Pornographic magazines form a part of the
history of erotic depictions. It is a form for the display and dissemination of these materials. In 1880,
halftone printing was used to reproduce photographs inexpensively for the first time. The invention of halftone printing took pornography and erotica in new directions at the beginning of the 20th century. The new printing processes allowed photographic images to be reproduced easily in black and white, whereas printers were previously limited to engravings,
woodcuts, and line cuts for illustrations. It allowed pornography to become
mass-market, making it more affordable and more easily acquired than any previous form. Gradually, this material came to dominate – particularly as other magazines were taken over and absorbed. At times in its post-WWII history,
H&E has catered primarily to the soft-porn market. Another early form of pornography were
comic books known as
Tijuana bibles that began appearing in the U.S. in the 1920s and lasted until the publishing of glossy colour men's magazines. They were crude hand-drawn scenes often using popular characters from
cartoons and culture. In the 1940s, the word "
pinup" was coined to describe pictures torn from men's magazines and calendars and "pinned up" on the wall by U.S. soldiers in
World War II. While the 1940s images focused mostly on legs, by the 1950s, the emphasis shifted to
breasts.
Betty Grable and
Marilyn Monroe were two of the most popular pinup
models. Monroe continued to be a popular model for the men's magazines in the 1950s. The 1950s saw the rise of the first mass-market softcore pornographic magazines:
Modern Man in 1952 and
Playboy in 1953.
Hugh Hefner's
Playboy started a new style of the men's glossy magazine (or girlie magazine). Hefner coined the term
centerfold, and in the first edition of his
Playboy used a photograph of a nude Monroe, despite her objections. Another term that became popular with Playboy readers was the "
Playboy Playmate". These new-style magazines featured nude or semi-nude women, sometimes simulating masturbation, although their genitals or
pubic hair were not actually displayed. In 1963,
Lui started in France to compete against
Playboy, while
Bob Guccione did the same in the United Kingdom in 1965 with
Penthouse. ''Penthouse's
style was different from other magazines, with women looking indirectly at the camera, as if they were going about their private idylls. This change of emphasis influenced erotic depictions of women. Penthouse
was also the first magazine to publish pictures that included pubic hair and full frontal nudity, both of which were considered beyond the bounds of the erotic and in the realm of pornography at the time. In 1965, Mayfair was launched in the UK in competition to Playboy
and Penthouse
. In September 1969 Penthouse
was launched in the U.S., bringing new competition to Playboy
. Playboy
was the first to clearly show visible pubic hair in January 1971. The first full frontal nude centerfold was Playboy's
Miss January 1972. In 1974, Larry Flynt first published Hustler in the US, which contained more explicit material. Some researchers have detected increasingly violent images in magazines like Playboy
and Penthouse
over the course of the 1970s, with them then returning to their more upscale style by the end of the decade. Paul Raymond Publications relaunched Escort in 1980 in the UK, Razzle in 1983, and Men's World'' in 1988. Sales of pornographic magazines in the U.S. have declined significantly since 1979, with a nearly 50% reduction in circulation between 1980 and 1989. The fact that the U.S. incidence of rape had increased over the same period has cast doubt on any correlation between magazine sales and sex crimes. Studies from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s nearly all confirmed that pornographic magazines contained significantly less violent imagery than pornographic films. ==Common features==