When I saw my wider family over Christmas, I was rather startled to see one of my three 17-year-old nieces wearing a hoodie that had a print on the back of a pouting, scarlet-lipped female mouth chewing on a just-extinguished matchstick, with PLAYBOY writ large above the image. Playboy Enterprises still turns over hundreds of millions of dollars - but it makes money from soft porn TV channels and online content and licensing the famous bunny logo to all manner of companies. Although the brand itself is far from dead. Now it’s time to do the same with the print magazine. Playboy was quietly banished and replaced by Punch. She lifted the lid of my big brother’s desk and found a naked centrefold inside it It transpired he’d been charging other boys 5p to take a look. My scrupulously upright mother didn’t complain about any of it until she attended a parents’ evening at our local CoE primary school. They hung in rows on a cardboard backing and as the packs were peeled away a picture of a busty topless model emerged. When my parents took over the tenancy of a country pub in Kent in 1968, my father decided to keep copies of Playboy on the bar counter, alongside Country Life. If you’re blinking in disbelief, cast your mind back to the way packets of peanuts were sold in pubs. The magazine’s presence in a liberal household wasn’t unusual. Women wrote and featured in Playboy, the quality of writing was good and the nude pictures were often seen as liberating to the post-war generation. In the mid-Seventies, the world was still giddy from the sexual revolution and the backlash was yet to properly kick off. People (mostly men) read it for the car write-ups, interviews and travel as much as the pin-ups, and in 1975 its circulation per monthly copy peaked at 5.6 million. Yet as epitomised by Playboy, the girlie mag was the embodiment of intelligent sharp-edged masculine glamour - the sort of thing you expected to find on James Hunt’s or Jack Nicholson’s coffee table, beside a white tux. Suggested reading Let's make sex education sublime
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