Playboy’s decision to stop publishing nudes would be surprising if it had not always been America’s most prudish magazine. I do not mean that it has strong religious beliefs or moral scruples, for prudes never really do. Nor, for that matter, are the most religious ever very prudish. Neither the erotic Saint John of the Cross, nor the scatological Martin Luther, nor the explicit Saint Paul can really be called a prude. These men wanted to get to God, and if they had to muck through sex or s**t to get there, they weren’t about to blanch.

No, a prude is someone concerned above all with respectability. He accuses himself not for bad morals but for bad manners. He cares less about doing something wrong than about doing anything incorrectly. In this sense, Playboy has always been consummately prudish. It will print naughty pictures, but only of nice girls. They are girls who aspire to be artists! Who are studying linguistics! Whose interests are elevated! — even if the readers’ in them aren’t.

In Playboy’s pages, the prude takes on the guise of the connoisseur. He pretends to enjoy infinitely fine shadings of taste, but he really is deathly afraid of committing a faux pas. This is how you get an editorial strategy that can be summed up as big tits and big words, one in which Linda Lovelace sidles up to Vladimir Nabokov and William F. Buckley Jr. The gentlemen reassure the reader that all is being done quite correctly and the woman winks to let him know that no moral claim or political demand will spoil his fun. Her wink has always been as important as the gentlemen’s nod. It is a sign that no voice of conscience could limit the connoisseur’s pleasures — never mind what subtle moralists like Joe Sobran, who wrote a piece called “The Sage and Serious Doctrine of Hugh Hefner” for National Review in 1974, or eloquent feminists like Gloria Steinem say. Simple correctness is the highest — and highly malleable — value.

Playboy’s editors like to sloganize about sexual freedom, but as slogans go, this one is less political than advertorial. Liberation is not advanced an inch by reinforcing every social distinction except that between the sexual and the commercial, the intimate and the mercantile. Playboy’s interest in Lady Justice does not extend beyond taking off all but her blindfold so its readers can see if she might be a 39–25–35.

Rather than liberate sex, Playboy subjects it to the canons of connoisseurship. Women appear in its pages not as moral or political subjects but as luxury products to be sampled, appreciated, and discriminated between like fine cigars. Such an attitude supports sexual liberation only in the incidental way that a love of tobacco might make one oppose the Cuban embargo.

Playboy subjects sex to the canons of connoisseurship. Women appear in its pages not as moral or political subjects but as luxury products.

This philosophy of prudish connoisseurship is designed to serve a sexual freedom of commerce. Playboy has always feared limits on sex, and it still does — even as it chooses to cover its nudes. What it feared was not repression as such, but any regulation that might limit its penetration of the non-penetrating market. Thus the simple profit motive was elevated into a kind of philosophical commitment.

Even as Playboy covers up, its motives remain unchanged. This is not a betrayal of a legacy, but an act of fidelity. One wishes the nostalgists now shedding tears over the decision were as concerned about the fortunes of intimacy as about those of its profiteering enemies. Barring that, one wishes they suffered from fewer illusions about the journal whose heyday they sentimentally recall. Even in this latest decision, Playboy submits to its original dominant.

— Matthew Schmitz is deputy editor of First Things.