Playboy lifts ban on naked women

Playboy magazine without nudes didn’t get much play.

The 62-year-old magazine has decided to remove its ban on fully-naked women due to poor sales of the already suffering gentleman’s publication, Playboy’s social media accounts revealed Monday.

The March/April issue will herald a return of private parts with a cover stating “Naked is normal,” printed across the breast of an uncharacteristically natural-styled model Elizabeth Elam. The issue is also downloadable at Playboy.com.

Upon the suggestion of chief content officer Cory Jones, and with the blessing of the magazine’s founder Hugh Hefner, the magazine stopped printing photos of fully-nude models in March 2016. In their place were scantily clad women, and poses with objects strategically covering nipples and vaginas.It was a bid to increase its appeal to a broader audience in the face of competition, particularly the availability of pornography online.

In recent years the magazine suffered a drop in readership; the magazine had a circulation of 5.6 million in 1975, and only 800,000 in late 2015.

“You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free,” the company’s chief executive told The New York Times in October 2015 ahead of the embargo.

But sales tanked further after the nudity ban, prompting Hefner’s 24-year-old son Cooper to slam the decision as a death sentence for the publication.

‘When you have a company and the founder is responsible for kick-starting the sexual revolution and then you pluck out that aspect of the company’s DNA by removing the nudity, it makes a lot of people including me sit and say: ‘What the hell is the company doing?”

The young Hefner was one of the first to applaud the decision to bring back the magazine’s tradition.

“I’ll be the first to admit the way in which the magazine portrayed nudity was dated, but removing it entirely was a mistake,” Cooper Hefner tweeted Monday. “Nudity was never the problem, because nudity isn’t a problem. Today, we’re taking our identity back and rediscovering who we are.”