Men's Magazines.

Hugh Hefner's Playboy, founded in 1953, had dominated men's magazines featuring female nudity since the first years of its existence. By the 1970s the rise of hard-core porn, both in movies and in magazines, and the growth of new magazines such as Gallery, Oui, and Hustler posed a brief threat to its market position. The biggest challenge came from Bob Guccione's Penthouse, which began publishing in the United States in 1969.

The Porn Wars.

Penthouse was less sophisticated than Playboy but more sophisticated than Hustler. And while Penthouse did not take its photography of genitalia to the extremes that Hustler did, it was more daring than Playboy, both in explicitness and in pictorials, and therefore posed a commercial threat to Hefner's magazine. Thus the porn wars began. Playboy did little to change its image, but it did begin offering fuller views of...