So the nice girl next door at Evergreen Terrace is going to be sort of taking it off for Playboy. A Playboy spokeswoman seems to indicate that Marge Simpson will only be showing implied nudity in her three page pictorial, despite having landed the cover of Playboy for all newsstand copies. (Subscribers will get a non-cartoon celebrity on the cover. No word on whether it is a naked celeb.) The old saying goes, implied nudity is a lot like implied food. I don’t a hundred percent agree, but it seems like doing Playboy should equal conservative nudes because that is their format. Unless Marge were just doing an interview, in which case I’m not sure about her being the sexy covergirl, much as I love The Simpsons.

I think a number of people keep saying Lois Griffin from Family Guy should do Playboy next, because they know Lois Griffin would actually show the goods. Let’s be realistic here and see that Lois Griffin would be a great fit for Hustler. Regardless, Marge Simpson doing Playboy is a very cute way to celebrate The Simpsons 20th anniversary. Yup, The Simpsons have been on the air for twenty years.

Playboy CEO Scott Flanders, who replace Hugh Hefner offspring Christie Hefner this summer, states that he is really excited about having a cartoon on the cover for the first time because he really wants to bring in a younger audience. Yes, you read that correctly. I don’t know if he is any relation to Ned Flanders, but he does think that The Simpsons will really bring in the under-35 crowd. According to The Chicago Sun-Times, based in the city where Playboy is headquartered, CEO Scott Flanders thinks Playboy’s current audience is around thirty-five because of shows like The Girls Next Door. And putting a cartoon’s twenty year anniversary on the cover will bring in a younger audience. It’s not like he’s putting Abby the Cow from Nickelodeon’s Back at the Barnyard on the cover.

Given that The Simpsons came out of the underground and alternative comics world, it started off with an audience which would have been offended by the suggestion that cartoons are for kids. The Simpsons manages to be more subtle than others who have followed in its yellow animated footsteps, so kids can watch it, but the point was always that The Simpsons was also more sophisticated.

Raise your hand if you remember Life in Hell from before The Simpsons. Are you in your twenties? Yeah, didn’t think so.

Playboy is a brand which has always had such a genius for branding that it seems odd and unsettling to watch them flounder. Like when your first older relative or mentor starts to forget things or have random outbursts.

Putting Marge Simpson on the cover of Playboy is an awesome promo. Just not a promo which is actually designed to bring in readers born the same year as Bart Simpson. Bart read Playdude because he found Homer’s stash.

People often like to get me alone and confide that they would really really love to pose nude for me but they are concerned about their future careers. When I lived in Washington, DC, I just took this at face value. I’m proud of how I have lived my life. I was class president in 10th grade. If I felt like running for some community office, I don’t think I would be daunted by my – gasp – association with artistic and activist depictions of naked people. Nonetheless, I understand how someone who aspired to be a beltway insider might be concerned about limiting their career options. But I live in Los Angeles now. These are actors, models, musicians, and celebutantes whispering to me about how they crave to have their bodies in front of my lens. But they can’t, they just can’t. Maybe the conversation is titillating and erotic for some people. I don’t know. It isn’t for me.

Did getting naked on camera hurt the careers of Marilyn Monroe or Sharon Stone? How about Ewan McGregor or Bruce Willis? I’m not even going to take a stab at naming naked models because there are nudes in existence of every single successful high fashion model I can think of. Tyra Banks devotes a whole episode of America’s Next Top Model to getting wannabe models to get naked. Has on-camera nudity hurt the careers of Madonna or Marilyn Manson?

When it comes to entertainment careers, the public’s response to nudes is generally either positive interest and applause or a complete lack of awareness. Except of course for poor beleaguered Fred Durst, but the public’s brutality for him is a subject for another article.

Do you usually watch mainstream pageants? You know, the kind where kinda regular pretty girls walk around in bathing suits and say they want to become veterinarians because they love children? Thinking about it, didn’t posing nude and having the photos run in Penthouse cause one Miss America to be stripped of her crown? Yes, yes, it sure did. That Miss America is Vanessa Williams. To the best of my knowledge, Vanessa Williams is the only Miss America to have a real entertainment career, starring in movies, recording albums, and being directed by some of the top people in the world. Wow, I bet she cries herself to sleep at night every night, knowing that she won Miss America and is the most famous person ever to wear that crown, but, like, some officials don’t count her win. Because Penthouse ran some photos of her looking sort of sensual with another woman.

Does this remind anyone, besides me, of something going on in the tabloids today? Donald Trump publicly chastised Miss USA, the winner of a pageant he owns. A lot of people had, not only never heard of reigning Miss USA Tara Conner (whose name I found by Googling +“miss usa” +lesbian), but they had never heard of the Miss USA or Miss Teen USA pageants. How convenient that it was Miss Teen USA Katie Blair who Tara was making out with. Now Trump can get promo for both pageants at the same time. Had you ever heard of Miss Teen USA before? Ever watched it?

Tonight, on The Apprentice: Los Angeles, the product placement is apparently supposed to include Playboy. There is also a tabloid rumor circulating that Playboy offered Miss USA Tara Conner the opportunity to pose for the magazine. Gee, but didn’t Trump threaten to strip the pageant queen of her crown if she didn’t straighten up and fly right? How could Hugh Hefner buddy up to Donald Trump on his show and simultaneously try to corrupt his virginal pageant lesbians?

And the most famous Miss America is Vanessa Williams, the Miss America who canoodled with another woman and had nude pictures of her published. The whole world talked about it when Miss America had her crown stripped from her and I do believe the Miss America pageant’s ratings went way up. Hmm, I wonder if the Tara Conner and Katie Blair scandal could be cynically modeled on the Vanessa Williams scandal.

Nah, what kind of cyberpunk social manipulation lunacy would have to be the norm for Donald Trump and Hugh Hefner to conspire to recreate the Vanessa Williams Miss America scandal? Oh yeah, the lunacy all around us every day of the digital age we currently live in. I should really work in television.

I wonder if television execs have to deal with people, they barely know, pulling them aside to whisper about how badly they would like to get naked for them. I guess they probably do.