How I’d make a success of a nude-free Playboy

I can’t say that I’m surprised Playboy has decided to stop publishing pictures of naked women. On the contrary, I was amazed to learn that it still does. What on earth is the point of a nudie magazine in an era when pornography of every conceivable kind is available at the click of a mouse?

Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s 89-year-old founder, has always strongly objected to the word ‘porno-graphy’ — he prefers ‘erotica’, obviously — and, to be fair, he did manage to position Playboy as more upmarket than rivals such as Penthouse and Hustler. In its heyday, it included interviews with the likes of Martin Luther King and Jimmy Carter and could afford to pay proper writers such as Norman Mailer and Martin Amis to contribute. I’ve even taken Hef’s shilling myself.

But will this sophisticated gloss be enough to sustain the brand after the famous pictorials have been junked? The ‘new’ Playboy will only include photographs that can be categorised as ‘PG-13’, suitable for those aged 13 and above.