Plenty of motives for dropping nudes in Playboy

CHAMPAGNE would once have run in the streets, and good feminists would have yodelled delight from the rooftops.

The grumpiest would have danced tangos of delight, for they never, ever could have imagined that downstream from their many bruising battles over sexism their fondest wishes would have really come true.

But be careful what you wish for.

Playboy is to stop running pictures of naked women. That sounds like good news.

Thinking women have long been affronted by the eternal exploitation of the young and lovely by the old and venal.

Hugh Hefner, who founded the rag in 1953, has become the embarrassing, 89-year-old relic of a time when naked breasts were still a thrill, and pink-skinned, airbrushed girls available to him on glossy paper were the height of a lonely – or dreary – adult man’s erotic fantasy.

More importantly, they were also the dream girlfriends of spotty adolescent boys.

Playmate centrefolds were icons in the age of what old men like Hefner called ‘‘sexual liberation’’.

The thrilling idea was that girls who posed naked were doing what every pretty girl secretly longed to do but was never asked, and if they would pose naked they would do a lot of other exciting things with anyone in trousers.

It was a fairy story, but one that grown-up men wanted to believe, and a certain kind of pretty girl was happy to exploit.

But it was a limited vision of the ideal life because real people have real needs beyond a shag, and even narcissists can crave conversation.

The joke was that men read Playboy for the articles. I never heard anyone quote one.

Maybe I’ve known too few deep thinkers, but why the sudden change?

It’s because Playboy’s chief executive, Scott Flanders, has declared the practice of running the nudes that once earned it zillions to be, ‘‘so passe at this juncture’’. How chillingly cruel. How like saying that young women with their hair in pigtails climbing trees stark naked have become boring, even when they artlessly pose with their legs apart.

Can it be that all the boob jobs in the world now count for nothing, and men now yearn for intellectual women of average looks who genuinely speak three languages and can cook a passable risotto? Well, no. Future female models, celebrities and Playmates, be reassured, will still be seen in provocative poses in Playboy, but scantily clad.

It’s just the nudity that’s the bother, not the objectification of women. There is a business mind at work here. This is not about the dignity of women, you idiot.

It’s about money, which is always lusted after, and never remotely passe.

It’s also about print media.

Playboy’s circulation has dropped from 5.6 million in the 70s to 800,000 today.

Its future lies in the internet, on Twitter and Facebook, where nudity is banned. Its audience reach has quadrupled there, from 4 million up to 16 million unique users each month.

And the irony is that it’s the internet that undercut Playboy in the first place, by offering easy access to more porn than you ever imagined, for free.

The forbidden is no longer forbidden, however censors struggle to control it, and what’s out there can be darker and more dangerous than we ever expected our fellow human beings to be.

Wholesome-looking young women with no clothes on are truly passe on the dark web, and suddenly seem to have belonged to an age of innocence.

Before we know it church pastors and general worriers will be begging for their return.

I am fond of the cautionary tales for children written by Hillaire Belloc more than a century ago, and to my mind still delightfully funny.

One tells the tale of a boy who gives his nurse [nanny] the slip at the zoo, and is eaten by a lion.

The moral, and universal truth that applies in this case also is: ‘‘Always keep ahold of nurse/ For fear of finding something worse.’’

Which is to say, I’ll hold the champagne.