The '70s-era porn shops I remember visiting all had their straight and gay porn sections, plus a lot of more specialized tastes (bondage, psuedo-lesbian, etc.).
Not here in New Zealand they didn’t: thick-necked piggy-eyed Customs agents would just seize anything that could be remotely construed as homosexual. I guess that’s another major advance: it was slightly over twenty years ago that homosexuality was legalised here; now we have transgendered MP’s and gay Cabinet Ministers getting married with the PM in attendance. The amount of change that attitudes have undergone in barely over a score of years is breathtaking.
Timed out on the edit. Insert a comma after “transgendered MP’s”.
When my Dad was a kid, his large extended family lived in rural Georgia. No one had indoor plumbing and many did not have electricity.
Every single tool (with the exception of the automobile and the general existence of deliberately shaped glass and metal, perhaps) was self-explanatory to a kid of 8 or 10. You could see how it worked. You could imagine someone facing the task and inventing the tool to make life easier. The general curve of progress from cave men 15,000 years ago to present time looked pretty transparent: you could’ve brought some of those pleistocene fellows to the farm and showed them around and expected them to see how things worked and go “Wow, butter churn, sewing machine, stove, wagon, what clever ideas, we’ll have to make such things ourselves when we get home”.
To be sure, there are still decently large swaths of territory on earth where things are still like that, and meanwhile, small towns (let alone big cities) with significantly more complicated technology on display did exist in my Dad’s childhood, but still…
The change, from a world where nearly every tool and process was readily understandable to one where so many of them are “black boxes” full of incomprehensible magic, where kids grow up taking for granted that they’re surrounded by equipment they have no idea how it works or how in the world anyone could have come up with the idea, how our species could have gotten from caveman to this, that blows my mind when I think about it.
There were muscle magazines geared toward “bodybuilders”. Google Athletic Model Guild or Bob Mizar. And as far back as the 30s there were “documentaries” about nudist that although focused on young women did have some guy flesh on display. And of course back in the 50s YMCAs weren’t coed 
.
Oh, there are still things like that. We used to call the International Male catalog “porn for the closeted” as recently as the early 90s.
I’d like to second what AHunter3 said.
It’s only been a couple of hundred years that mechanical transportation has been available. Prior to that, getting anywhere on land required muscle power. So if you could somehow transport someone from 1800BC to 1800AD, he would recognize the methods used for transportation. (Now, depending on where the person came from, he might not recognize a horse, or might find the technology used in an eighteenth century wagon somewhat unfamiliar, but he would grasp the concept.)
Similarly, it was only until recently that artificial lighting was developed. Prior to that, all lighting depended on burning something (candle wax, oil, etc.) Again, the person from 1800BC would probably recognize the technology used in 1800AD.
And as AHunter3 said, these things stayed much the same for most of human existence.
That is true, and even into the 20th century, many people lived without things we would consider necessities today. I remember reading an essay by the economist Thomas Sowell where he described growing up in the south without “luxuries such as electricity.” And he is about 75 years old, so he was born WELL into the 20th century! AHunter3 is also right about the complexity of tools and gadgets these days…the leap from mechanical tools to electronic has left much of mankind in the dust, I think. Meaning that, for an average handy guy, I think it used to be relatively easy to figure out, say, how to fix a lot of stuff (like basic car repairs, for instance). These days, you apparently need computers to fix cars! I was just thinking the other day about the DSL wireless connection I was using, and the fact that if it went on the fritz, I would have absolutely no idea what to do about it, other than to call somene to come and fix it. I wouldn’t even be able to begin to troubleshoot the problem. As far as I’m concerned, all this electronic stuff is voodoo!
Another thing is the quality of protective motorcycle gear. There was a time when jeans and an open-face helmet was considered full riding gear. Add goggles and a jacket and you’re golden. The ultimate was a waxed cotton Belstaff jacket. It was hot, heavy, smelled bad, and it’s ever-tacky surface collected dust (and everyone knew if you owned a dog), but it was the best thing going. Even Steve McQueen wore one. Nowadays I see little kids on 50cc dirtbikes that are better equipped than the pro riders were when I was their age. It seems strange thinking back that anyone considered that stuff adequate.
That’s true even for regular bicycles, too. Kids today wear more protective gear just to ride down the street on their three-speed than we used to ever wear when I was a kid. You couldn’t have PAID us to wear knee and elbow pads or a bike helmet. No. Way. Hell, our parents would never have actually paid money for something that seemed so silly back then! “You want WHAT? To ride a bike?! What’s the matter, afraid of a skinned knee?”