Dian Hanson’s: The History of Men’s Magazines. Vol. 3: 1960s At the Newsstand

Viva La Sexual Revolution!

The 1960s liberate the world’s newsstands
Sexual revolution, civil rights, Flower Power, miniskirt, women’s liberation, The Pill, Black Panthers, hippies; all these words and phrases entered our language in the turbulent 1960s. The decade started as an extension of the domestic ’50s and ended with worldwide chaos as baby boomers reached sexual maturity. What a fun decade for men’s magazines.

While Playboy’s world dominance grew, with France, Germany, England, and Italy producing “men’s lifestyle” titles, diversification spread in the U.S. The first big breast magazines debuted, with Fling, Gem and The Swinger; men’s adventure titles – with nudes – provided nostalgia for mid-life veterans; humor magazines hung on – barely – while hippie nudist titles exploited a legal loophole allowing them to show pubic hair.

Italy finally joined the party with sexy fumetto photo comics and a hero named Supersex. Latin America clung to the old burlesque format, mired in religious restriction and political unrest. France retained post-war favorite Folies de Paris et de Hollywood for an older audience and launched elegant Playboy clone LUI for its sons. While the world donned miniskirts England did England, reveling in bloomer and petticoat fetishism with Spick and Span digests. But no one topped Germany, where Ulrike Meinhof edited Konkret in 1969, a magazine of sexual and political revolution, before forming Red Army Fraction with Andreas Baader to bomb, kidnap, and assassinate her way into domestic terror history.

Volume 3 contains over 650 groovy covers and photos from Argentina, England, France, Germany, Italy, and The U.S., plus text.