BACK IN OCTOBER, Playboy magazine announced that it would no longer be featuring full-frontal nude photographs.
The magazine said that after 62 years, the advent of the internet had led to nude photos becoming “passé”.
“You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture,” said its chief executive Scott Flanders.
But those hoping for a feminist makeover might be disappointed. A sneak peek of the new magazine has been sent out to some print journalists, and the verdict is in – not that much, really, has changed.
The cover is clearly meant to look like a Snapchat selfie, in one nod to the internet age. The featured model, Sarah McDaniel, meanwhile, can credit Instagram to a certain degree for her fame.
But The New York Times reports that:
There are still naked women in this newly demure version of the magazine. It’s just that they have been shot in ways intended for strategic concealment.
It points out that there is still a centrefold (Dree Hemingway, great-granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway) who is shot “in the buff”.
The NYT notes that Playboy’s tamer strategy is aimed at drawing in a younger audience, and that when it relaunched its website as safe to work, the average age of its visitors dropped.
The phrase ‘entertainment for men’ is now gone from the cover, and “a lot more white space” features.
Says the NYT:
In short, the new Playboy, which will appear on newsstands as early as this weekend, has ditched its jauntily illicit aura and become a slightly saucier version of a lot of other magazines, like Esquire and GQ.
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