'We Found the Slave Trader's Treasure of Madagascar!'

By November 1965 sales wee in decline for men's magazines so, like this issue of Real Men, they had not just to pack more sex, scandal and sensation into every issue, but they had to make sure that potential buyers knew of its content by packing the cover with images and headlines.  Here we have not one, but two cover paintings, (both looking like they might have been cropped from larger cover paintings from earlier issues), and five stories highlighted.  Five very sensational stories covering the gamut of popular men's magazine concerns.  Two of them hold out the promise of salacious sex scandals, with another of those 'true confessions' of young swingers, this time as to their 'wife swapping games' and the promise of some sado-masochism with 'A Night With the Pain Lovers'.  (As mentioned before, the illustration for the latter looks suspiciously like it is cropped from a cover illustrating some kind of war story involving the terrible torture and abuse of young women prisoners). 

War stories are represented by 'Breakout From a Nazi Death Camp' and, reflecting contemporary realities, 'We Lived Through an Ambush by the Viet Cong'.  (Like the Korean war before it, the Vietnam war was a bonus for the publishers of men's magazines as it meant that those cover paintings depicting 'beastly Japs' doing beastly things to western women could be recycled with only a minimum of retouching).  Finally, we have another treasure hunt story, promising that 'We Found the Slave Trader's Treasure of Madagascar!'  Which, apparently, consisted of '$44,000,000 in Rubies ans Sapphires'.  Even in the sixties this sort of treasure hunt story was popular, feeding into male fantasies of stumbling across hidden riches which would propel you into some kind of playboy lifestyle.  The treasures involved were usually pirate (or slave traders) lost caches - discovery of which involved travel to exotic tropical locales full of topless women - or sometimes Nazi gold, (usually hidden in less glamourous locations and also being sought by dangerous war criminals wanting it to finance their putative 'Fourth Reich').  Such stories are still with us, but nowadays they are sold, via TV series on things like the Discovery Channel, as true stories of people seeking sunken pirate wrecks for their treasure.  In many ways these supposedly 'true life' documentaries and the channels that carry them are the true descendants of the men's magazines.