Playboy is removing all nude images from its magazine, according to a report on October 12th from the New York Times.
As Bill Donohue’s recent commentary on the policy move so adequately summarizes, pornography has become a public health crisis.
With unlimited supply via the internet, pornography brings sexual addictions and disorders, broken and undermined relationships, sexting, child-on-child sexual abuse, revenge porn, increased rape in college campuses and the military, objectification of men and women, mental disorders such as anxiety and depression, and the list goes on.
This long list pleadingly points at the pink elephant in the room: #pornharms.
And the public health crisis credit goes, partially, to Hugh Hefner and his role in the sexual revolution.
The sexual revolution led to a pornified modern culture where Playboy-type nude images are mainstream. So mainstream that hardcore pornography, violent pornography, and child pornography are effortlessly at our fingertips. In today’s world, pornography is much more accessible than Playboy was 50 years ago. Playboy’s chief executive said it himself, “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”
The real question is why Playboy is making this move. If the sex industry needs more sex, why are they presumably cutting back on it?
It surely is not a move for morality, but instead it is a move for finances. They lost a large following since their 1975 circulation of 5.6 million copies, now only circulating 800,000. Other sexually explicit magazines say, like Penthouse and Hustler, Playboy’s decision is “brand suicide” and “a sign of desperation.”
At the end of the day, Playboy won’t really change. Playboy stated they would still have provocatively posed women in their magazine, just not fully nude snapshots.
What snapshots they do include, it will be to attract young consumers. They want to “modernize” their look in order to have access to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. It looks like they’ll try to become like a male Cosmopolitan, with racy sex magazines, ads, and Snapchat infomercials.
They’re changing their consumer focus in this last ditch effort to keep the magazine alive.
While Playboy moves on to try and find greener pastures, society must deal with the aftermath of a sexual revolution that has, in reality, left us in a sexual wasteland.
A wasteland where we find ourselves as sexual zombies and we are literally killing our brains in the process of compulsively viewing hardcore Internet pornography.
The same hardcore pornography that is putting Playboy out of the “nude photos” business.
What we must do now is look past the pleasure façade Playboy advertised for 50 years and see the reality of a severely shifted, pornified culture. And with that pornified culture comes the public health crisis of pornography which society must realize, and address, in order to eventually heal.
