1960s Mans magazine

There were many of these types of magazines on the shelves back in the 1950s, 1960s. They were still around in my youth mainly in second handbook shops and I was fascinated with the covers of the older editions. By the beginning of the 1970s, they change the cover artwork of the magazines to models although keeping the outrageous story headings until the magazines demise in the late 1970s.

They were called “stag mags” or "adventure pulps" in the USA where a lot of them originated. Many of the titles found their way to the UK. The magazine cover depicted on is article can easily offend and would send alarm bells ringing today. They are colourful, rude, shocking, sleazy, and often downright fascinating and are totally not politically correct in today’s world.

The covers like the one opposite would usually have woman in some kind of mortal danger be it nasty Nazis or some primitive tribe the woman would be depicted in various stages of undress. The titles of the inside stories on the covers were always outlandish and full of sexual innuendo like ‘Intimate Confessions of a Rough Trade Chick’. Now I have heard of Rough Trade Records but have no idea, who or what is a Rough Trade Chick.

In the early editions there was a strong Nazi theme running through these magazines with the woman depicted mostly as resistance fighters, concentration camp inmates, or American nurse’s always-attractive young woman with heaving bosoms. The torture meted out was normally a whipping that kind of stuff the Nazis liked a bit of hot iron branding usually with a swastika. You can see from the cover used, a bit of roasting alive was also an option.

The men in the magazines were the bodybuilder type who enjoyed meeting out pain to their captives. You would sometimes have a weedy professor or a butch lesbian guard who also enjoyed dishing out some pain. There were many devious ways to submit pain, which the writers never seemed to fail to come up with a way to crate pain or kill.

I have never read one of the stories inside the magazine but from the cover art, I can figure out it will be of a sexual nature. The often-lurid cover of which the original artwork is highly sort after by collectors were illustrated by the likes Mort Kunstler, Norman Saunders, and Gil Cohen to name a few.