Penthouse June 1973

Penthouse magazine June 1973

June, 1973, and the number one song on the Billboard Hot 100 is 'My Love' by Paul McCartney and Wings.

Let's open up the June issue of Penthouse magazine and see what awaits us inside, along with the 'Pet of the Year Play-Off' promoted on the cover. 

Featured in this issue is a lengthy article about John Dillinger from Jay Robert Nash, whose book Bloodletters and Badmen was a touchstone 1970s book in the 'true crime genre. Bloodletters also benefited from the Nostalgia Craze then burgeoning in American popular culture.

Nash contends that a man named James Lawrence, not John Dillinger, was shot to death by federal agents in Chicago in July 1932, a contention not embraced by all historians.

One of the more unusual iterations of tobacco products in the 1970s was the sawed-off cigar marketed as the 'Derringer'.

In 1973 hair transplantation was an inexact science, and there was no minoxidil or propecia (finasteride), so Penthouse did an article on the coolness of wigs for men.

Another advertisement touts the benefits of Forum magazine...............

According to Penthouse staffer Gay Haubner's memoir,

An extremely profitable spin-off, the Reader’s Digest-size Penthouse Forum was nothing more than letters too filthy to run in the magazine, accompanied by cheaply reproduced black and white photos of past Pets who had signed away all their rights in perpetuity.

Then there is the launch of Guccione's Playgirl clone, Viva:

A pictorial by '......an intense, studious, easily agitated young man' named Dudley Gray presents young women posing amid Fabrics and Furniture.........

The 1970s Penthouse pictorial style, centered on soft-focus photography, is in full effect for the Pet for June, a lissome young lady named Paula Francis.

Personally, I find this cartoon to be pretty funny.........

The Vietnam War is the subject of two articles. Thomas Buckley's piece covers Al McCoy and his 1972 book 'The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia', which argues that the CIA had a covert but heavy hand in the heroin trade in Southeast Asia, using drug trade-derived profits to fund the Laotian resistance to communist rebels. The first edition of McCoy's book is long out of print and exorbitantly priced; however, a more affordable and updated edition, selling for $33, is available here.

The other Vietnam article, by Jerome Doolittle, claims that decisions to pursue the war were influenced by the status of South Vietnam as a sexual playground for American males, particularly bureaucrats and administrators in the State Department and the Department of Defense. Doolittle argues that the in-country workers in the American government were reluctant to give up access to petite, submissive, Asian women and advocated for persistent U.S. involvement in the war. 

This claim is specious, but Doolittle does make clear that the overwhelming majority of American males in South Vietnam were quite comfortable to convert Vietnamese women into concubines, and the Vietnamese women were quite comfortable with taking large sums of money from the Americans to dispense these favors.

The 'Pet of the Year Play-Off' (the latter term chosen to irritate Playboy magazine, no doubt) features some deserving young women, of both American and U.K. origin. No Instagram face or body filters with these photographs; when they were taken, Instagram didn't exist..........! 

Thus ends our sojourn into the pop culture landscape of 50 (!) years ago. I hope you have enjoyed it.