Big-haired glamour girls and fancy cars in a 1980s T&A magazine for the auto enthusiast.
As regular readers will know, we at The Reprobate like to take deep dives into the history of some of the oddball things that come our way. Sometimes, though, that dive comes up empty, and at that point, we’re left pondering whether to simply go ahead and tell you what little we know, or drop the piece entirely.
In the case of Autobuff magazine, we’ve chosen the latter – our investigation into this magazine has revealed little beyond the fact that it ran for an indeterminate number of issues in the 1980s and is – dare we say – very much a product of its time. This is the magazine for men who like to whack off over both hot cars and hot girls, but it avoids pushing the limits of decency too far. Like the Sexy Girls and Sexy Guns videos, the magazine’s shamelessly sexist exploitation of nubile young women stops very much at the ‘tease’ level, avoiding the sort of explicit nudity that would have no doubt pushed it into the adults-only category and reduced sales outlets. As it is, Autobuff – ‘the magazine for the adult auto enthusiast’ – could be bought by grubby-fingered and grubby-minded teenage boys who could finish off the undressing in their minds, while pretending to be solely interested in automobiles while buying it at their local store.
Seen now, Autobuff feels like a directory of 1980s American cheesecake glamour – the hair, the clothes (what little there is of them) and, no doubt, the cars themselves all define the decade of tasteless excess perfectly.
As ever, we encourage any readers who know more about Autobuff – indeed, anyone who may have been a ‘reader’ of the magazine – to get in touch.
