The party is over for nude lovers. “You could argue that nudity is a distraction for us and actually shrinks our audience rather than expands it,” Flanders, the CEO of Playboy Enterprises, told Entrepreneur last December. “At the time when Hef founded the company [in 1953], nudity was provocative, it was attention-grabbing, it was unique and today it’s not. It’s passé.”
Playboy’s circulation has dropped from 5.6 million in 1975 to about 800,000 now, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. Many of the magazines that followed it have disappeared. Though detailed figures are not kept for adult magazines, many of those that remain exist in severely diminished form, available mostly in specialist stores. Penthouse, perhaps the most famous
Playboy competitor, responded to the threat from digital pornography by turning even more explicit. It never recovered. Previous efforts to revamp Playboy, as recently as three years ago, have never quite stuck. And those who have accused it of exploiting women are unlikely to be assuaged by a modest cover-up. But, according to its own research, Playboy’s logo is one of the most recognizable in the world, along with those of Apple and Nike.
This time, as the magazine seeks to compete with younger outlets like Vice, Mr. Flanders said, it sought to answer a key question: “if you take nudity out, what’s left?” With the digital cornucopia of pornography, Playboy’s raison d’être has vanished. Its website dropped nudity last year and soon its magazine will still feature women, but not fully nude.
Still, the ugly, naked truth remains. You can take the nipples and full frontal spreads out of Playboy, but you can’t take the objectified females out of it, stark naked or not. As Flanders said, “Sexy, beautiful women that men aspire to want to have attracted to them, that will never change in the DNA of Playboy…”
Culled from Entreprenuer
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