It was 1976: the dark days before the Internet, before regularly available porn on iMacs in libraries everywhere; Sports Illustrated hadn’t yet figured out that showing Cheryl Tiegs in a see-through crocheted one-piece would revolutionize men’s magazines forever; and a Playboy, secreted away from one of your friend’s perverted dad’s bathroom stash, was one of the most coveted and life-altering of all known objects. But then, it happened: the Farrah Fawcett poster, the single most iconic image of any 1970s boyhood. With her superabundant blonde ringlets, more teeth than your average sand shark and the just-visible outline of angelic areolae (oh, good god, yes! Mom might not even notice!), the Farrah poster ushered an entire generation of guys into compulsive, Pavlovian onanism.

Today of course, such stuff is tamer than tame, but back when the search for arousal often had to settle on pics of nursing tribal women in National Geographic, the Farrah poster was a horniness geyser taped to the back of boys’ bedroom doors. Farrah, you died young and tragically, but know how many of us you gave life to. — Jack Harrison

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