The main goal of the diploma thesis is to describe the development of content in Czech and American Playboy and compare them both over the years and the American and Czech versions with each other. The theoretical part of the thesis presents the development of both American and Czech Playboy and the changes that have occurred in the magazine are included in the cultural development and contemporary context of the USA and the Czech Republic. The diploma thesis seeks the causes of changes and development of the journal, in culture and society, in their changed attitudes, norms and values. At the same time, in this diploma thesis I deal with the Playboy audience and agenda setting. Three years 2010, 2015 and 2020 are selected for analysis in the practical part. As part of the quantitative content analysis, I examine which topics, articles and sections appear in the issue, which topics have disappeared or appeared over time and which part of the magazine is occupied by nudity. Using qualitative analysis, I focus on the transformation of the cover pages of Playboy magazine, the depiction of women on such cover pages and the comparison of American and Czech covers.

Men are bombarded with contradictory masculine imagery in the media. The perfect man must be aggressive but not violent, sensitive but not emotional, healthy, active and smart without being an idealist, overachiever or too bookish. Heterocentric male focused lifestyle magazines rival women’s magazines in number and availability. Some men look to these images as a tool by which to gauge their masculinity and learn their social role performance. This inquiry includes a content analysis of four major men's lifestyle magazines over a 12-month period in which four new masculinities: certitude, irony, new sexism and double voicing were critiqued. Elements of costume, nonverbal expressions and activity level in the photographs of men and women were examined. The findings indicate that Maxim and Stuff were deluged with displays of certitude of gender roles, irony, "new sexism" and double voicing. Playboy had a high level of gender certitude, marginal levels of new sexism and irony and low levels of double voicing. Lastly, GQ had relatively high levels of gender certitude but it had very low levels of the other masculinities.

"Cold War Playboys: Models of Masculinity in the Literature of Playboy" emphasizes the literary voices that emerged in response to the Cold War's redefinitions of space and sexuality and, thus, adds to the growing national discourse of Cold War literary and masculinity studies. I argue that the literature Playboy includes has always been a necessary feature to creating its masculinity model; however, that very literature often destabilizes the magazine's grand narrative because it presents readers with alternative models of masculinity. To make that argument, I presume five things: 1) masculinity, like femininity, is a construct; 2) the mid-century masculinity crisis should be attributed to redefinitions of space and sexuality; 3) the crisis generated a variety of masculinity models; 4) Playboy presents its own, unified model of masculinity through its editorial features; and 5) finally, that Playboy should be considered an early Cold War artifact because the space Playboy magazine represents, dually domestic and privatized, is hardly trivial--decade after decade, it has absorbed society's shifts and reflected them back to readers. Citing biographical, historical, critical, and textual evidence, I consider how the literature of Playboy magazine responds to the construction of Cold War discourses regarding sexuality and space. In particular, I examine how Playboy contributions from Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Baldwin detail models of masculinity informed by Cold War culture. Playboy's emphasis was obviously Playmates, but fiction always appeared in its pages. As its largest component, fiction became the backbone of Playboy. Therefore, Hefner's educated, sexual male identity included, and still includes, reading a wide array of literature--from Ian Fleming to Ursula le Guin. "Cold War Playboys" asks: How did literature gain primacy in Hefner's ideal male identity? What purposes does reading this literature serve when appealing to a particular masculinity? Answering these questions allows me to explore how one mass-produced magazine and specific literary figures participated in and resisted the construction of Cold War discourses regarding space and sexuality.

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