Adult magazine Playboy has decided to do away with featuring nude photographs of women, PTI reports.
As part of a redesign that will be unveiled in March 2016, the print edition of Playboy will still feature women in provocative poses. But they will no longer be fully nude. The idea to not include nudes was suggested by Cory Jones, a top editor at Playboy and its founder Hugh Hefner, 89, agreed, reported the New York Times.
The magazine's executives admit that Playboy has been overtaken by the changes it pioneered.
"That battle has been fought and won. You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it's just passe at this juncture," Scott Flanders, the company's chief executive, told the newspaper.
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 Playboy with adult content have disappeared from the scene and that is one of the reasons behind revamping the magazine.
The first cover of the magazine in 1953 featured Marilyn Monroe. Hefner did not put a date on the cover in case it did not take off but he went on to establish an empire with the success of the magazine.
According to the Washington Post, "for 62 years, the iconic adult magazine has fueled sexual fantasies with glossy fold-out spreads of fully nude women. Furtively hidden in adolescent bedrooms and defiantly plastered on college dorm room walls, it helped spark America's sexual revolution and tested the country's acceptance of photos that in an earlier day passed for pornography. Now, however, in a move that is sure to shock (privately, at least) millions of Americans, Playboy is putting clothes on its centerfolds."
The company cleaned up its Web site last year and saw traffic quadruple. Now Playboy aims to do the same with its magazine, which can still be found inside plastic wrappers on the back shelf at the local supermarket. The new Playboy magazine will still feature a Playmate of the Month, but the photos now will be PG-13, chief content officer Cory Jones told the New York Times.
