Despite a lineage of male publishers, Playgirl’s first editor Marin Scott Milam was quite the siren, telling The Milwaukee Journal that her reader “is her own person first,” compared to Cosmo’s “desperation” for men.
The magazine was envisioned as an “envelope-pusher, where women could indulge in both eye candy and mind candy.” Editorially, Playgirl was successful, selling more than 600,000 copies of its first issue, eventually exceeding a circulation of one million readers, in more than three dozen countries. On the heels of a legendary spread of Burt Reynolds in Cosmo, Playgirl was formed as a feminist response to Playboy, a media empire founded by Hugh Hefner two decades earlier. The nudie adult magazine based in Los Angeles was founded by night club owner Douglas Lambert.
Wade legalized abortion, the Watergate hearings were just beginning, and Playgirl magazine published its first issue. A slightly finger-wagging video on Playgirl's feminism
