Sir! A Magazine For Males

Sir! with its exclamation mark has always sounded, to me, like a magazine for people who like corporal punishment.  While never a pure spanking magazine, Sir! did have a chequered, not to mention long, history.  It started in 1942 as a pin-up type magazine before, in 1945, becoming 'A Magazine for Males', (according to the new strap line), shifting more into men's magazine territory.  During the fifties it sometimes seemed to stray into a scandal magazine type of format, featuring salaciously titled stories chronicling the alleged depravities of the rich and famous.  By the later fifties it seemed to have settled into a more conventional men's adventure format, complete with sensational cover paintings and headlines.  This issue, from December 1957, is one of the earliest in this style and looks much like any of the contemporary rival magazines from this genre.  In particular, the mix of stories is typical: 'My Wife Was Captured By Apes' gives us the jungle adventure/savage wildlife vibe, with a hint of bestiality as a beautiful woman is carried off by a gorilla.  Sex and violence are present with 'Tahiti, Sweet Land of No Inhibitions' and 'Escape From the Torture Stake' respectively. 

'Was Von Richtofen a Sadist?' gives us the obligatory war story, with its reference to the famed German World War One flying ace, otherwise known as the 'Red Baron'.  Best of all is the medical sex story (a genre popular for a time in men's magazines): 'New Scientific Test For Maleness'.  Now, I could say something pithy here about possessing a penis surely being the established criteria, but then I'd be wading into the whole LGBTQ debate on terminology.  Mind you, one might argue, that in this respect, Sir! was way ahead of its time by highlighting the need for new measurements of sex and gender.  This men's magazine phase was relatively short-lived: by the early sixties the magazine began to revert to a pin-up format, gradually becoming more of a soft core sex-orientated magazine.  In this format, it carried on until 1984.  This is a typical cover from that era, (from June 1982):

I always admire the direct approach and this incarnation of Sir! leaves a potential buyer with no doubt as to what they'll be getting, from the 'Special Big Tit Issue' promise to 'How To Make Anal Intercourse Less Painful', the content is plain.  The other two headlines on the cover represent variations on the sort of themes that were employed to titillate readers in the fifties and sixties: the promise of girl-on-girl action and surefire advice on seduction techniques.  It is nice to know that some things never changed in the world of men's magazines.