Jenny McCarthy: Why I posed for Playboy

On Monday, Jenny McCarthy’s anticipated Playboy cover debuted online -- and it is still creating plenty of buzz on the Web days later.

Yahoo! searches for "jenny mccarthy 2012" spiked an impressive 883% over the past 24 hours. Also booming in Search: "jenny mccarthy 7," "jenny mccarthy photos," as well as a host of search terms that we can't really mention, but we're sure you can put two and two together.

The search interest is particularly impressive because it isn't like McCarthy is a stranger to posing in the altogether. The Playboy veteran first posed in 1993.

What’s different today is that she is now 39 and a mother to 10-year-old son Evan.

Was she worried about how he’d react? Nah.

"I think he can find a lot worse available on the Internet these days," she told People this week. "I think people make such a big deal sometimes about it, when I feel like it just comes down to how you raise your child and how you explain things to your kid."

One day, she said she’ll have a talk with him, but for the time being, she doesn’t make a big deal out of any racy pics she’s posed for.

Said the “Love in the Wild” host: "I don't have one [magazine] cover up… I mean, I don't even have my Rolling Stone cover up. It's like, who wants to look at themselves? I don't. Seriously, the only picture I have up of myself is one of a shark eating Evan and me."

Jenny McCarthy talks about her new gig hosting NBC's dating competition "Love in the Wild":

Besides, she told People, her new Playboy pics are “really gorgeous and classy. They could be out of W magazine. They're really elegant. It's probably a lot more sophisticated than a lot of the stuff you'd see of people with their clothes on."

And though McCarthy does look good (darn good!), she isn't the first 40-ish celebrity to pose for Playboy. Others include Farrah Fawcett, who posed when she was 50, and Nancy Sinatra, who took off her walking boots at the age of 54.