Girl Watcher

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Cover of the June 1959 issue of "Girl Watcher"

Girl Watcher was a short-lived girlie magazine from the late 1950s. It was designed to be a humorous, over-the-top publication, in the vein of Mad Magazine, although more overtly and outrageously sexualized.

According to one of its essays:

Girl watching is edifying, transporting and fulminative ... Today's girl watcher is the connoisseur of the day, of the female figure come to its fruition, of Slenderella, Maidenform and Saks Fifth Avenue. (March 1959)

"Girl Watcher" featured pin-up photographs, short fiction, cartoons, horoscopes, and profiles of iconographically sexual stars such as Mamie Van Doren and Kim Novak. There were also how-to articles (e.g. "Stalking the Girl" and "On Photographing a 'Kitten-Type' Blonde"), and a fake "letters" column in which beautiful women would write in demanding to be watched, with letter titles such as "Men Come Get Me".

Virtually all of its content had to do with a sort of repressed and debatably benign voyeurism that would come to be seen as culturally superfluous (not to mention deeply misogynistic) with the advent of the sexual revolution and the rise of Women's Liberation in the 1960s. Many of the articles in "Girl Watcher" were written concerning the taxonomical classification of women (into such categories as "Pittsburgh Blonde Flipper" and "Philly Floozie"), and the men who derive pleasure from watching them (e.g. "The Deerstalker" and "The Swivel-Head").