Penthouse July 1986

Penthouse

July 1986

July, 1986, and Peter Gabriel's single 'Sledgehammer' sits atop the Billboard Hot 100.

The July issue of Penthouse is on the stands, featuring Pet Krista Pflanzer on the cover.

 

The magazine still has a healthy page count, but it clearly is in a transitional period. For one thing, the advent of videocassettes is irrevocably changing the 'adult' entertainment landscape. No longer were redblooded American males reliant on print media for thrills and titillation; anyone with a TV, a VCR, and a credit card, could have porn delivered to their houses or apartments. The July Penthouse has its share of videocassette ads in its back pages; the same things that eventually would kill the magazine are, at least in 1986, bringing in needed revenue.

Does anyone remember the 'Pony' shoe brand ?! They were big in the 80s. I never bought any Pony shoes, I always was comfortable with Adidas or Nike.

In the July issue, publisher Bob Guccione makes clear his alarm and disgust over the actions of the Reagan administration's Attorney General, Edwin Meese, who in July of '86 published 'The Meese Report' on pornography. 

Guccione was quite hostile towards Meese and the latter's efforts to curtail 'adult' magazine distribution. While the Report did not do all that much in terms of enacting federal laws to curtail porn distribution per se, it did scare many outlets into discontinuing magazine sales; for example, in April of '86, 7-11 stores stopped selling Penthouse and Forum, a move that obviously cut into Guccione's bottom line. The July issue of Penthouse had an article that was (unsurprisingly) very critical of Meese.

Turning now to the stuff that Meese didn't approve of, the Penthouse Forum still is going strong. After all, everything in the Forum was 100% true !

Probably the best pictorial in the July issue is the one featuring a German lass named Helga. She likes "...a foaming stein of Bavarian beer," and believes "...one man is enough for me."

 

The essay 'Summer Sex,' by Ellen Sherman, relates tales of summertime lust and love, 80s style. Taiwanese artist Hilo Chen provides a great accompanying illustration.

As part of his campaign to cast Ed Meese and the Reagan administration as fanatics who were denying Americans freedom of expression, and Penthouse as a patriotic manifestation of the 1st Amendment, Guccione has an artsy pictorial of the Statue of Liberty. 

The accompanying essay by sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov lends big-name credibility to the pictorial (then again, we know Asimov wasn't above doing a little bit of his own 'spicy' stuff now and then). However, Asimov's essay is less about freedom, or even the Statue of Liberty, and more about the need to construct space colonies (?!) since these are places that would be free from the mores and attitudes of people like Meese..........

Let's close our overview of the July issue with some rather lowbrow cartoons......all part of the fun, in that long-ago Summer of '86.