After the launch Playboy in 1953 a deluge of adult entertainment magazines spilled across America. A “flood tide of filth” as one critic described it. Magazines like Adam, Dude, Rogue, Gent, Torchy, Candid, Twilight and Sultry filled the magazine racks. These girlie mags were blamed for the “promulgation of decadence” intended to corrupt America’s youth and make it impossible “for men to revert to normal attitudes in regard to sex.”

Adult magazines were deemed as great a threat to the American way of life as Communism.

Compared to today’s porn industry—these jazz mags are tame. Codes of censorship meant models were more artfully photographed. Full nudity was forbidden—well, until Penthouse broke that ban in the late sixties and Playboy followed with its first full-frontal centerfold in 1972. The focus was mainly titillation or T & A.

There was always some moralizing religious do-gooder (like future financial felon Charles Keating, see below) who claimed these images encouraged perversion, fetishised breasts and were intended to “appeal to the sodomist.” With all this in mind, it’s quite remarkable that our baby boom grannies and grandads grew up to be average, run-of-the-mill, suburbanites.

Or did they?
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Perversion for Profit” is a 1965 propaganda film financed by future financial criminal Charles Keating (the central figure in the 1980s “savings and loan scandal”; see also “Keating Five”). The film is vehement diatribe against pornography arguing comically that it leads to acts of violence and “perverted” attitudes regarding sex—including inclination toward homosexuality. Today the goofy “Perversion for Profit” is seen as a sort of Reefer Madness of porno.
 

 
Via Vintage Girlie Mags.