Pornographic magazine While the 1940s images focused mostly on legs, by the 1950s, the emphasis shifted to breasts. Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe were two of the most popular pinup models. Marilyn Monroe continued to be a popular model for the men's magazines in the 1950s. The 1950s saw the rise of the first mass-market softcore pornographic magazines: "Modern Man" in 1952 and "Playboy" in 1953. Hugh Hefner's "Playboy" started a new style of the men's glossy magazine (or girlie magazine). Hefner coined the term centrefold, and in the first edition of his "Playboy" used a photograph of a nude Marilyn Monroe,
Rogue (magazine) friend Hugh Hefner coming to me in 1953 to propose an idea for a magazine to be called "Playboy". Hef was talented but poor and his passion had been fantasy. He was a struggling cartoonist and had been working in a clerical capacity at "Esquire". I had been buying fantasy cartoons from him for several years (they were so bad I never published them but he needed the money and to this day we have a running routine where I threaten to issue them as a nostalgic bonanza but defer to his pleadings of personal embarrassment) and one evening he