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
clone
LUI
for its sons. While the world donned miniskirts England did England, reveling in bloomer and petticoat fetishism with
Spick
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.