During the 1980s, magazines in the United States were legally prohibited from showing erections in photographs.

The finding

What the evidence shows

No US law named erections as banned in magazine photos. Obscenity is judged under the Miller test, which uses local community standards and does not treat showing genitals as automatically obscene. Mainstream magazines like Playgirl held back on erections, and Playgirl's history says explicit shoots with erections were rare and mostly came later. That was caution about obscenity charges, not a specific legal ban, though obscenity prosecutions were a real risk. A federal or state statute from the 1980s that specifically banned depicting erections in magazines would flip this.