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Twentieth Century Erotica: The Centerfold Era

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By the end of the pin up era, erotic images didn’t go back in a drawer. Instead, they began to come in collections with a special full size “centerfold” image in the middle. Safely sandwiched between the covers of Gentleman’s Magazines. Each subscription copy mailed out discreetly in a “plain brown wrapper.”

Centerfold girls go wild

By far the most well known of the men’s magazines is Playboy. Hugh Hefner founded the magazine in 1953, funded partly by a $1,000 loan from his mom. That’s when the centerfold with the infamous staple in her navel first appeared.

Playboy became a lot more than a magazine and it’s pages were stuffed from everything from hard hitting political interviews to reviews of the latest high end stereo equipment. It soon became an icon of the 60’s sexual revolution. The mansion and club came later.

In the 1960s, along with the centerfold “playmate of the month,” the Playboy Philosophy column showcased things like LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, censorship, and the First Amendment. Playboy was also “an early proponent of cannabis reform and provided founding support to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws in 1970.”

In 1969, Bob Guccione decided to give Hefner a run for his money and with Penthouse, the playmate bunny became a pet. That’s when he brought his UK based magazine to America. Penthouse quickly started to gobble up the Playboy market-share with “editorial content that was more sensational than that of Playboy, and the magazine’s writing was far more investigative than Hefner’s upscale emphasis, with stories about government cover-ups and scandals.” His had a better centerfold spread, too.

The biggest thing that set Guccione’s girls apart from Hefner’s was the look. Bob “applied his knowledge of painting to his photography, establishing the diffused, soft focus look that would become one of the trademarks of the magazine’s pictorials.” In other words, he used an airbrush to remove all the blemishes, scars and pimples. “Guccione would sometimes take several days to complete a shoot.” Another thing about Penthouse that quickly helped it gain success was the fact the “magazine’s pictorials offered more sexually explicit content than was commonly seen in most openly sold men’s magazines of the era.” When penthouse wanted to do a centerfold photo spread, they wanted legs spread too. “It was the first to show female pubic hair, followed by full-frontal nudity and then the exposed vulva and anus.” Of course, we had to tone things down a little for our little gallery.

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Written by Mark Megahan

Mark Megahan is a resident of Morristown, Arizona and aficionado of the finer things in life.

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