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Playboy Magazine to stop publishing nude pictures.

It makes sense when nearly any porn imaginable can be found on the internet for free, but it's gutting an institution. It was founded on the boobs of Marilyn Monroe and Bettie Page, dammit!

DarkAudit said:

Playboy Magazine to stop publishing nude pictures.

It makes sense when nearly any porn imaginable can be found on the internet for free, but it's gutting an institution. It was founded on the boobs of Marilyn Monroe and Bettie Page, dammit!

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It was also built by works from Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Margret Atwood, Ray Bradbury (Farenheit 451 was serialized in Playboy), and many others... a lot of writers wrote for them simply because Playboy payed more per a word than other outlets so it was a good way to pay the bills while working on other projects. It's actually surprising how much literary work Playboy has published or reprinted over the years.

Eh.

AshburnerX said:

ay Bradbury (Farenheit 451 was serialized in Playboy)

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As was A Sound of Thunder, the most republished science fiction story ever.

Indeed, which is why I always enjoyed their articles.

Don't know if the article mentions it, but when they stopped publishing nudes on their website they saw a 4x growth in traffic. Makes sense to continue that trend.

At least they are trying to stay relevant in the digital age. Most "institutions" fail at this.

But will they still hide a rabbit on every cover?

--Patrick

Dave said:

At least they are trying to stay relevant in the digital age. Most "institutions" fail at this.

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True. I think it's a bit of a shame, though, as finding tasteful nudity/erotics rather than pornographic nudes is actually getting harder and harder. Playboy was never Hustler - yes ,they've made/published pictures I've had fun with as a teen, but really, how many people bought Playboy as spank material? Perhaps in the beginning, but over the past 10-15 years? Heck, even 20 - I watched internet porn around 1996, though I admit the internet wasn't quite as wide-spread at the time.
Going for more thought-provoking (implied) nudity, interesting photographic nudity, etc would've been what I expected.

Bubble181 said:

finding tasteful nudity/erotics rather than pornographic nudes is actually getting harder and harder.

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Yeah, I don't get it. It's like there are people out there who only care about the sex, but don't care about the woman.

--Patrick

This was my father's take on it when I e-mailed him the news-

Gas Bandit's Dad, the Khaki Kukri, said:

Indeed. This is a measure of how much American culture has changed just in my lifetime, that you can't make money selling pix of nekkid broads -- T&A can be the teaser for other content, but the other content has to be good (ask HBO).

It is hard to remember now, but when I was a kid it was pretty difficult for a peripubescent boy to actually see his first set of naked tits; in fact, many a young guy in the Eisenhower/Kennedy years was initially aghast at his first glimpse of the conformation of a real woman sans Playtex girdle and conical bra (most of us recovered quickly ;0). Young soldiers and twentysomethings had more options, but they nearly all involved illegal commerce with gangsters, travel to a bad neighborhood, and the risk of being beaten and robbed, not to mention acquiring a loathsome disease or two.

Playboy in those days was one of the first venues publicly selling extramarital sex not as sleazy but as the centerpiece of the sophisticated, urbane lifestyle of upper-middle class affluence that Baby Boomer guys already aspired to -- 'Without the girls,' Hugh Hefner once said, 'I'd be publishing Esquire.' It was the first girlie mag you could buy at the corner newsstand (albeit behind the counter) rather than at that windowless First Amendment Store with sticky floors down by the tracks. And it was the classiest of its ilk. Playboy featured in-depth interviews with the movers and shakers of the day, real investigative journalism, and fiction by literary heavyweight authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer. 'I buy it for the articles!' wailed a generation of young guys, but when the comparison was to Hustler and Stag that was actually true.

Hef's message resonated in the repressed 50's and if-it-feels-good-do-it 60's, but he never quite made the transition to complete respectability and found himself in a crossfire between turbo-Christians from the right and feminazis from the left. After peaking in the early 70's, the Mad Men / Ring-a-ding-ding sensibility of the Playboy message became less and less relevant to how young men saw themselves and who they wanted to be. And with free porn becoming ubiquitous on the internet, these young men found less and less reason to shell out relatively big bucks for the glossy magazine that changed their fathers' lives.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

The Khaki Kukri
"Quid, me anxius sum?"

Your dad write latin phrases in his emails? That's pretty sic.

drawn_inward said:

Your dad write latin phrases in his emails? That's pretty sic.

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Dad loves pseudolatin. He used to call "Illigitimi non carborundum" his personal motto. It's faux-latin for "don't let the bastards grind you down."

I think a Dean Koontz book used the phrase Carpe Cerveza, which I used through my undergrad years. My latin/greek prof used to say "piece of placenta" all the time instead of "piece of cake".

I approve of the pseudolatin. I need a latin twist on the phrase "Don't start no shit and you won't get no shit."

drawn_inward said:

I think a Dean Koontz book used the phrase Carpe Cerveza, which I used through my undergrad years. My latin/greek prof used to say "piece of placenta" all the time instead of "piece of cake".

I approve of the pseudolatin.

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GasBandit said:

Dad loves pseudolatin. He used to call "Illigitimi non carborundum" his personal motto. It's faux-latin for "don't let the bastards grind you down."

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You know, that was the phrase the ultra hard right general in the government of Gilead used (in private) in The Handmaid's Tale.
That book was written in the early 80s, but the ultra-conservatives disguised their coup by blaming the need for security from Islamic radicals.

drawn_inward said:

"Don't start no shit and you won't get no shit."

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My best guess after poking around at Google Translate: "Si non severimus fimo, nec colliges ex fimo."
("If you do not sow offal, you will not reap offal.")

--Patrick

Semper ubi sub ubi.

Quando omni flunkus, moritati.


That's all I got. But hey, like that one phrase comes from Margaret Atwood, mine too comes from a pillar of Canadian Culture.