Penhouse is a men’s magazine founded by Robert C. “Bob” Guccione. It combines urban lifestyle articles and softcore pornographicpictorials that, in the 1990s, temporarily evolved into hardcore.Although Guccione was American, the magazine was founded in 1965 in the United Kingdom. Beginning in September 1969, it was sold in the United States as well.^[4] it has been owned by  Global Media Inc. since 2016. The complete assets of Penhouse Global Media were bought out by the owners of Xvideos.com in June 2018 after winning a bankruptcy auction bid.The Penthouse logo is a stylized key which incorporates both the Mars and Venus symbols in its design. The magazine’s centerfoldmodels are known as Penhouse Pets and customarily wear a distinctive necklace inspired by this logo.Penthouse magazine began publication in 1965, in the UK^[8] and in North America in 1969, an attempt to compete with Hugh Hefner‘s Playboy. Guccione offered editorial content that was more sensational than that of Playboy, and the magazine’s writing was far more investigative than Hefner’s upscale emphasis, with stories about government cover-ups and scandals. Writers such as Seymour Hersh, Craig S. Karpel, James Dale Davidson, and Ernest Volkman exposed numerous scandals and corruption at the highest levels of the United States Government.