Playgirl Magazine

Playgirl

June 1973 cover (Issue 1, Number 1)
Editor in Chief	Nicole Caldwell
Categories	Women's magazines
Frequency	Monthly
Publisher	Magna Publishing Group
Year founded	1973
First issue	June 1973 (two "preview" issues, Jan. and Feb. 1973)
Country	United States
Language	English, many others
Website	www.playgirl.com
ISSN	0273-6918

Playgirl is an American magazine that features general interest articles, lifestyle and celebrity news, in addition to semi-nude or fully nude men. In the 1970s and 1980s the magazine printed monthly and was marketed mainly to women, although, as the magazine knew, it had a significant gay male readership, in a period in which gay male erotic magazines were few.

The magazine was founded in 1973 by Douglas Lambert during the height of the feminist movement as a response to erotic men's magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse that featured similar photos of women. In 1977 Lambert sold Playgirl to Ira Ritter who took over as publisher. The magazine covered issues like abortion, equal rights, and interspersing sexy shots of men and played a pivotal role in the sexual revolution for women. From March 2009 to February 2010, it appeared only online. The magazine returned to print as a sometime quarterly beginning with its March 2010 issue. The last print issue to date was for Winter 2016. As of 2016 the magazine was believed to have had only approximately 3,000 subscribers.

Playgirl from inception to recent years was intended to be a women’s magazine and an outlet for women to explore their sexuality (very similar to the popular men’s magazine, Playboy) and to embrace the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During its height, publisher Ira Ritter took the magazine to an even more sophisticated arena which included political articles to strengthen the editorial content, and featured influential figures of that time. However, over the course of the last 30 years, Playgirl faced adversity and many obstacles of opposing opinions in the media that ranged from Feminist Sex Wars to pornography, prostitution, and lesbian practices.

Playgirl was published by New York City-based company Blue Horizon Media, Inc. until April 25, 2011 when Blue Horizon sold the print rights for Playgirl together with other of its titles High Society, Cheri, Black Diamond, Finally Legal, and Purely 18 to Magna Publishing Group, Inc. of Paramus, New Jersey. The Playgirl.com website is owned and operated by Trans Digital Media, LLC. In December 2015 Magna Publishing Group was acquired by 1-800-PHONESEX.