Playboy Won't Publish Any More Nudity

In a move that may seem as strange as McDonald’s dropping hamburgers or Nike getting out of the shoe business, Playboy won’t be publishing any more nudity in its magazines.

The Beverly Hills-based company announced the move, which will go into effect in the March 2016 issue, on its website Tuesday morning and cited the immense volume of pornography available with one search of the internet.

“That battle has been fought and won,” Scott Flanders, the company’s chief executive, told the New York Times, which broke the story Monday night. “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”

The adult magazine, famous for featuring nude models and interviews with public figures in the same issue, has dropped to just 800,000 subscribers from 5.6 million in 1975, the Times reported.

Playboy hopes the move opens up the brand to a more mainstream audience.

Its website hasn’t shown nudity since August 2014.

“As a result, Playboy executives said, the average age of its reader dropped from 47 to just over 30,” the Times reported. “And its web traffic jumped to about 16 million from about four million unique users per month.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean Playboy will be a G-rated media outlet.

The website will still feature “photos of beautiful women” and “articles and videos from our humor, sex and culture, style, nightlife, entertainment and video game sections,” according to the statement.

You’ll just have to find nudes somewhere else.

“This is a company — like all great companies — that has risk in its DNA,” the statement concludes. “It was built around a magazine virtually no one thought would succeed, yet now it’s impossible (for us, anyways) to picture a world without Playboy. Our journalism, art, photos and fiction have challenged norms, defied expectations and set a new tone for decades.

“So we say: Why stop now?”

• Read the full New York Times feature here.
• Read the full Playboy statement here.