Anthea McTeirnan: No-nudes Playboy is just following the money

So Playboy magazine, now 62 years in its stockinged feet, is making its stars cover up. Why? Well … "you're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. So it's just passé at this juncture," said an admirably frank CEO Scott Flanders.

And there's the rub. The US issue of Playboy magazine no longer turns a profit. It is merely there to bolster the wider Playboy brand.

The magazine's circulation has dropped, from 5.6 million in 1975 to about 800,000 today. The publication itself is little more than a marketing tool for Playboy's licensing business: which allows clothing and jewellery makers to use the Playboy brand.

Playboy Enterprises also authorises the kind of products many of us get our knickers in a justifiable twist about: stationery sets aimed at young girls, for example.

However much double-entry bookkeeping you do, the money is now purely in the brand. The "put them away girls" decision was taken last month at a meeting attended by Playboy founder, current editor-in-chief and now apparent friend of feminist struggle, Hugh Hefner.

In 1953, when Hefner published the first issue of Playboy, and put Marilyn Monroe on the cover, he penned an editor's letter that read: "If you're a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex . . . "

Ho, blooming ho, Mr Hefner. How women laughed. How they chuckled at the old adage that guys just read the magazine "for the articles" (which, admittedly, made an effort with contributions from Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and interviews with high-stature public figures including Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Jimmy Carter).

Arguably, at that time, Playboy actually did stand culturally and politically erect on the top shelf. Not any more.

This month Ana Cheri won the title of Miss October to become Playboy's Playmate of the Month. (This is where you can forget the intellectual heavyweights.) "We took Ana to the Playboy Mansion one afternoon," reads the Playboy website, "put her in a bikini and had her jump on a trampoline. But that didn't seem that interesting. So we decided to fill the trampoline with Skittles as well. The results were much more interesting."

Dontcha just love the brave new world of digital multi-media? Click on the website and see Ana on that trampoline with the sweets wearing a bikini. She has her top on and it is quite sweet, if that is any measure of progress at all, ladies.

But, here again, the cleaned-up imagery is really about cold commerce. Playboy's website has already banished nudity, partly to give it access to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This has quadrupled online traffic from around 4 million unique visitors a month to 16 million, and led to the average age of its readers dropping from 47 to just over 30 years old, the company says.

Lads mags like Nuts and Loaded have died a death and the ubiquity of porn is sweeping all before it, so it's brand or bust for the world's most famous girlie mag.

Playboy's logo showing a rabbit head wearing a bow tie is one of the most recognisable in the world. The company makes most of its money from licensing it around the world to sell products including toiletries, drinks and jewellery. About 40 per cent of merchandising income is generated in China, where the magazine itself is not even available, so the precedent is out there.

Meanwhile, one of Playboy's most famous stars, Holly Madison, has said she that doesn't want her daughter, Rainbow, to follow in her footsteps by becoming a Playboy model and has raised her to know "she has value".

The reality TV star, who dated Hugh Hefner for seven years, said: ‘”When she is an adult, she will be able to do what she wants, but from day one I’ve tried to raise her to know she has value, her body parts have value, and she doesn’t have to do something cheap or tawdry to get attention.

“If she wanted to [be a bunny] – and God forbid she did – I would tell her my whole experience with it and I’d be honest that it wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

So there you have it, as Playboy makes a business decision proven to deliver the money shot, it seems that the lesson remains the same: don't put your daughter in the mansion, Mrs Worthington.