Word: playboy
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Fifty-five years ago, sex went mainstream. Since debuting in December 1953 with a snapshot of Marilyn Monroe gracing its cover, Hugh Hefner's Playboy helped thaw America's once-frigid attitude toward human sexuality. Playboy remains the genre's big kahuna, and its stew of titillating photo spreads, risqué party jokes and, yes, interesting articles was the original recipe for success in the pornographic magazine business. But the strange, seamy history of smut on paper neither began nor ended with Hef's brainchild...
...Compared to these early efforts, the magazine Hefner hammered out in the living room of his Chicago apartment was a paragon of high culture. Nudity aside, Hef conceived of Playboy as an aspirational publication - one which rightly framed sex as an all-American pursuit and sexual conquest as a badge of honor. The first issue of the magazine - which would have been called Stag Party but for threats of copyright infringement - sold about 54,000 copies, cementing the allure of Hef's smoking-jacket sensibility. By the swinging 1970s, the magazine's circulation surpassed seven million...
...Unsurprisingly, publishers tried to piggyback on Playboy's winning formula. Penthouse magazine, an upstart competitor formed by Bob Guccione in 1965, closely mirrored Playboy in format, with a lascivious mix of interviews, fiction features, cartoons and narrative pieces surrounding the buxom centerfolds. But in its choice of images, Penthouse lacked Playboy's sexual subtlety. (Professional competition aside, Hef and Guccione actively disliked each other; while Guccione promoted the rumor that Hef was a "closet queen," the Playboy publisher, noting Guccione's cultivation of a similarly decadent lifestyle, remarked that "If I were he, I'd want...
...competitors aimed to stoke readers' prurient desires, and in winning the battle, they ended up transforming American culture. By marketing sex as a normal, healthy pursuit, Playboy prodded the country to dispense with "old-fashioned moral strictures on one of the most powerful of human urges," according to Hefner biographer Steven Watts. But their efforts may ultimately have been too successful for their own good. A nation receptive to porn and wired for the Web has been a dangerous combination for print magazines. With pornography comprising 25% of all Internet searches, according to GOOD magazine's estimate, magazines have seen...
Read TIME's Skimmer of the New Hefner Biography, "Mr. Playboy...