Playboy is covering up.
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.
(Washington Post, October 13, 2015)
This is hardly “Breaking News.” In fact, it’s about as meaningless as news that Blockbuster will stop renting movies. Moreover, like Blockbuster, Playboy will go bust … in due course.
Ironically, the folks at this magazine appear to be the only ones who never got the running joke about buying it for the articles.
But the world wide web of porn has rendered Playboy’s nude pictorials, well, quaint. And the notion that people will now buy it to ogle scantily clad girls is no less so. After all, with computers, smartphones and photo-sharing apps like Instagram, the opportunity to ogle an unlimited number (and variety) of such girls is now at everyone’s fingertips….
Not to mention that publications like Maxim have already saturated this sub-genre of porn that Playboy is now getting into. Hell, even Victoria’s Secret is selling more T&A than lingerie.