Playboy’s Nudes: Is This Actually The Opposite Of Progress?

Playboy’s executive board has announced that, as of March 2016, the magazine will be dropping fully “nude” images from its pages.

For sixty years, the titillating tome has produced shiny portraits of beautiful, bunny-eared women in provocative poses and while it will likely do this for years to come, it has relinquished its hold on one thing - the full nude.

[Image: copyright Playboy]

Huzzah for women everywhere, has been the general response, with claims from the BBC that Playboy is “cleaning up its act”, to “rely” as the Telegraph suggests, “on the strength of its writing.”

But is this really a step forwards into a world where objectification of women is not such a paradigm?

[Image copyright: Rex Features]

Playboy’s Chief Executive Scott Flanders explained the move by claiming that the internet had made “nudity outdated.”

For those of you who might assume this to mean a victory for the swarms of people using viral marketing and social media to highlight the absurdity of exploiting naked women so routinely, be not so assured.

Campaigns such as No More Page 3 have certainly made some noise, but they’re a whisper next to the booming global voice of those who repeat the “sex sells” mantra over and over as justification for slapping a barely-clothed woman on the face of every new product.

What Playboy’s board is actually insinuating, sadly, is that it has become so routine to see naked women on the internet, that Playboy Magazine has had to loosen their grip on that particular USP.

As Flanders himself speculates: “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”

In other words, they simply can’t compete.

With the magazine’s circulation at an all-time low of 800,000, where once it boasted figures as high as 5.6 million, the proof is in the pudding.

[Image copyright: Playboy]

But what’s so bad about seeing naked women, I hear you cry and as well you might.

Women’s lifestyle sites such as this one have been pushing out images of, if not fully nude, semi-nude women, on the regular, as part of a “body confidence” mission that hopes more and more people will love the skin they’re in.

But, if we’ve learned anything from this week’s banned Lush Cosmetics campaign, it’s that the general public still have a very narrow view of what they deem to be an acceptable showing of the female body.

In other words, slender models can get away with nearly anything for the sake of art or fashion. Taut, bronzed bodies in advertising are almost invisible at this point, so ubiquitous is their use, but don’t even think about taking your clothes off if you’re big, elderly, pale, disabled or of a particular ethnicity.

Pornography occupies its own space in this argument. For the large part, it follows the same rules as above, but there is more scope for diversity on the grounds that viewers search according to their particular sexual proclivity.

Certain types of bodies that aren’t slender and perfect have become more visible in pornography, but only because they are fetishised, which isn’t necessarily healthy or constructive either.

So, weighing up the evidence, it looks a little like Playboy magazine aren’t opting out of nudity in order to prioritise their worthier content.

Instead, the magazine is simply admitting that its lost foothold in the market, not because tastes have matured, but because the internet has overwhelmingly gratified the desire to see images of naked female “perfection” with every mouse click.

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