Masturbation, Constipation, and Bernarr MacFadden
June 17, 2025
This is the story of Physical Culture, the pioneering health and prosperity pulp magazine, the advertisers who supported it, the messianic self-promoter who founded it, and the metastasizing exploitation culture it helped spawn.
Bernarr MacFadden (1868-1955) loved few bodies more than his own. Here he serves as the model in an ad for his idiosyncratic hair treatment plan from a 1901 edition of Physical Culture, the founding magazine of his publishing empire.
MacFadden was twice prosecuted and convicted of violating the Comstock Act, which prohibited the mailing of pornographic literature. He was pardoned both times.
Physical Culture, October 1912
A cleaned-out colon, a lustrous head of hair, a Caruso-like voice? Whatever you needed to clear your way to success and acceptance among the select, you’d find it for sale in the pages of Physical Culture, a monthly health and prosperity pulp foundational to a publishing empire that, across the first decades of the twentieth century, rivaled that of Henry Luce and William Randolf Hearst.
Physical Culture was the creation of Bernarr MacFadden, a man who, after withstanding a childhood of poverty, orphanhood, and a vaccination-gone-wrong case of measles, had, through a self-directed program of exercise, fresh air, and dietary experimentation, fashioned himself into a leaner variant of the strongmen then wowing circus sideshows and international exhibitions. Educated in salesmanship and sexual spectacle through a 6-month gig at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, MacFadden, after flailing through several failed business efforts, trailed through Great Britain on the heels of pioneering bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, then, at around age 30, returned to New York, rented an office, copied Sandow’s schtick, and set to work on his pioneering magazine.
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