| Vintage Pulp | Feb 25 2021 |
What a difference a decade makes.
It's the early 1970s and men's adventure magazines are transitioning from an almost total focus on war, travel, and sport to a hybrid model more reliant upon nudity and sex. Such publications always included a few pages of glamour photography, but eroticism came to fore as the seventies arrived, and in a few cases former adventure magazines such as Cavalier and Sir! shifted entirely to pure porn.
This February 1973 cover of Man's World has pushed adventure illustration to the margins and brought cheesecake to the center. By the end of the year the magazine's covers would feature only nude women. Ironically, it was actually returning to its roots. When it launched in 1951 its covers were also solely photos of women—though in short-shorts and tight sweaters rather than nude.
It was less than a year after its sexualized start that Man's World began to emphasize danger and worldly thrills on its covers, which continued until about 1971, when unclothed unmentionable body parts arrived. But even in the presumbaly limitless erotica market there are winners and losers. Man's World was never Playboy, and in 1978 it was finally crowded out, with its last issue appearing in February of that year. We have twenty-four interior scans from this 1973 issue below.
