Male Magazine 1968! It's "The Summer of Love!"
With a little stop at TRUE Magazine and Ladies Home Journal.
The last piece I posted, here in my little substack universe, was an analysis of the November 1958 issue of MALE magazine, (a copy of which I purchased on ebay.) Sociologically speaking, I was interested in examining an authentic remnant of the NOT AT ALL elite, completely UN-WOKE, all-white-man 20th century world that our current president and his terrifying oligarch co-horts are hoping to restore in order to make America great again.
And having now picked through the women-only magazines from the same time period, I feel the need to add that although the articles in these 50’s men’s magazines are grim, violent and dunderheaded, at least the men in them had a pulse.
On the other hand, the faces of the ladies in the women-only publications seem to have made an art out of pulse free living.
It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that men figure prominently in almost every story and ad in the just-for-women’s magazines. But it is amazing to see how infrequently women are even mentioned in the men-only magazines. Oh sure, every now and again one of these so-called women might hire a guy to lead her down the Amazon in a search of her dead husband’s stolen treasure. But other than that, women are completely absent.
By 1968, during the counter-cultural shift known as The Summer of Love, the ads in the MEN-ONLY magazines changed only slightly. There were still many offers of exciting opportunities to start your own business just by sending in a coupon. But the career choices had changed. Gone were lessons in meat cutting and assembling an air conditioning or a refrigerator. Now “The Liberty School of Claim Investigating” was on the scene and ready to help launch a guy into “the lucrative and fast growing field of accident investigating”. The outside world might be protesting an unjust war in Vietnam and mourning the assassination of Martin Luther King or staring, shocked, at the way these disrespectful young people were now shacking up without getting married. But in the back pages of MALE, a man could still take that important first step toward “an exciting outdoor career of adventure as a game warden” just by sending in a coupon.
If and when women did appear in the men-only magazines of this period, the counter-cultural shift brought in a whole new way of seeing them.
In this groovy new world, the poor beleagured men of MALE magazine, their hands already full of stuff to learn from a brochure about accident investigating, now also had to figure out how to cope with roving bands of PLEASURE HUNGRY GIRLS ON THE PROWL FOR WILD NEW KICKS.
Of course, MALE was still a man’s man’s safe space where he could relax and even find a recommendation for a man’s book for men that a manly man might enjoy. For example, a book like ‘POOR NO MORE,’ which offered a man the chance to grab some vicarious thrills from the “tumultuous saga.” of buccaneer Craig Price, the kind of man other men ENVY. And as if that weren’t enough, it was also packed with important insights even a tumultuous buccaneer needs to understand about how women think.
It is interesting to note that the 1968 ad section in the back of MALE magazine was now filled with a lot of something that did not exist at all in the 1958 edition. Apparently there was trouble in paradise for the budding accident investigators, fingerprint experts and game wardens of 1968 that the meat cutters, vinyl repairmen and shoe salesman of 1958 had not experienced.
I decided to expand my research a little by examining a slightly less tawdry men-only magazine from the same period. This issue of “TRUE, The MAN’S Magazine,” from February 1968, with its articles about WWI generals, hunting rifles and the winter Olympics, appears to have been written for a more conservative and slightly more literate group of men-and-only-men male readers.
In the entire issue, there were only two mentions of women to be found:
And then there was THIS piece, labeled HUMOR. It was written by the award winning and respected author of “Anatomy of a Murder.”
The waggish illustration that accompanies the piece offers a pretty good preview of what is to come.
The article, written in a wry tone of voice, examines what the author (who is also a lawyer) clearly sees as an assortment of whimsical and ridiculously hard-to-believe “rape” scenarios. For instance, consider the hilarious irony of a woman who believes that because she was assaulted while she was asleep, it might somehow be considered a RAPE!
I hope I am wrong and this is not the world of ‘increased masculine energy ‘that Mark Zuckerberg was pleading to Joe Rogan that the world needed….and that the current administration and its oligarch toadies (many of whom have been accused or convicted of sexual assault) would like to see return. But if it is, to better help us prepare, UP NEXT: I am going to take a look at what the Women’s Magazines of this same period were teaching the ladies to do to get along. For example:
I am even going to try to explain True Confessions magazine, circa 1960. So stay tuned. I will get back to you with everything you need to know…. just as soon as I figure out what the hell is going on myself.
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I fear that those particular mags are exactly what our monster-in-chief was reading instead of The Red Badge of Courage, Lad a Dog, et al.
Some have said (meaning this is not my idea) that pop culture in the US was so prudish, even about sex during marriage, that violence, which Americans never have any trouble with, took its place as a titillating factor. Even sixties sitcoms and some movies kept married couples apart in separate beds. For maximum "excitement" they cranked up the violence. Sex itself became allied with violence--a double-whammy--in pop culture, especially the cheaper, more exploitative variety. Much can be extrapolated from this line of thinking. Your look at men's magazines ten years apart is really interesting, the details change, but the audience assumption stays the same. Men's and Women's magazines shared a bizarre assumption: men and women want and need to become "super" versions of men and women, part of an all-American drive toward perfection and perpetual self-improvement, almost as if pop culture's main message is "you suck, you could be SO much better." Mad men, of course, created this. Enough!