Man's Life: 'Happiness is Sex With My Best Pal's Wife!'

 

The end of the 'swinging sixties' was looming, but it was business as usual in the December 1969 issue of Man's Life, ('The Action Magazine for Men').  That said, the cover format illustrates a growing trend for men's magazines as the decade drew to a close of having the cover painting minimalised and more emphasis being put upon the sensationalised story titles.  I'm assuming that the voyeuristic cover is illustrating 'The Day a Madman Was Unleashed From Prison', the sort of thing that might have been equally at home in one of the 'True Crime' magazines.  Actually, voyeurism was a popular subject for men's magazine covers, which frequently featured women in various states of undress being peeped by some miscreant sat outside their bedroom window.  It's an apt subject as the publications themselves were offering their readers a form of voyeurism - an opportunity to peer into the sleazy worlds of things like vice and wife-swapping from the comfort of their own homes.

The rest of the contents is par for the course for the era: 'Happiness is: Sex With my Best Pal's Wife' presages the slide of most men's magazines into more explicit sex orientated adult material in the following decade, as is 'Malibu Beach: Where the Sex Kittens Run Amuck'.  'Miracle Escape From the Commie Killers of Cambodia' is the typical men's magazine war story updated for the Vietnam era, while 'I Was Captain of the Mafia's Ship of Vice' is another reason why I once considered pursuing a career at sea.  If I was to believe the stories in men's magazines, the oceans of the world were awash with such floating sex and sin palaces - just imagine what the Captain's Table was like on such vessels.  Man's Life held out until 1974 before it switched to photo covers rather than more traditional paintings and staggered on to at least 1975 in a new, more soft core porn orientated format.  Although this was the last regular issue of the decade, 1969 also saw an Annual published.