Nuts to axe mag when bare truth is still out there

Well, plenty as it turns out. The weekly lads mag is to shut after 10 years of publication as its circulation has dropped to a sixth of its heyday. As someone who works in the print media, doing my best to adapt to the digital world and monetise myself online (I always thought that made you go blind), I take no pleasure in this.

And that's because this isn't a victory for the campaigners against the sexualisation of women and the outdated concept that is Page 3, it's another part of the media whose audience has gone elsewhere.

Some of the women who posed topless in Nuts were making more money in a year than I will see in five. One of the most popular, Lucy Pinder, was said to be on a six-figure sum. And she was not alone. If I could make that money for standing in front of a camera, pouting with my shirt off but my undercrackers still on, I would.

But what was the point of Nuts Magazine in 2014? Looking on social media on the day the closure was announced, I found the accounts of various models who have appeared on its pages, accompanied by an 'interview' in which they talked about their boobs. And on Twitter some of them had posted pictures of themselves, taken by the professional photographers who had been paid by Nuts, but free for all and sundry to gawp at, rather than £1.80 an issue. There was no advertising with it either, just boobs.

What you also got that way was the secrecy, the ability to peruse what they had to offer behind closed doors without having that awkward exchange with a newsagent, where you'd have to fork out for a copy of something big enough, like the Daily Telegraph, to wrap it in. Nuts had become an embarrassment for the lads who used to say they only read it for the articles. The campaigns to get it sold in modesty bags on the top shelves, culminating in the Co-Op removing it from sale altogether, had turned Nuts into something socially unacceptable, not to be seen in polite company.

Morally, I'm with the likes of the Lose The Lads Mags and No More Page 3 campaigns. Quite apart from the fact that every time I leaf through the office copy of The Sun, I have to turn over two pages to prevent my blushes, it's time we all grew up a bit and started looking each other in the eyes, rather than a few inches south of there. And if we live in a world where young women leave school thinking they can make more money grabbing their breasts for a camera than they can training to be doctors then we're letting our daughters down badly.

All of that is reason enough to shrug and bid Nuts good riddance, while waiting for its rival Zoo to follow suit into publishing oblivion – a quirky trait of the noughties we'll look back on, point and laugh at in decades hence, like flares and shellsuits.

In the end though, the closure of Nuts means little more than the sad loss of 25 people's jobs. What it offered – nudity and more nudity – is freely available online for anyone who wants it. And out there, on the wild frontier of the internet is more smut than you could shake a stick at.

The campaigners who wanted Nuts removed from sale are celebrating now. They've won the battle but the internet has won the phwoar.

Keith Harrison is away