Playboy has announced that it will stop featuring photos of nude women. To me, this is a little like a cooking magazine announcing that it's going to stop running those silly recipes. As a longtime reader/follower of Mr. Hefner's publication (and since the time I worked with Hef, possessor of a lifetime subscription he gave me), I always thought the makers of Playboy were fooling themselves to believe the naked ladies weren't the main reason people bought the thing.
Hefner himself always seemed to think it was a mag that spoke to the Complete Male, covering such a being's interests in politics, fashion, music, electronics, lifestyles, etc. And it really was a good magazine in many ways, paying top dollar for articles and cartoons. The nudes were just one aspect of all that…one topic of many that interested the men who purchased it every month. I suspect though they're about to discover that even in the Age of the Internet with so many porn sites just a click away, the folks who buy it for the article won't buy it for the articles without the nudes.
Part of the reason I believe this is because I recall that when The Playboy Channel was starting up on cable, it was originally just hour after hour of shows with nude women appearing every five or ten minutes. Then someone got the idea that the channel could be more mainstream if it didn't just offer that so they started producing shows where no women disrobed — things like comedy roasts and jazz specials and interviews and other programming that took after the other, non-naked elements in the magazine…
…and it was a spectacular failure. It wasn't many months before they chucked all that. They not only brought back the unclad babes but they got rid of everything else. It was 24/7 nudes and they even began sneaking in hardcore sex films.
The trouble was that in the area of selling sex, Playboy was a superstar brand name. When they started trying to compete with Showtime or HBO or other channels that were then starting-up, they were a small, underfinanced player with no special advantage…and a subscriber base that had signed up to see tits and felt swindled. I have the feeling something similar's going to happen with the magazine.
But then the magazine's been pretty boring for a long time. To the extent it's about catering to the Complete Man, it's some Complete Man as defined by Hef in the sixties and not redefined nearly enough since then. Also, there are very few magazines today that seem as exciting as magazines did back then. Even before we all began living on the Internet, sales of almost all print periodicals went into freefall.
I guess I understand why they're trying what they're trying. First off, given their sales, they pretty much have to try something. Secondly, most of the success stories in magazines the last decade or so have involved reader demographics. You have to consistently deliver a readership that has buying power for certain products in a certain price range. Most of the top women's magazines are a great place to advertise if you're selling, say, make-up and perfume to women ages 15-40.
Most likely, someone at Playboy figures they can do the same thing for men of a certain age bracket and purchasing power…and that the centerfolds were alienating some potential advertisers. They may be right in the short run. I'll bet they're not right in the long run.
Hugh Hefner is 89 and now seems to occupy his days being a sad parody of himself. The other day, I saw a photo of him with Bill Cosby at the Playboy Mansion. It accompanied an article about an underage woman who's now suing Cosby claiming she was drugged and molested on Hef's property. It really reminded me what an anachronism Playboy is these days.
My hunch is that the empire is just biding time 'til Hef is out of the picture one way or the other and someone who wants to be The New Hef swoops in, buys the operation and retools the whole thing into The New (but in selected ways, Classic) Playboy with himself as the centerpiece. That's when the nude women will come back. Along with a lot of the people who stop buying the magazine in the months to come.