land on the magazine this announcement is sure fire proof that the ‘Times are a changing’.
