The final chapters take a broader view of the publishing industry and women’s sexuality in the 1970s. These women wrote often of sexual liberation, but they avoided engaging in any systematic critique of male power in society or heterosexual relationships. This dissertation examines how the visibility and cultural influence of the women’s movement encouraged male magazine publishers to employ women editors as spokespersons. Playgirl and its competitors strategically embraced some of the tenets and language of the women’s movement while generally refusing to support the movement as a whole. This project argues that sex magazines for women offered an evolving narrative of sexual liberation that was intrinsically wedded to, and in constant conversation with, the women’s movement. Through the marketing of male centerfolds for women, women were asked to consider their sexual appetites for men’s bodies as equivalent to those of heterosexual men for women’s bodies. Publications such as Playgirl, Viva, and Foxylady reveal essential differences between sex magazines for men and those for women, particularly how each type of publication addressed its readers through editorial content as well as advertising and marketing.
culture: sex magazines for women and woman-authored underground comics. This dissertation considers how heterosexual women’s sexual pleasure was negotiated in the popular and underground press in the 1970s, focusing particularly on two virtually unexamined parts of U.S.
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