"I Fought Australia's Savage Death Men"

The December 1969 issue of Man's World was the last in its traditional men's pulp format before it became a more straightforward adult magazine with photo covers depicting semi naked young women.  This last cover painting is hardly the most inspired and, in style, harks back to the late fifties and early sixties, but is a fitting send off for this version of the title.  As are the various story titles.  The story being illustrated, 'I Fought Australia's Savage Death Men' promises more of the genre's traditional racial stereotyping, this time in the relatively unusual venue of Australia.  Despite this more exotic than usual locale, those aborigines are obviously just as savage and white-woman rape crazy as those African native, South Sea Islanders and Arabs depicted in similar stories elsewhere.  But if treasure hunts resulting in having to flee homicidal natives isn't you thing, don't worry, because 'Man's World Takes You to the Wildest Sex Swap Convention'.  The mind boggles as to just how they define a 'Sex Swap Convention.  Is it some kind of conference where people have public displays of gender reassignment surgery?  Or merely a meeting of cross dressers?  

This, along with items like '5 Girls Reveal How to Play Their Favorite Passion Games' and 'Brenda's Love Room', look forward to the kind of sex-orientated content that would dominate the magazine from 1970.  'London - After Dark Sex Capital of Europe' is undoubtedly a play on the whole myth of 'Swinging London' and is part of another long tradition in men's magazines: the sex travelogue that tries to convince its readers in small town USA that sex is somehow more available and more exotic overseas, (especially in decadent Europe).  The other cover stories seem to cover a couple of the other regular topics of the genre - survival in the wilderness ('My Plane is Down...I'm Surrounded by Wolves') and war and possibly crime ('The Nuclear Mob' - the title implying the idea of nuclear armed organised crime).  While these sorts of stories would continue into the magazine's new incarnation, they would increasingly be crowded out by the more obviously sex-orientated stories, pretty much vanishing by the mid-seventies, as Man's World (or  The New Man's World as it styled itself) increasingly aspired to be a poor man's Playboy.  In this guise, it survived until at least the late seventies.  (While a magazine of this title still exists, it is an Indian publication with no connection to the US men's magazine).