Rant #1,545: The Naked Truth

You might remember that a little more than two weeks ago, in Rant #1,531 on October 14, I wrote about the demise of Playboy Magazine as we know it, meaning that the magazine will, early next year, remove all nudes from its pages.

Removing all the nudes was news, and I wrote about Playboy Magazine on that date and also on the very next day.

Well, I am going to bring up the subject yet again, because as I suspected, no nudes does not mean no nudes--just in the United States and in several other editions that Hugh Hefner's empire covers.

Evidently, Playboy will continue to have new nudes in several of its publications around the world even as it removes them from the U.S. edition.

One of these is the edition in Mexico, where I read that many subscribers were getting absolutely hysterical that their favorite magazine would have no more nudes.

Not true--Mexican Playboy will continue to have naked women in its pages.

The reasons for this are not as simple as one would think.

One of the reasons that the powers that be at the publication decided to scrap the nudes in the U.S. edition was that so much real pornography is available on the Internet, so much, in fact, that they felt it made the U.S. edition of the magazine superfluous with its nudes.

Thus, get rid of the nudes, and you would have a lifestyle magazine that appealed to a larger amount of readers, even different types of readers, than before.

You would also appeal to a different level of advertiser, and that, really, is the reason they decided to scrap the nudes in the U.S. edition.

However, even though the U.S. is bordered by Mexico, the two markets are as different as night and day.

While a good portion of the U.S. adult public has access to high-speed Internet--and thus can access high-speed porn whenever it wants to--the Mexican demographic is very much different.

According to some reports, less than 50 percent of the population has access to high-speed Internet, or to any kind of Internet, thus making their readership less likely to get their titillation off of a computer.

But the Mexican market evidently loves their magazines, as they, in general, have kept up with the circulations of their most popular magazines even as in the U.S., most magazine circulation has gone down.

So, being that as it is, Playboy decided that the Mexican edition of the publication will keep its nudes.

And you just know that many of those issues will make their way across the border, in particular in places like Texas and California, so even many Americans will still be able to get their jollies from Playboy--but it will simply be from the Mexican edition of the magazine.

Not every edition of Playboy has nudity to begin with. Several editions in the Arab world have never carried nudity, and in other places, the nudity is basically handled by local standards, so as not to upset the public or government officials.

So in some countries, you see nothing, in others, just breasts and in others, the whole shebang.

So Playboy readers, get set for some foreign editions of the publication to turn up in local stores once the U.S. nudity ban is put into force, because Playboy and nudity go together like bread and butter, even if the guy with the sailor hat and his flunkies think that the two don't mix anymore.

(And happy Election Day. Please go out and vote!)