LOS ANGELES — For generations, teenage boys got their first look at a naked woman from Playboy, often from a copy swiped from Dad’s sock drawer or filched from a newsstand.
These days, however, you can see far more explicit photos on your phone than anything Hugh Hefner probably imagined when he launched his pioneering skin magazine 62 years ago with a centerfold of Marilyn Monroe.
Which is why, Playboy announced this week, it will stop running nude photos in its U.S. print edition.
“You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture,” Playboy Enterprises CEO Scott Flanders told The New York Times, which first reported the change.
In a move Playboy said had the blessing of the 89-year-old Hefner, the magazine will continue to publish what it called “sexy, seductive pictorials of the world’s most beautiful women.” But those women will presumably have some clothes on.