"I’m sorry to be crass about it, but I don’t think the point of the magazine is for self-pleasure. You no longer need a print magazine for that."

"It weirdly offers an artistic and highbrow view of the female nude, at a time when that is hard to come by."

Says Phillip Picardi, quoted in "I’ll make Playboy playful again, says its new gay editor/Phillip Picardi, a Catholic former Condé Nast wunderkind, also wants to attract women to the £30 magazine with more ‘artistic’ nudes and robust writing" (London Times).

He wants to “destigmatise male sexuality”, he says, and “help men to build a healthier relationship” with the women in their lives. “I’m hoping we can be a space for men who feel caught between needing to be manosphere-adjacent and needing to be the performative liberal male,” he says.... “We should promote the idea that we can be excited about sex and we can be excited about each other and excited about touching each other,” he says with a cheeky grin.

How Catholic is he? We're told he's "a lapsed Catholic who recently completed a master’s at Harvard Divinity School in order to rediscover his faith (his thesis was titled: Is Jesus Kinda Hot?)." Is religion part of making "playful again"? You can find "an artistic and highbrow view of the female nude" in church:

This reminds me of a sequence in the movie "Blue Moon," about the songwriter Lorenz Hart, who was gay, though not openly. The character has this conversation with the bartender. From the brilliant screenplay by Robert Kaplow (commission earned):

HART: You know what the sexiest thing on the planet earth is? A half-erect penis. 

EDDIE: Jesus Christ, Larry, nobody wants to hear this. 

"The role of the French school is to train republicans. I will never accept that at the Republic school we refuse to look at a painting."

Said Gabriel Attal, France's education minister, quoted in "Major row erupts in France after nude painting shown to pupils/Teachers walk out after ‘offended’ pupils at a school near Paris refused to look at Renaissance-era painting as teachers walk out" (Independent).

Sophie Venetitay, from the Snes-FSU teachers union, told the AFP news agency that several first-year high school students, aged 11 and 12, said they were offended by the work by 17th-Century Italian painter Giuseppe Cesari. She said some students had “averted their gaze”, “felt offended” and said they were “shocked”.... Ms Venetitay said staff felt they had been left feeling unsupported and working in a “degraded climate”, adding the incident reminded her of the brutal killing of Samuel Paty.Mr Paty was stabbed then beheaded near his secondary school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in October 2020 after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class.

This is my second post on the subject. Here's the first. I consider this a new topic because of the quote in the post title, reflecting the distinctively strong French dedication to secularism, something I've blogged about many times in the 20-year history of this blog, beginning with 3 posts in the first year of this blog: "Enforcing strict secularism in France," "It isn't a lack of understanding of history that makes the French head scarf ban seem wrong to Americans," and "Only one slope is slippery."

"Some students averted their gaze, felt offended, said they were shocked.... some also alleged the teacher made racist comments....”

Said a teacher quoted in "Nude painting row at French school sparks teacher walkout" (BBC). 

The students were 10 to 11 years old. They were exposed to a Renaissance painting that depicts the story of Diana and Actaeon from Ovid's Metamorphoses — with 5 female nudes.

Staff felt they had been left unsupported and were working in a "degraded climate".... She said the case recalled the brutal killing of Samuel Paty, who was murdered after he showed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class. French authorities believe untrue rumours spread about the class contributed to inciting an 18-year-old radicalised Chechen refugee to murder him close to the teacher's school in a Paris suburb....