My father had 3 or 4 European-style* nudist magazines, which my sister allegedly found secreted in the woodpile under the basement stairs, and then moved to her room (I have only her word for all of this). I sneaked a look a few times when she (and everyone else) was out of the house. Just women, unfortunately for my budding interest in seeing naked men. They were completely and frankly naked, posed lolling in the sun. I would say they were probably not air-brushed but were certainly trimmed and possibly some of the younger-looking ones were shaved to look even younger.
*If I recall, the publication names on the covers were in French. I have no idea where he might have found these, possibly from a co-worker I suppose. I also think it’s possible that my sister got them from her disreputable low-class boyfriend, but that doesn’t explain why she would have been interested in keeping them.
When I was in high school, my best friend was a year older, and his 4-year-older brother had Playboys around. I once borrowed one for the (very respectable) interview, which my mother found under my bed. She asked me if I wasn’t a little young for that sort of thing, and I truthfully said that I had it for the interview (of course, I had looked at all the pictures). I guess she wouldn’t have worried about me ogling naked women if she had known my true predilections at the time.
My father didn’t, but I once discovered a stash of detective magazines in a closet at my grandfather’s house. Detective magazines from the fifties were soft porn, featuring lurid ilustrations and tawdry tales from the steamy underbelly of American cities.
I never found any at my house when I was growing up. I did find my uncle’s stash once when we were visiting, and apparently he never realized that I had found them, because I was able to check them out again on subsequent visits. As far as I can remember there weren’t any Playboys but whatever was there definitely had nude women, and I believe there were one or two with light bondage, which may have led to my interest in the subject in later years.
When I was on my way to high school I found a stash of Playboys under a hedge and managed to smuggle them home in my book bag.
Yes. And it was not a secret, though he didn’t leave them lying around the house or anything. He kept his Playboys on his nightstand shelf.
And he actually took my mom and me to stay at a Playboy Club hotel (Playboy Towers, I think it was called) in Chicago once when he needed to be in that city for business. I was a little kid - maybe 6 or so at the time. Bunnies serving dinner and drinks in the club.
Although they didn’t have explicit nudity “men’s adventure magazines” (known as “armpit slicks” by magazine collectors) made Playboy and Penthouse look like exemplars of respect for female dignity and equality.
My great uncle passed away when I was 13 and I came upon a box of Man’s Story, For Men Only, Impact, and assorted other nastiness. The text and illustrations described the humiliation and torture of damsels (as young as 16) by a variety of Nazis (so many Nazis), communists, street gangs, and Asian, Latin American, and African soldiers. Upon rescue, the young women would inevitably reward the brawny white heroes with a roll in the hay. Thank God, my dad had a much more benign and inticing stack of Playboys in the garage.
It might be worth noting that Marvel Comics was originally just a small side hustle for the publisher of some of the rankest examples of men’s adventure magazines. Martin Goodman’s bread and butter was torture porn and racism, not Millie the Model and Spider-Man.
But a neighbor dad did and kept them in his garage. Mostly Playboy but a few Penthouse and OUI magazines.
I was almost 18 (born 1960) before I saw some hardcore stuff like Hustler. Compared to Playboy it was like the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it.
Dad had his stash of Playboy plus a copy of the groundbreaking “Everything you wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask”. All of which I of course read, back about 1970 at age 13. That book, while flawed, had a profound effect on my sexual education and ideas about what adult sexual activities were like.
When I started working at Waldenbooks at age 16 I also suddenly had access to “The Joy of Sex” and I credit that early access to such works for making sure my then girlfriend (and still my wife) never had any unplanned pregnancies. Combining teenage hormones with my nerdy tendencies towards research paid off big dividends.
Nope, nothing of the sort. Except I once found a paper my dad wrote for a business class in college. About Playboy magazine’s market capitalization or something like that. Knowing my dad, he probably thought it ironically amusing to take on that subject while not reading Playboy. He was a devout Catholic at a Catholic university, for context.
I found a Penthouse he left out one time, but that was it (late-80s, I was in my early teens at the time).
My (and my stepbrother’s) motherload was found in a nearby woods, where someone stashed a big ol’ stack of nudies in a plastic bag under a log. Talk about discovering treasure! I was probably a pre-teen at the time.
Another huge score came when my mom rented a house when I was 14, and the landlord hadn’t cleaned out the clutter in the basement left by the previous tenant (a young bachelor). He gave us the keys and told us he’d clean the clutter up in a day or two. I was able to get in before my mom and sort through the mess before it was tossed. Lucky for me, there were probably about 40-50 exotic nudies tucked in among the mess-- Playboy , Penthouse, Hustler, European stuff…I felt like the luckiest boy on earth. Almost 40 years later, I still occasionally have dreams where I stumble across such an abundant treasure trove of nudie magazines; it’s not even about the sex, it’s just a feeling of absolute amazement and glee at the discovery! For a teenage boy in the late-80s to discover that much smut in one place, with no one around to share it with-- well, I think I know how early explorers felt when they discovered a new land.
Nope. The closest thing to porn that was in the house was a book called Youpi and the Girls which was an odd little book featuring photos of a dog with scantily clad or unclad female people.
There were occasional subscriptions for things like Argosy, and True plus sometimes some photography magazines. The former was tame-ish but sort of interesting .The latter were generally tame but there were interesting ads. Bunny Yeager’s always got my attention.
Later on, a business associate was allowed to store some boxes in our attic for a bit but never reclaimed them One of the boxes had several late 60s Playboys. Well, okay then.
Same here. My dad was a member of the Playboy Club, when I was a little kid, and we lived in suburban Chicago, but that was entirely because he was in industrial sales, and, at that time (early 1970s), it was considered to be a socially appropriate place for entertaining clients. There was, IIRC, a magazine which Playboy Club members received as part of their membership, but it wasn’t the “standard” Playboy magazine; my recollection from looking at a copy that my father had received was it had no pictures of women (naked or otherwise), and was just a magazine full of non-sex-related articles.
I always knew a couple of neighbors whose dads subscribed to Playboy or Penthouse, and they would occasionally “borrow” a copy, so that the other kids could marvel at pictures of naked women.
How old was old? My brother bought a skin mag in the Fountainbleu in 1966 (he was 13, my brother had guts) and it was just like Playboy in the amount of skin shown. No frontal nudity anywhere back then, if that’s what you mean by nudity.
My father had his on top of the closet. He had mostly Playboys, and few Penthouses and Ouis. A friend had a father who kept them more easily available.