Interesting opinion piece recently, I believe in The New York Times. I'll try to find and share it. It's by a longtime feminist, who pleads with Playboy to retain nudes.
It's "Longing for the Innocence of Playboy" by Jennifer Weiner. An excerpt:
"I was thinking about my friend when I read the news that
Playboy, the venerable purveyor of **29** interviews, literary fiction and female nudity, had decided to stop publishing pictures of naked ladies. “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture,” said Scott Flanders,
Playboy’s chief executive.
With a once-mighty circulation of 5.6 million now hovering around 800,000,
Playboy has been left with no choice but to put on its big-girl panties and try to compete with other glossy lad mags and their versions of the Good Life.
Most men my age, sons of the 1960s and ’70s, have a
Playboy story, whether it involved borrowing one of Dad’s copies or sneaking a peek at their local convenience store.
But we ladies grew up with
Playboy, too....
Feminists hated
Playboy, and its hard-core cousins. In 1983...Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were arguing that pornography was not just offensive but was also a violation of women’s civil rights. Even if the stance made for strange bedfellows — sharing picket lines with Jerry Falwell and his cronies must have been weird — at least feminists agreed: Porn was bad. Until we didn’t, and it wasn’t.
Lucky me, this shift happened right around the time I started college, when sex-positive feminists — also known as “do-me feminists,” early prototypes of Gillian Flynn’s Cool Girls — were down with the nudity, with accompanying boyfriends to strip clubs and with treating porn as if it were no big deal.
Playboy seemed sweetly antique as we explored the work of Annie Sprinkle, Susie Bright and Candida Royalle, and began taking responsibility for our own pleasure, which was not always easy in the pre-Internet age. (I look forward to explaining to future great-grandkids how, when I was young, you couldn’t order your vibrators on the Internet, you had to actually walk into a store and buy them.)
It was confusing — especially when Hef stepped back and his daughter, Christie Hefner, took the reins of Playboy Enterprises. Can a magazine exploit women if it’s a woman doing the alleged exploiting? What did a real feminist look like? What did she do in bed? Was she a cheerful, dirty-movie-watching, beer-guzzling participant in any act, no matter how outrageous, as long as it was an act of her choosing? Or did she reject the old poses and standards and acts as the artifacts of a system that was never centered on female desire and never had her interests or her satisfaction at heart?...
Right now, I’ve got parental blockers on their phones and laptop . I monitor their TV and movies. I explain that sex is the ultimate expression of love and intimacy between two consenting and financially independent adults in their 30s.
Still, somewhere in my daughters’ future, there’s a Google search waiting, and it’s going to take them to places that
Playboy and I never imagined. And so, as I stand on the precipice of my older daughter’s adolescence, I say something I never thought I’d say: Come back,
Playboy, and bring your innocently naked ladies with you. All is forgiven."