I’m an American living in Germany, where they’re way more permissive about nudity than anything I’ve experienced before. There’s casual nudity of adults and kids on TV, at the beach, and in the awesome saunas and they just treat it as normal and a part of life. If you don’t get naked in a sauna someone will come and tell you to take off your swimsuit for some unknown reason. I like to go to the spas and find that the nudity doesn’t bother me as long as I don’t wear my contact lenses and everyone is reduced to a blurry blob. It’s not my own bare body that bothers me, it’s having to see everyone else’s. If I can’t see much the issue is solved.

There’s some hoopla over the semi-nude but covered Bruno GQ cover. The guy’s naughty bits are hidden by his arm and leg, and there’s stuff like this all the time in the US magazines with the female celebrities. It’s usually inside the issue, though, and news stands in the Hudson News chain are only thinking of the children and have decided to cover Bruno up. They did the same thing with Jennifer Aniston’s lookalike cover, so it seems fair. This of course tends to draw attention to the magazines and increase sales, as Folio explains:

Hudson News is at it again.

The company, which operates more than 500 newsstands in major cities, airports and train stations—including New York’s Grand Central Terminal—is treating GQ’s July issue, which features a nude Sacha Baron Cohen (as his flamboyantly gay Brüno character) on its cover “like pornography,” according to the New York Times’ Media Decoder blog.

The newsstand took the liberty of covering up the bottom half of the July cover with a black “blinder.”

While it might seem somewhat surprising, given the influx of nudity on covers recently (see Samir Husni’s helpful roundup), it really shouldn’t be. Hudson News, a notoriously conservative chain, has done this sort of thing before—and often.

Last December, GQ’s much talked-about January 2009 cover—featuring Jennifer Aniston wearing nothing more than a tie and a smile—was covered up by Hudson News in Grand Central. (The newsstand placed a piece of paper across the issue in its window display, but copies inside remained uncovered.)

In June 2006, Hudson News censored the first of five consecutive issues of FHM, including a cover featuring Brooke Hogan—Hulk Hogan’s then underage daughter—which prompted liquor advertisers to pull out of the magazine.

If the retailer was hoping to draw attention away from magazines baring all on covers (and putting it in the window isn’t exactly a sign they want to), censoring them, as one might expect, tends to have the opposite effect. The first FHM cover covered up by Hudson News sold over 400,000 copies on newsstands, well above its 350,000 average. And GQ’s Aniston cover sold some 370,000 copies—up 90 percent over its January 2008 cover, making it the single best-selling GQ issue in over 10 years.

[From Folio Mag via We Smirch]

It makes sense to cover up the semi-nude covers if they’re concerned about children. I don’t mind my son seeing normal non-sexy nudity and tend to agree with my new culture that if we don’t make a big deal out of it the kids won’t, either. Other people are more protective of their kids and have a different opinion about it and you have to respect that. When nudity goes into the realm of anything sexy that absolutely bothers me, though. The other day I yelled at a guy at a gas station for having the adult magazines just two levels above the ones for kids so that they were plainly visible. These GQ covers are borderline sexy and borderline nude, so you can see why Hudson News is cautious about it. Especially when people are confronted with hairless smug Sacha Baron Cohen and don’t have the option of taking off their glasses first. Someone needs to think of the children and the people with clear vision.