Picture from Getty Images
I have never read Playboy (honest) but I am of course aware of it, I'm not even sure if it is available over here to be honest. We of course have magazines that range from the reasonably high-end titles such as FHM and GQ right the way down to the likes of Nuts that combine comedy, sport, music, games, and films with women posing topless. There is a time and a place for it and as I said in the blog I wrote about the No More Page 3 campaign, there is nothing more beautiful than the female nude, so I was surprised to read that Playboy have made the decision to stop with the naked shoots. They reckon that in this modern world of free Internet porn the notion of a photograph in a magazine is a little old fashioned and the circulation has dropped drastically, so to drop something like this seems a brave and possibly dangerous move. Did people really read it just for the articles? We may be about to find out.
To cease with something as apparently passée as a photograph of a topless woman is surely contributing to the problem. I don't want to live in a world where people would rather watch porn, where nobody ever looks as though they are enjoying themselves, than look at a picture. I know I wrote in the No More Page 3 blog that magazines seem a bit analogue now but I personally much prefer to use a bit of imagination. Maybe I am doing it wrong and everyone is right, but just the sight of the female nude is far more pleasing than watching a dead-eyed woman being fucked by a room full of equally dead-eyed men who I always assume are just wondering what to make for dinner. The imagination is a great thing and when I see an attractive woman I imagine what she looks like naked, this doesn't mean I want them to undress in front of me, unless they really insist on it which for some reason they never do.
The Sunday Alternative Podcast #59 is available from here
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