While there were a number of glossy nudist magazines on (some) newsstands in the 1960s and on into the 1970s, I wouldn't say there were really all that many. It is so easy to exaggerate things and come away with a false picture of the way things really were. But I take your point.
I think nudists may have been a little embarassed about some of the magazines but put up with them because they got the word out. There were genuine advertisments and listings of clubs, which is how I ended up visiting one. I remember a stack of old nudist magazines lying on a table in the clubhouse. Clearly many were just a way to publish photos of naked people, mostly young women, but there were a lot of good articles. The attitudes and thinking reflected in the articles seems to have vanished along with the magazines. I keep wondering what most nudist looked like before, say, 1970.
Another thing is that photos were heavily air-brushed in nudist magazines in the 1950s and 1960s. If there was any educational value to the magazines, that pretty much eliminated it. And speaking of air-brushing, "men's" magazines like Playboy do not air-brush photos to eliminate any flaws a model may have. Aside from the fact that there are a lot of nearly flawless young women (sometimes medically assisted), the air-brushing is done on the model, not the photo. It's called makeup. Flaws in the photofinishing is, or used to be, done with paint brushes.
One thing that happened to the nudist resort business, if you can call it that, was that along came a new generation that were not "joiners." There's more to it than that but young people wanted to go nude at the beach rather than at a pool. They didn't even want to pay to park. They took the idea of a "free beach" very literally. And I guess I'm part of that crowd. Then that crowd started having their own children and the world changed again.
None of this had anything to do with freeballing, except the free part.
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