Question on standards regarding nudity in magazines

Factual Questions
1

I used to have a subscription to Gear magazine, and one thing I noticed is that there would often be one photo in the magazine in which the model’s breasts were visible. Not every issue had this, but no issue had more than one photograph where you could see booby. I found this curious because it is almost as though they have some sort of ‘nudity cap’ in which they can’t show more than X pictures with nudity (in this case 1).

It is ironic that Wal-Mart banned magazines like Maxim and Stuff because I NEVER saw any nudity in those.

2

I know of no statutory requirements that would slot a magazine in a particular category based on content such that such a magazine would be at some disadvantage as a result (i.e., higher taxes on magazines with nudity or some such thing), other than in jurisdictions where porn is totally banned. It’s generally just the editorial policy and market strategy of the magazine. I am not familiar with Gear but maybe they wanted to have enough nudity to be titillating (no pun intended :D) without being pigeonholed as porn.

Disclaimer: I have no specialized knowledge of the field. Just because I never heard of it doesn’t mean it ain’t so.

3

There are no formal standards of any kind. A prosecutor can file charges based on obscenity or the post office can pull obscene materials from being mailed, but that term has no real definition and is imposed on a case by case basis, which are seldom won by the authorities. If you are talking about simple adult nudity (which women’s fashion magazines have a surprising amount of, BTW, if you like irony) I know of no applicable statutes.

4

Men’s magazines have pictures of beautiful naked women in them. Women’s magazines also have pictures of beautiful naked women in them.

This is because the male body is by-and-large ugly, lumpy, and should not be seen by the light of day.

Exapno Mapcase is correct. The standards are not a cut-and-dried quesion of legality, but a question of marketing and local channels available for distribution on a scale large enough to support the mass manufacture of specialized reading material.

For example, you may have noticed the “creep” of explicitness in magazines over the last 50 years, from Marilyn Monroe’s posing as Playboy’s first “Sweetheart of the Month” in 1953 up to today… well, in the last three or four years, magazines that once toed the line with “simulated sex acts” and mere nudity have sunk to pretty raunchy levels.

Such magazines generally only have readership in certain circles, and are priced and distributed accordingly. This is because they know who their customers are and what those customers like, and also because they know that the Wal-Marts and 7-11’s of the world wouldn’t dare offending their customers with such smut even if the price were lowered to $1.99!

Tamer magazines such as Maxim, and, as was noted earlier, Cosmopolitan, appeal to a broader base of customers without offending. They can be priced more reasonably and attract more advertisers to help defray publishing costs as a result.

In addition, Hef’s been noticing that the Maxims of the world have been attracting some pretty big names as of late (among them Sex and the City’s Kim Cattrall and Dark Angel’s Jessica Alba) who merely appear in sexy clothing. People see, they like, they buy - and no nudity is involved!

We could see a definite split here in the near future (it’s already happening, actually) where the really far-out porn is available only in adult bookstores, while the more upscale or trendy magazines back off from nudity almost entirely!