Playboy’s Abandonment of Nudity Was A Historical Necessity

“The disappearance of nudity from Playboy says more about the persistence of ticklish attitudes about nudity than it does about Playboy. Insofar as Hugh Hefner was somewhat correct to view himself as an agent of sexual liberation, this development resembles a kind of planned obsolescence. The Playboy nude was a stage to be passed through, like puberty or, in Marx’s theory of history, capitalism.”