Ten Years that Shook the (Men's Magazine) World
By Dian Hanson
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Speculation is that they were funded by organized crime. If it was the mob - I found no hard evidence - their money was never better spent. The new slicks, as they were called, offered high-quality topless photos of sexy women on thick shiny paper with no intrusive lifestyle features. Since they weren't sold on newsstands, their publishers felt free to take risks others wouldn't dare. It was in the slicks where Elmer Batters got his toe in the door to invent the popular genre of leg fetish magazines. Exotique publisher Lenny Burtman also found shelter in the slicks to create the first full-sized female dominance titles. The slicks would be first to show pubic hair in the US, the first to show nude men and the first to exploit the Flower Power fantasy of hippie sex.
What emboldened the slick publishers to create America's first unapologetic sex magazines was the obscenity trial known as Samuel Roth vs United States of America. Roth, a publisher since the 1920s of mildly spicy magazines, sex education books and novels including Lady Chatterley's Lover, chose to defend his publications as art, and challenged the court to define the difference between art and pornography. The result, handed down along with Roth's obscenity conviction in 1957, was "The Roth Test". To this day before any work can be deemed obscene in the US a court must determine "whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, finds the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest".
It seems an innocuous little phrase, yet in its very vagueness lies its value. A good lawyer can find innumerable ways to define "average", "contemporary", "community" and "dominant". And "taken as a whole"? That's the gold. After the Roth Test a publisher could no longer be prosecuted for one shocking photo in a magazine, or one paragraph of questionable text. First Amendment (Freedom of Speech) lawyers successfully argued this line to mean that a single page of redeeming social value, say a column offering medical advice or homerepair tips, salvaged a publication from obscenity status. The Roth Test was largely responsible for the number of men's titles on American newsstands doubling between 1957 and 1959, and for the rise of the slick publishers, who pushed the limits of the new law by making magazines with absolutely no attempt at social redemption.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Speculation is that they were funded by organized crime. If it was the mob - I found no hard evidence - their money was never better spent. The new slicks, as they were called, offered high-quality topless photos of sexy women on thick shiny paper with no intrusive lifestyle features. Since they weren't sold on newsstands, their publishers felt free to take risks others wouldn't dare. It was in the slicks where Elmer Batters got his toe in the door to invent the popular genre of leg fetish magazines. Exotique publisher Lenny Burtman also found shelter in the slicks to create the first full-sized female dominance titles. The slicks would be first to show pubic hair in the US, the first to show nude men and the first to exploit the Flower Power fantasy of hippie sex.
What emboldened the slick publishers to create America's first unapologetic sex magazines was the obscenity trial known as Samuel Roth vs United States of America. Roth, a publisher since the 1920s of mildly spicy magazines, sex education books and novels including Lady Chatterley's Lover, chose to defend his publications as art, and challenged the court to define the difference between art and pornography. The result, handed down along with Roth's obscenity conviction in 1957, was "The Roth Test". To this day before any work can be deemed obscene in the US a court must determine "whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, finds the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest".
It seems an innocuous little phrase, yet in its very vagueness lies its value. A good lawyer can find innumerable ways to define "average", "contemporary", "community" and "dominant". And "taken as a whole"? That's the gold. After the Roth Test a publisher could no longer be prosecuted for one shocking photo in a magazine, or one paragraph of questionable text. First Amendment (Freedom of Speech) lawyers successfully argued this line to mean that a single page of redeeming social value, say a column offering medical advice or homerepair tips, salvaged a publication from obscenity status. The Roth Test was largely responsible for the number of men's titles on American newsstands doubling between 1957 and 1959, and for the rise of the slick publishers, who pushed the limits of the new law by making magazines with absolutely no attempt at social redemption.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
History of Men's Magazines Vol. 3
Hardcover, 21.3 x 27.7 cm (8.4 x 10.9 in.), 460 pages
$ 59.99
$ 59.99
Swinging Sixties at the newsstand
CanCan, Sweden, 1960s