The moralists couldn t do it, the radical feminists couldn t do it.
But inadvertently perhaps, Facebook and Instagram showed Playboy that it could live without nude photos of women.
This week, Playboy magazine announced it would no longer publish nude photos of women in its U.S. print edition, which launched in 1953.
The decision was the logical extension of one made last year to remove nude photos from Playboy s online site.
That allowed the content to appear via Facebook, Instagram and Apple s App Store, which all restrict sexually explicit imagery on their platforms. Plus, with the new no-nudes content, Playboy was deemed safe for work.
Playboy s brand quickly became more mainstream. Web traffic jumped to 16 million, up from 4 million unique monthly users, the New York Times reported.
And younger readers flocked to the site — the average age is just over 30, down from 47.
If Facebook s PG-13 rules helped tip Playboy s decision to drop nude photos online, why get rid of naked photos for the print magazine? Here s what Playboy officials said on its site:
The Bunny transcends nudity. Tens of millions of readers come to our non-nude website and app every month for, yes, photos of beautiful women, but also for articles and videos from our humor, sex and culture, style, nightlife, entertainment and video game sections.
Wired says the company makes more of its money from licensing its logo. Vox says Playboy has is betting that that demand will grow even more if Playboy becomes less associated with explicit pornography in the minds of the public.
The decision to drop nudity from the magazine is best seen in this light. The goal isn t so much to make the magazine itself more successful — though presumably its owners would like to do that — but to make the magazine a more effective sales tool for the Playboy brand more generally.
So we may be seeing more of the Playboy bunny ears, something that the critics of Playboy may not celebrate.
But there won t be photos of naked women.
Photo: November 2015 issues of Playboy magazine are seen on the shelf of a bookstore in Bethesda, Maryland on October 13, 2015. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
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