Playboy and the End of Nudity

So, if you hadn't heard, Playboy has announced that they will no longer feature nudes in their magazine starting in March of 2016. Now assuming this is not a PR stunt similar to the one pulled by The Sun regarding no longer publishing topless women, I think this future for Playboy is a pretty interesting one from a cultural standpoint (I will note that I assume they will go back to the nude should this turn out to be a failure, of course).

I've often said that I think that probably the two living men that have had the most significant impact on twentieth century media culture (and, no, I'm not saying most significant positive or most significant negative cultural impact, just most significant) are Stan Lee and Hugh Hefner. While, perhaps, not for this generation of young men, Playboy, for better or for worse, served a rather central role in the sexual development of the American male for three or four generations. Additionally, it has had a fairly huge effect on American and global media culture as well.

All of which is to say that I feel that I may want to write something in a slightly more substantial form about this in the near future. The idea of Playboy moving away from nudity is, of course, not really the "end of nudity" at all (I just said that to be hyperbolic). Instead, of course, it just shows the way that free and easily accessible pornography has changed the nature of the business.

Whatever one thinks of Playboy, the idea that more overtly hardcore and more amateurishly produced internet pornography has become the norm is slightly troubling to me from an aesthetic perspective (not that this hasn't been true for some time, but this move by Playboy marks that transition rather acutely). As I said, think what you will of Playboy, but some of the best photographers in the world shot for the magazine and their approach to pornography (both Hefner's and those photographers) had more tact than their other contemporaries did (say, the approach of Penthouse or Hustler or hardcore pornography in general).

Hefner's Playboy took what is largely a more traditional approach to the nude (within the context of the place of the nude in the history of art) by displaying the body as beautiful and erotic and focused on idealizing the body and those values. Much of what typifies the aesthetics of other pornographers has been a more deviant approach to the erotic, focusing on the strange and creating an often bizarrely biological approach to displaying the female body. In other words, Hefner wasn't interested, as some pornographers are, in essentially giving his viewer the opportunity to look at women as if they were giving them a gynecological exam.

I realize that other more tactful pornographers exist out there (and indeed Playboy's decision to change up their approach to the subject of the erotic may give a boost to those kinds of print and online publications and some opportunity for new publications of that sort to arise and fill that niche), but the end of the nude in Playboy may clearly suggest that the nude treated in that way has moved out of the mainstream of pornography and culture more generally and something more akin to the gynecological approach I referred to has moved in as the new normal (something like this already happened in the American art world some time ago, but that notion would be better suited for a larger discussion on the subject).

In any case, I didn't mean to go on about this for as long as I have. Indeed, I may just feel compelled to write something much more substantial about this to publish at PopMatters or something. We'll see what I have time for. Either way, still interesting and still vaguely troubling, to me at least.