Men's Adventure - Legacy

Legacy

The title of the Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention album Weasels Ripped My Flesh was borrowed from a man-against-beast cover story in the September 1956 issue of Man's Life, and the title went through another permutation when filmmaker Nathan Schiff made the horror feature Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979).

These magazines' circulation dropped precipitously in the mid-1960s. Their tales of wartime adventure appealed to American men of the World War II and Korean War generations, and these established readers were reaching an age at which these magazines' girlie pictures were less of a draw. For those who wanted pornography, more explicit and less old-fashioned publications were available by this period. The Vietnam War and its attendant social controversies did nothing to create an appetite for similar entertainments that would have involved rescuing damsels from the Viet Cong. The magazine vision of adventurous, fighting masculinity also became unfashionable. Some publications, such as Swank, survived by turning into explicitly pornographic magazines; others simply ceased publication.

There have been attempts to revive the Argosy title, once in the 1990s, and again in 2004. Soldier of Fortune carried on the tradition of war stories for a male audience. A few contemporary "lad mag" periodicals such as FHM and Maxim are somewhat similar to the earlier adventure magazines, featuring a combination of cheesecake pictorials and occasional true adventure/horror stories.