“The idea was there of a magazine that would paint the picture of a more entertaining, romantic life for a generation of men who had come back from World War II, were going to college in record numbers, and started to envision the possibilities of a life that was different and richer than what their fathers had lived.”
CHRISTIE HEFNER, PLAYBOY EDITOR IN CHIEF, 2003
One way the magazine industry competed with television was to reach niche audiences that were not being served by the new medium, creating magazines focused on more adult subject matter. Playboy, started in 1953 by Hugh Hefner, was the first magazine to do this by undermining the conventional values of pre–World War II America and emphasizing previously taboo subject matter. Scraping together $7,000, Hefner published his first issue, which contained a nude calendar reprint of the actress Marilyn Monroe, along with male-focused articles that criticized alimony payments and gold-digging women. With the financial success of that first issue, which sold more than fifty thousand copies, Hefner was in business.
Playboy’s circulation peaked in the 1960s at more than seven million, but it fell gradually throughout the 1970s as the magazine faced competition from imitators and video, as well as criticism for “packaging” and objectifying women for the enjoyment of men. From the 1980s to today, Playboy and similar publications continue to publish, but newer men’s magazines have shifted their focus to include health (Men’s Health) and lifestyle (Details and Maxim).
Women’s magazines had long demonstrated that gender-based magazines were highly marketable, but during the era of specialization the magazine industry aggressively sought the enormous market of magazine-reading women even more. Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Woman’s Day focused on cultivating the image of women as homemakers and consumers. In the conservative 1950s and early 1960s, this formula proved to be enormously successful; but as the women’s movement advanced in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, women’s magazines grew more contemporary and sophisticated, incorporating content related to feminism (such as in Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine, which first appeared in 1972), women’s sexuality (such as in Cosmopolitan magazine, which became a young women’s magazine under the editorship of Helen Gurley Brown in the 1960s), and career and politics—topics previously geared primarily toward men.