The coronavirus makes Playboy disappear from USA - Lifestyle newsstands

The coronavirus gives Playboy the coup de grace in the US, making it disappear from newsstands after 66 years: the spring number, which comes out this week, will be the last paper, at least for this year. However, the magazine will remain in the digital version, where it is more vital than ever, with a 30% increase in subscriptions in 2019.
"As the coronavirus pandemic's disruption of content and supply chain becomes increasingly clear, we have been forced to speed up a discussion that we had already started internally," explained Playboy Enterprises general manager Ben Kohn on group website, announcing the stop of publications, which had already gone from bimonthly to quarterly last year. Thus ends an era, at least in its paper format.
What is considered the world's first erotic magazine debuted on newsstands in December 1953 but had no date as founder Hugh Hefner doubted a second issue would come out. On the cover there was the then newcomer Marilyn Monroe, to whom the first central page with a bare breast was dedicated. A stylized rabbit head with a tuxedo bow tie was adopted as a logo: a sexually suggestive image that became a cult icon. Since then the magazine spread all over the world, breaking many taboos in an era marked by Puritanism and contributing to the movement of the sexual revolution but then also attracting many criticisms for its celebration of the woman object. The contents of Playboy, however, have never been limited to the nude and have ranged from cultured entertainment (already in the first issue there were articles on jazz, the Decameron and pieces by Sherlock Holmes) and the design, including items of costume, fashion, sports, politics and interviews with famous people from every sector: from Jimmy Carter to Fidel Castro, from Vladimir Nabokov to Gabriel García Márquez, from Malcolm X to Martin Luther King Jr., from John Lennon to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Cassius Clay to Orson Welles, from Yasser Arafat to Steve Jobs.
Its sales peak dates back to 1972, with seven million copies. Three years earlier, even the most explicit Penthouse magazine had landed in the US and the rivalry between the two magazines both led to the publication of increasingly full nude images to increase their market shares: "Pubic Wars", Hefner jokingly defined them.
The market position of Playboy was then heavily affected by the advent of other competing publications, pornographic magazines in the strict sense and, in the eighties, by porn products for home video. It survived by repositioning itself as a 'luxury' magazine for adult men of a certain cultural and social level, but then the fatal coronavirus arrived. The most loyal American readers are still clinging to a hope, even if the abstinence will be long: in 2021 the publication of special issues is expected.