Playboy magazine made a game-changing announcement in a sex-saturated culture: The pornography magazine will no longer publish nude photos of women.
“As you may have heard, Playboy is going to be non-nude starting with the March 2016 issue, which actually comes out in the month of February, because that’s how magazines roll,” the magazine says in a statement. “This means the models, celebrities and, yes, Playmates will not be naked for the first time since our founder Hugh Hefner laid out the first issue in 1953.”
The magazine chose to back out of publishing nude photos due to the Internet’s ready access to porn.
According to the New York Times, Playboy’s circulation has dropped from 5.6 million in 1975 to about 800,000 now. Many of the magazines that followed it have disappeared. Penthouse, perhaps the most famous Playboy competitor, responded to the threat from digital pornography by turning even more explicit. It never recovered.
“The magazine will adopt a cleaner, more modern style,” NYT reports. “There will still be a Playmate of the Month, but the pictures will be ‘PG-13’ and less produced.”
Charisma News previously reported that studies indicate that at least 70 percent of American men and 30 percent of American women regularly view online pornography. The numbers aren’t much better among Christians, with a 2011 ChristiaNet survey finding that 50 percent of Christian men and 20 percent of Christian women regularly use porn.
