Statement By Dawn Hawkins, Executive Director of NCOSE
One year after Playboy pledged to ban nudity from its magazine, the company has decided to bring it back. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) denounces this magazine as sexually exploitive and calls on retailers to remove it from their shelves.
“Was Playboy’s temporary removal of full nudity a scam to get better placement with retailers or does Playboy simply have no way to profit other than blatantly exploiting women?” asked Dawn Hawkins, Executive Director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. “With Playboy’s transition out of explicit nudity last year, it garnered prime shelf space in allegedly ‘family friendly’ stores like Barnes & Noble—often at the eye-level of children. However, as Playboy has long known, nobody reads it for the articles and their supposed change proved buyers of Playboy are interested in one thing: objectifying and exploiting women. Due to the pervasiveness of hardcore Internet pornography, Playboy is becoming outdated, and its re-introduction of nudity is a desperate grasp at remaining relevant. Now that Playboy has returned to its blatantly sexploitive roots, the pressure is on Barnes & Noble and other retailers to swiftly remove this magazine from its shelves. The public is encouraged to contact executives here.”
“Of course even when Playboy did not feature full nudity, it continued to produce material that promoted pornography and the objectification of women. Playboy paved the way for the commodification of the female body in soft-core pornographic magazines, and it laid the groundwork for the public health crisis of Internet pornography that America is experiencing today. We encourage newsstands and business owners to reject Playboy, and to send the message that women are equals to be respected, and not mere body parts to be objectified for profit.”
