No nudity was a ‘mistake’ – Playboy
“That battle has been fought and won.”
That’s how Playboy chief executive Scott Flanders described the storied softporn magazine’s decision in 2015 to stop publishing nude photos.
Flanders told the New York Times that fall that America’s demand for porn was increasingly being met online, prompting a nudity-free “redesign” at Playboy.
“You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free,” he said. “And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”
On Monday, Playboy announced it would once again run pictures of naked women. Chief creative officer Cooper Hefner said the magazine never should have banned nudity.
The March/April issue of the magazine will feature photos of Playmate Elizabeth Elam on a cover that says “Naked is normal.”
“I’ll be the first to admit that the way in which the magazine portrayed nudity was dated, but removing it entirely was a mistake,” the younger Hefner wrote on Twitter. “Nudity was never the problem because nudity isn’t a problem.”
Playboy’s first issue without nude photos came out in February 2016, ending a more than six-decade run of glossy centrefolds featuring young women baring it all. The magazine still featured “sexy, seductive pictorials of the world’s most beautiful women, including its iconic Playmates.”
The move was met with a mix of ridicule and confusion.
“Old Playboy was a lifestyle bible,” BuzzFeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen jabbed. “Current Playboy is a caricature of itself.”
In a post on the Playboy website, Hefner outlined a “new Playboy philosophy,” in which he suggested that the decision to re-embrace nudity was partly rooted in the country’s political and cultural climate. He ticked off a list of “collective accomplishments” from the past few years: the election of the first “mixedrace” president (his term), a Supreme Court ruling in favour of same-sex marriage and marijuana legalisation in some places. “But after so much progress,” Hefner wrote, “our hard-won victories are in peril. Just as the social and political pendulum had swung in liberals’ favour, as history has shown time after time, the pendulum swings back.”
Not using nudes, Hefner said, is out of step with Playboy’s “tradition of advocating for civil liberties and freedom of expression.” – Washington Post