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  • Home
  • About
  • Articles
    • Sex History
    • Sex Worker Voices
    • LGBTQ History
    • Sex Workers Timeline
    • Sex Talk
    • Whore Law of Yore: How New South Wales decriminalised sex work 1979-1995 by Eurydice Aroney
    • Timeline of British Law and Sex Work
  • Kate’s Blog
  • Vintage Erotica
    • Parisian Sex Workers 1930s
    • Erotic Literature
    • Erotic Art
    • 1800s
    • 1900-1950
    • 1950-2000
    • History of Burlesque
    • Delta of Venus Archives
  • Sex Worker Rights
  • Word Of The Day
  • Friends and Allies
  • Historical Hotties
  • Recommended Reading
  • Quizzes

Erotica from 1950 Onward 

The phrase "pinup" was coined to describe pictures torn from men's magazines and calendars and "pinned up" on the wall by U.S. soldiers in World War II. Cheesecake shots of movie starlets and burlesque stars were the order of the day, but the second half of the 20th century saw the emergence of  men's magazines such as Playboy and Modern Man of the 1950s. Soon, this type of magazine was the primary medium in which pornography was consumed.

Penthouse, started by Bob Guccione in England in 1965,  was the first magazine to publish pictures that included pubic hair and full frontal nudity, both of which were considered beyond the bounds of the erotic and in the realm of pornography at the time. In the late 1960s, magazines began to move into more explicit displays often focusing on the buttocks as standards of what could be legally depicted and what readers wanted to see changed. By the 1970s, they were focusing on the pubic area and eventually, by the 1990s, featured sexual penetration, lesbianism and homosexuality, group sex, masturbation, and fetishes in the more hard-core magazines such as Hustler.

Magazines for every taste and fetish were soon created due to the low cost of producing them. Magazines for the gay community flourished, the most notable and one of the first being Physique Pictorial, started in 1951 by Bob Mizer when his attempt to sell the services of male models; however, Athletic Model Guild photographs of them failed. It was published in black and white, in a very clear yet photographic manner celebrating the male form and was published for nearly 50 years. The magazine was innovative in its use of props and costumes to depict the now standard gay icons like cowboys, gladiators and sailors.

Source here.