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Adult magazines for sale at the local Army PX have gone the way of the cavalry charge after a decision Wednesday to strip the shelves at base exchanges of magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse.
Marines and sailors will still be able to find those magazines for sale on Navy and Marine Corps exchanges which have not stop selling them, says Marine Corps spokesman Bryan Driver.
While morality groups and the brewing sexual assault scandal in the military have raised the temperature on issues such as the availability of pornography to the troops, Army marketers said it was declining interest in the magazines that led to the change.
"In this digital age, magazine readership and buyer-ship is declining. So it's just a chance for us to re-evaluate our stock assortment, find out which ones are selling, which ones are not," says Chris Ward, spokesman for the Army & Air Force Exchange Service.
He said the magazines have been on sale for soldiers for decades.
Oddly enough, the exchange made its decision just days after the Pentagon, in a written response to the organization Morality in Media, declared that the magazines did not violate department rules against selling sexually explicit material on military property.
A Pentagon review board concluded that "based on the totality of each magazine's content, they were not sexually explicit," Frederick Vollrath, assistant secretary of Defense for readiness and force management, wrote in a response to the group.
The Army & Air Force Exchange operates nearly 1,200 stores for soldiers and airmen worldwide, including eight in Iraq and 34 in Afghanistan where the magazines have never been sold because adult-content magazines are banned by U.S. commanders.
Sales of what the exchange calls "adult sophisticate" category magazines have declined 86% since 1998, largely because of the availability of free content on the Internet, Ward says. "The decision to no longer stock the material is a business decision driven by time, money ... combined with decreasing demand," he says.
Marines and sailors will still be able to find those magazines for sale on Navy and Marine Corps exchanges which have not stop selling them, says Marine Corps spokesman Bryan Driver.
While morality groups and the brewing sexual assault scandal in the military have raised the temperature on issues such as the availability of pornography to the troops, Army marketers said it was declining interest in the magazines that led to the change.
"In this digital age, magazine readership and buyer-ship is declining. So it's just a chance for us to re-evaluate our stock assortment, find out which ones are selling, which ones are not," says Chris Ward, spokesman for the Army & Air Force Exchange Service.
He said the magazines have been on sale for soldiers for decades.
Oddly enough, the exchange made its decision just days after the Pentagon, in a written response to the organization Morality in Media, declared that the magazines did not violate department rules against selling sexually explicit material on military property.
A Pentagon review board concluded that "based on the totality of each magazine's content, they were not sexually explicit," Frederick Vollrath, assistant secretary of Defense for readiness and force management, wrote in a response to the group.
The Army & Air Force Exchange operates nearly 1,200 stores for soldiers and airmen worldwide, including eight in Iraq and 34 in Afghanistan where the magazines have never been sold because adult-content magazines are banned by U.S. commanders.
Sales of what the exchange calls "adult sophisticate" category magazines have declined 86% since 1998, largely because of the availability of free content on the Internet, Ward says. "The decision to no longer stock the material is a business decision driven by time, money ... combined with decreasing demand," he says.
The Army has stopped selling Playboy Magazine in its base PX stores. Why? Lack of demand. Not because of stupid political rules, but because not enough people were buying them. This can only mean that Playboy's print edition is dead. There's no greater concentration of Playboy's demographic market in any other place than an Army base--18 to 24 year old males without access to women. I think this is a watershed moment in the history of print media.
Discuss.
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