![]() ![]() ![]() Employing established conventions of the women’s magazine, Playgirl utilized that form toward granting women access to explicit images. ![]() Although the magazine often is dismissed as the token attempt of a masculinist industry to equalize its representational politics, I argue instead that a significant synergy exists between Playgirl and entwined debates over pornography, gender, and commercialized sexuality in 1970s America. This essay examines Playgirl as a rich, yet overlooked, archive in the history of American pornography. These distinctive regional self-images add to the work of Russell in challenging over-simplified conceptions of twentieth-century middle-class culture as homogenous and ‘national’. These changes correlate closely with wider national images of northern England, with the most confident self-images – of Lancastrians as wealthy, cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and proud of their history and traditions coinciding with the popularity of northern culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The analysis, from the magazine’s launch in 1947 to the end of the post-war boom in 1973, identifies changes over time in editorial attitudes to class, the South of England, modernity and the past. Through a content analysis of a successful example, Lancashire Life magazine, it introduces regional differentiation into current scholarship on the middle classes in the second half of the twentieth century. ![]() This article is the first academic study of a significant twentieth-century periodical genre, the county magazine. ![]()
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