When I was first at university, I took refuge from the vagaries of a Bachelor in Fashion Design by signing up for a gender studies elective. We had a terrific and uncompromising lecturer who ruled the classroom with an iron fist, and she would accept citations in essays from only one periodical: Playboy.
It was, in an academic sense, the ultimate vindication of the vaguely apocryphal claim, “I read it for the articles”.
It’s amusing, then, to see that the magazine itself has finally adopted “I read it for the articles” as an official editorial position, this week it announcing it would no longer run nude photos of women.
The company’s CEO, Scott Flanders, decried naked spreads as “passe”, telling the New York Times that Playboy’s new PG-13 tone would be “a little more accessible, a little more intimate”.
This likely has a lot to do with the skyrocketing traffic (and plummeting age of the average user) the Playboy website received last August when nudes disappeared; finally, visiting Playboy was “safe for work”, and probably the reason I’ve not been barred from the wifi while writing this.
Whether or not this means Playboy is now safe from the ire of a certain sort of feminist (who did not count my gender studies among their ranks, evidently) remains to be seen. It depends upon whether you ever thought Playboy, and not the more outwardly exploitative publications it arguably spawned, was one of the great villains of the sexual revolution.
That is, in short, complicated; as Carrie Pitzoulo wrote in the Journal of the History of Sexuality in 2008, “Ideologically, the hedonism central to the Playboy lifestyle would not have been possible without women free to live and love as they liked.” Feminism and women’s liberation was good for the brand.
In truth, I always read the magazine – well, the small collection of early-1970s editions I own – both for the articles and the nudes. But attempting to return to the ranks of regular customer following the magazine’s reboot three years ago left me cold; stripped of the dreamy quality of the 70s shoots I loved, the contemporary waxed-and-retouched nudes seemed out of place and out of time.
“Modern” Playboy’s attempts to return to the quality writing of old (right down to hiring graphic designers who’d worked on more respected men’s magazines, in order to trick the reader’s eye into thinking “ahh, serious print journalism”) might have been admirable, but the reader would soon turn the page and be confronted by a gaggle of shiny, anonymous robo-babes, all with their vulvas airbrushed to a dainty single crease. At least in the 70s they interviewed the models.
It’s not surprising, then, that the website’s traffic soared when it was stripped (as it were) of nude photos, given what replaced them was what appeared to be a commitment to tackling the brand’s rep as a dinosaur of sexual politics: Noah Berlatsky’s online column has tackled trans exclusionary radical feminism and made a case for employing feminist theory in what many would consider the least feminist of spaces. (Though it has not been received without some criticism.)
The question of whether or not a Playboy magazine sans nudes has any right to call itself Playboy now emerges and will no doubt be duked out in commentary employing the sort of “back in my day, it’s how we learned about anatomy” rhetoric last heard in country pubs.
But there is, perhaps, an argument to be made against the notion of “PG-13” men’s interest editorial. It may be less directly exploitative but, really, everybody knows where they stand with an unclothed bosom.
