"In the 1930s, pyjamas were exotic, the sort of thing worn by young flappers. These so-called 'new women' dressed in skimpy clothes, they smoked, they drank, they partied and they laughed at convention" -- and when they were murdered, it was what they deserved. Alessia presents the whole nasty scoop of clumping kitty litter that is The Pygama Girl Mystery in, My Pajamas Made Him Kill Me (Or, In Which I Review A Film I Haven't Seen).
"Why is it," I asked him rhetorically, "that smut is less acceptable than violence or the shallow idolization of 'famous people'? It's damn odd really, because my kids got here through normal, healthy sex -- not via violence or the vicarious living or emotional stalking of celebrities."
Speaking of books and moms, Elline (at Girl with Pen) happily reviews Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life in Off the Shelf: Mama, PhD:
The contributors in this book, edited by Caroline Grant and Elrena Evans, break the seal of silence that suppresses the intense difficulties and institutionalized prejudice that academics who want to be more than just a "head on a stick" – but rather a whole person, including a maternal body – experience.
In what certainly will not be news to feminists who have long argued that images in & portrayals by the media, the bottom line was, according to Dr Bjarne Holmes, a psychologist who led the research, "We now have some emerging evidence that suggests popular media play a role in perpetuating these ideas in people's minds."
Interestingly, after participating in the survey about media and relationships, Alessia then asked Which Came First? The Chick-Flick Or The Egg On Your Face? Worth reading -- and keeping tabs on her continuing thoughts on the study.
Because, yes, it bothers me deeply when you (especially my sweet cross dressers), get all squeamish about menstruation. Some of you think it's TMI, but a few of you have made comments about how "lucky" they are to "take what they want of femininity and leave the rest" -- and that really makes me angry. It makes most women angry.
The greatest harm that I can find in the story I have to tell, is that when I thought porn was evil, it had a negative effect on my confidence with women, and in myself; it led to psychological issues for me, and it meant a denial of my true sexuality. That ideology was harmful to me in the same way as it appears that certain right-wing Christian ideologies can be harmful to young gays in their midst. I am glad to accept erotica and porn as being not in and of themselves evil or wrong.
There just seems to be this inability for some of Luke's fans, mostly male fans from my experiences, to accept the fact that this character is a sexual being. I suppose because the Force and being a Jedi is always depicted as being "spiritual" and away from the body, those fans feel the need to see him as a celibate priest. I won't even get into the debate over the Old Jedi Order (Yoda, et.al.) and its regulation that Jedi have no attachments and whether or not that meant celibacy. Lordisa, I'm not touching that one right now!
Nothing against him -- he's been very nice dealing with a movie fan whose ignorance is pretty clear -- but how do I better articulate my thinking that our perceptions may be, at least in part, influenced by our genders (and related expectations, emulations, and emotions) without sounding like a silly girl? Or worse yet, some foaming-at-the-mouth feminazi?!
But at the end of the day it isn't sex in exchange for money that degrades, cheapens and enslaves women it's societal norms and roles. Prostitution will NEVER go anywhere because it's apart of human/ape/primate identity, it's who we are. Whether or not you look at it this way there is "prostitution" all throughout "regular" sexual relationships between people even marriages.
Because you know there's still a lot more defending of sex work to be done, Amber Rhea (of Being Amber Rhea), has some Red Herrings for you:
It's about people articulating their own sexual desires and boundaries - especially women, as we have been traditionally denied this right.
Last, but not least, Latoya Peterson's post (at Racialicious) called The Not Rape Epidemic which is so good, that I cannot select a quote from it. Just go read it all. I mean it.
A few final words about this carnival...
I had a great time hosting it. While the holidays admittedly slowed the number of submissions, those I received were wonderful; in fact, I'll be adding quite a number of new blogs/bloggers to the sidebar due to this experience.
The carnival, and in fact the issues the carnival supports, needs your support too. So please submit to future carnival editions, consider hosting a future edition, and link to the carnival posts.
Perhaps most important of all, please continue the conversations presented in individual posts/articles in the Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy. It can be silently, in your mind; in person discussion with friends & family etc. in the real world; or via blogging, letters to the editor at other publications, or other use of media. But continued exploration and expression of these issues is important.
While my carnival hosting duties may officially be over, I'm open to hearing from more of you about such related topics; so please, whenever you have or find posts which fit my beat aka submissions call, please do contact me.
This sex positive carnival highlights posts/articles promoting the sexual rights and freedom of women -- you can get an idea by seeing past editions at Better Burn That Dress, Sister and Sex-Kitten.Net. However...
I just might be mixing things up a bit with my edition. I'd like to focus on the past -- for otherwise we are doomed to repeat it. So, in my official call for submissions, I'd like to outline a few specifics ideas or topics I'd really like to see.
Because this blog is about history, I'd like to see/read posts which are focused on the past. That includes, but is not limited to:
* Explorations of your personal sex/relationship history -- not fiction, but non-fiction musings about lessons, frustrations, etc. Bonus points if you can tie it to a film, show us art which reflects it, point to parallels in the life of a pinup, or otherwise connect it to some pop culture reference point.
* Biographies or discussions of famous folks; what they've taught you, forced you to think about, or rudely awakened you to.
* Art history, artistic movements, artists, specific works, etc. which explore themes you dig, wish would return "because", or otherwise have you pondering gender, sex and rights.
* Political, religious, criminal, cultural history lessons involving sexuality & human rights.
* Reviews & analysis of film, music, magazines, books, etc. from the point of view of where they fit in or the messages they send/reflect regarding sexuality & society.
* How & where pop culture and public policy intersect regarding sexuality, sex education, and private lives.
Again, the above are suggestions, hopes, dreams -- but don't feel like you are crushing them (or my spirits) if you write/submit something that's more traditional fare for the carnival.
You are free to write anything along these lines just for this carnival edition, send me a link to a piece/pieces you've already written on any of these or related and appropriate themes, and/or submit a post/article you've read by someone else that seems to fit & rocks your world or impresses you enough to make the effort to nominate someone.
Please email your submission to me at Naughty(dot)Words(at)gmail(dot)com prior to noon on January 4th, 2009.
Nettie Rosenstein's Odalisque Perfume ads in the 40's and 50's romanticized "odalisque" including the risque use of artistic nudes in the print ad campaigns.
"Odalisque" is a French form of the Turkish odalık, meaning "chambermaid." The term specifically signifies a virgin female slave who, being the lowest ranking member of a harem, was not allowed to serve the sultan but instead his concubines and/or wives.
There's not a whole lot of romance there, Nettie Rosenstein; not in being a slave, not in being the one to deal with the piss-pots of the harem, not in being too-lowly to even deal with the master -- unless, of course, you could prove a 'talent' and work your way 'up' from piss-pots to male pissing tools and be a sexual servant.
But Nettie was not alone in romanticizing these women. In the 19th century, odalisques were common fantasy figures in the Orientalism movement, featured in many erotic paintings from that era.
However, Sten didn't learn English very well and so did not endear herself to American film fans; she was dubbed Goldwyn's Folly.
The movie has consequently been rather ignored, but really isn't as bad as folks might have you think; I rather enjoyed it on TCM tonight. The only irksome thing for me was The Code ending.
And the fact that TCM doesn't allow you to embed the videos; so you'll have to click the links above to see them.
I'm sure most of you have seen these old bootjacks where the V notch for boot removal is a woman's crotch, but this one is especially neat as it's marked "NELL'S PLACE". While it's supposedly marked for a business, the fact that it's put on a bootjack of a spread female form has additional innuendo (or would that be a double entendre?)
We all know pulp novels (which is a category of books wider than the term 'pulp' technically refers to) are exploitative works; but sometimes I just have to draw the line. Even if it's only 50 cents at a thrift shop.
Today's example, a copy of Super Cop Joe Blaze #3, The Thrill Killers, by Robert Novak.
It's not that I don't need to start collecting a bad series of cop adventure novels (supposedly by a Washington pundit), it's not that today I needed 50 extra pennies of my meager budget to go towards something else; I had after all lifted the book up to see what it was about. Nay, my refusal was based entirely upon the front cover text:
Nurses were being brutally raped then carved to ribbons by a pair of killers looking for kicks
My initial reaction was, "Aren't the readers lusting over the same kicks?"
And the more I ponder it the more my reaction stays the same, for the book doesn't say a single word, however clichéd, about how said super cop 'vowed revenge' or thought these murderers the 'worst sort of criminal'.
Instead it sells the rape & mutilation of women -- nurses who, by the way, are the pulp icons of 'good innocent & intelligent girls'.
Sexism, in light of the times & target consumer, may be rampant in pulp novels; but such misogyny is quite another thing entirely.
Many women are searching for the answers to what it means to be female, historically and right this minute, and how we feel about that ~ and we're using porn & erotic materials to do it.
...No matter who the body before us belongs to, it becomes our own. That could be our tits, our ass, our labia spread wide open like a briefcase on his desk. We could be the whipper or the whipee. Just how do we feel about all that?
Discover the lurid secrets of sex and sexuality as you wind through the streets of the Jewish Lower East Side. Spanning from the 1880's to the 21st century, from synagogues to sex shops, the former shtetl will come alive with tales of Jewish prostitution, pornographers, birth control pioneers, undergarment peddlers, bath houses, burlesque performers, erotica, fetish and fashion.
According to this article, Josephine Judson Carringer was musically gifted, highly intelligent, ad entered college when she was 16 yrs old. She wrote Three Little Fishes with Betty Lynn Kirk, her sorority sister at the University of Tennessee in the late 1930s. They then sold the song for $200 and Saxie Dowell adapted the lyrics and music into the piece that became a number one hit in 1939 as performed by the Kay Kyser orchestra with Ish KaBibble singing.
According to Time, June 19, 1939, "Saxie Dowell recently heard, in the South, an old nursery tune called Down in de Meddy. He thought it mighty cute." We can't blame Saxie for the giant PR machine which would deny buying music (especially for a mighty cute old nursery rhyme song), and so we can likely believe the rest:
The result was published last April by Santly-Joy-Select, Inc., which got out The Music Goes 'Round and 'Round and admits to liking "crazy things." Under its title Three Little Fishies, Saxie Dowell's song last week had set something of a current record by leading the field in sheet music sales for a month.
Three Little Fishies has verses which can be sung either in English (Down in the meadow in a little bitty pool) or in "fish talk" (Down in de meddy in a ITTY BITTY POO). The chorus can be sung only one way: Boop boop dittem dattem whattem Chu! The song, likely to cause reverse peristalsis in fastidious stomachs, is all about some "itty fitties" who "fam and dey fam" until they "taw a TARK!" (shark). Den dey fam back to deir poo. The publishers, wary of overplugging Three Little Fishies, withheld it from all but a few big orchestral names—Hal Kemp, Guy Lombardo, Kay Kyser, Paul Whiteman, each of whom recorded it. The song was plugged on the radio by Mildred Bailey, Fannie Brice, Judy Starr. Along with the itty fitties, fat Saxie Dowell fam into such fame that he is now thinking of leaving Hal Kemp and starting a band of his own.
The song is a relative childhood classic -- that is to say, if you had a corny family like mine, you heard your relatives sing it. Often. You may have even heard Madonna and Rosie O'Donell perform a cover of the tune.
Now, you might be wondering why I'd be taking so much time to discuss a cute old kids' song here at SPS. Well, the idea of Baby Snooks, the bratty character played by Fanny Brice fascinates me.
It plays well-enough on the Baby Snook radio shows but, as Brice was fond of dressing & behaving 'in character', once you can see as well as hear it takes on other elements.
Putting a grown woman in little-girl-garb may have it's humorous elements, but it also says something about power & dominance -- and you don't have to be a perv to see it. Little girls are innocence, but they are also property; they belong to daddy. Short baby-doll dresses, oh-so fashionable these days, communicate these things -- innocence and access -- which is why I don't own a single one of those monstrosities.
Having a bratty girl-child mouth-off to her master may be cute, but underneath it all lies -- as sure as those ruffled panties -- the idea that she will eventually heel and heed her master. Or, if she does not, then he is less-than-a-man and plays cuckhold to her charms. Sure, all this can only make it funnier; but did they get it?
Without Brice & Snooks, we likely wouldn't have had Lily Tomlin's Edith Ann on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In -- but there's a huge difference between the two.
Tomlin's Edith Ann appeared alone in her giant rocking chair where she told stories about her family & dog. Having her be alone could have been a choice to deal with scale; but even so, simply being alone meant Edith Ann was not (as) eroticized.
Baby Snooks, by comparison, not only acted with others but interacted physically with them, drawing in all those adult contexts. There is a large difference between discussing a punishment, a la Edith Ann, and showing a grown woman dressed as a child over the knee of her daddy figure like Baby Snooks; the image has erotically charged elements.
At the base of this humor is prettified misogyny &/or glorified cuckholding. It's all good & fine for adult role-play sex-scenarios, really; but as entertainment one really ought to be aware that's what they are enjoying.
Baby Snooks (with Hanley Stafford as "Daddy") was performed on television only once (and this was Brice's only TV appearance too), on CBS-TV's Popsicle Parade of Stars in 1950 (one year prior to Brice's death). Entertainment folks document Brice's height &/or age as the reason for its failure, and Brice herself is said to have admitted that the character of Baby Snooks just didn't work properly when seen... But come on!
This wasn't the first time Baby Snooks had appeared before people. Baby Snooks was even in Judy Garland's Everybody Sing (1938) prior to radio success.
While Brice & Garland are wonderfully funny in that scene, this was not the usual Baby Snooks routine. Baby Snooks was built on the annoying relationship with her father and, sometimes, other men. The Baby Snooks character had been preformed live on stage for years and, height of male actors aside, there clearly were other issues at work here.
Fanny, who rejoined the Follies at the Winter Garden, was still not in the best of health, and had to clear her throat in her Snooks scene Hope. "That's my cold clearing up," she ad-libbed at one point.
"I thought you were just oversexed," was Bob Hope's quick reply. The line stayed in.
Yeah. No wonder it just didn't work properly on television.
I wonder just what it is that people were thinking about Baby Snooks at the time.
Note:Gone Fishing (06/01/1939) & Baby Fish Story (04/11/1940) have quite a bit of similar content for a woman who eschewed rehearsals, saying she wanted to give performances a spontaneity and unpredictability that would be lost with an over-familiarity with the lines and other players. That could just be the writers milking their own jokes. What do you notice about the shows?
I command you to read it; or the boobies won't be bared here for quite some time. (Intelligent comment & discourse will be accepted as proof of reading.)
A center-fold presentation of what radio and movie talent-scouts looked for... I guess a gal really had to measure-up for radio too.
(Click to read the huge scan.)
Posed by Lillian Cornell, NBC singer, who typifies those qualities sought by the alert talent-scout. Photographs by Maurice Seymour.
From Radio Guide, week ending Sept 22, 1939 -- thanks to Pop Tart (who also put up a quiz from this issue, along with answers at CQ) for sending it to me!
Guy de Maupassant's The Private Affairs of Bel Ami is a film I've never seen (Bosley Crowther's review in The New York Times (June 16, 1947) was hardly kind; but it the film seems to have fans today, such as the folks at the Harvard Film Archive), but it matters not for my discussion of the film's posters/marketing materials, one of which I glimpsed at an auction recently.
These are examples I found on the web, the black & white looking like what I had briefly seen:
There were apparently (at least) two versions, each depicting a young Angela Lansbury fixed as firmly as a Chihuahua to a guest's leg (if not actually humping it), in desperate attempt to keep her man. This is as dramatic as film posters should be, and apparently in keeping with the story. But...
It's the taglines which draw my interest:
"All women take to men who have the appearance of wickedness"
"Are women too weak to be wicked?"
I suppose it's unfair to rile at such stereotypes when you have not seen the film nor read the novel, but from all accounts the story is that of a man who eschews love for power, willing to step on & then over women to get what he professes to want, which is money & social standing. How then does one feel free to label all women as drawn to the appearances of wickedness, an entire gender as weak? Wouldn't it be more fair to make the judgments about the man himself? Or at least use the word "some".
"It's to sell movie tickets," you say. But that's the part that bothers me.
If you want those who see the posters and read the ads to buy a ticket, you entice and seduce, not libel and offend -- or at least you do for an entertaining film, not a activist documentary. And so the point is that the taglines were not just accepting of such beliefs, but titillating -- indeed glorifying -- victimization, complete with damn-near titular advice on how to victimize women by exploiting the general gender gaffe.
Pickup on South Street (1953), starring Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley, Willis Bouchey, & Milburn Stone.
At the time, August 1952, the script was deemed unacceptable by the Production Code, for "excessive brutality and sadistic beatings, of both men and women." The revised script was accepted but required multiple takes including for a scene in which Jean Peters and Richard Kiley frisked each other for loot was considered too risqué.
The film went on to great success, including an Oscar nomination for Thelma Ritter for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in 1954.
The French release of the movie removed any reference to spies and microfilm in the translation. They called the movie Le Port de la Drogue (Port of Drugs). The managers of 20th Century Fox thought that the theme of communist spies was too controversial in a country where the Communist Party was still hugely influential.
Pickup was also a regular fixture on top ten lists of film noir before feminist intervention in that discussion made a femme fatale mandatory for the category. Seen now, it's Fuller sui generis, making films that are like no others. Nearly always working with tiny budgets, Fuller always spent up big on cinematographers, in this case Joe MacDonald. Fuller and MacDonald build the film on two extremes: tight closeups lit for sharp facial modelling; and free, sometimes flamboyant camera movement.
Pickup is assembled from standard pulp fiction components: situations, stock characters, conventions, cliches, attitudes, images, gestures, actions, and relationships. Unlike later practitioners described as neo- or post- , Fuller's work is at one with such material, not outside it. The film draws its energy from creating a world from within this pulp paradigm in all its crudity, brutality, sleaziness, and pure improbability (Fuller had a set built for Skip's home: an abandoned bait shack built on piles ten meters out in the East River, reached by a wooden gangplank. Its refrigerator is a crate lowered by a rope into the river. Its only amenity is a hammock. Fuller gets full value out of the set, using every inch of it across several scenes--wonderful filmmaking. Living there, how does he keep his suits so perfectly pressed? Where's the wardrobe? Does he cook? Why would a professional criminal choose a place with only one way in and out? Don't ask).
This film was remade as The Cape Town Affair (1967), directed by Robert D. Webb and starring Claire Trevor (in the Thelma Ritter role), James Brolin (in his first leading role), and Jacqueline Bisset.
Growing up, my dad used to make jokes about luring girls with the offer of nylons. He still does, honestly.
It's a bit creepy -- but less creepy than jokes about little girls and candy, that's for sure; but if you don't know the history of nylons, you wouldn't quite get his jokes. (Admittedly, such knowledge would only help you understand his nylon jokes; Dad's other jokes could still be murky.)
Thankfully, my parents both were not only quite the history lovers but storytellers too, so I knew the score -- both in terms of the "Nylon Mania" & "Stocking Panic" and how my dad joked about hoping to score.
The mocking of women's love of stockings was a prevalent theme in many WWII home front publications, and the use of nylons to lure women was humor oft-used in men's mags -- sadly, none are at my fingertips now (searched-for things rarely appear when desired; I shall post them as I find them).
Luring women at home and abroad with nylons and candy bars was the "come up and see my etchings" of its time, and lived on in memory far longer as a euphemism, even when not fully understood.
Of course, the panic of nylon stockings was more than a joke. As noted in the history piece at SK, the real crimes took place as people tried to exploit the power of "Stocking Panic." OrangeCat at Flickr transcribed this 1945 Readers Digest article on the subject:
Bootleg Nylons Readers Digest, February 1945
Watch out for the fellow who offers to sell you "nylon" hosiery! There isn't any.
No mere man can fully understand the power of nylon stockings over women's minds, hearts, and consciences. But a lot of men are busy exploiting this feminine weakness.
Foremost example: Uncle Sam. The only legitimate purchaser of nylon hosiery in the world is the U.S. Government. No, the stockings aren't "sent to Iceland on lend-lease," as reported in a silly story that was repeated on the floor of Congress. They travel a much more devious route.
Our secret agents overseas discovered that a half dozen pairs of sheer nylons would buy more information from certain mysterious women in Europe and North Africa than a fistful of money. After all, what could the ladies buy with money in the empty shops of the Old World? So several large hosiery mills, which had made no nylons since Pearl Harbor, received substantial orders from Washington; the necessary yarn, they were informed, would be available. Pleasantly surprised, they turned out the merchandise -- the only nylons legitimately manufactured in years.
Nevertheless, enough American women want nylon stockings at any price, in contempt of law, and with callous indifference to our soldiers' needs for other nylon goods, to support a sizable black market. It is some satisfaction to record that the black market operators give the women a merciless stinging.
Thirteen cases of raw nylon en route from the Du Pont factory in Martinsville, Va., to a parachute yarn plant in Winston-Salem, N.C., were stolen from a motor-freight terminal in Greensboro, N.C. Accepting the thin story that the nylon was salvage from a warehouse fire, two manufacturers made it up into hosiery. It was spread as far as possible by making the feet and tops of cotton. But these skimpy makeshift stockings sold readily for $5 a pair to bootleggers, who in turn got $10 a pair from customers, male and female, hexed by the magic word "nylon." The nylon yarn was worth $7800; it was made into $140,000 worth of stockings.
FBI and OPA agents arrested three men. One, a former official of a trucking company, was fined $5,000 and is serving a two-year prison term. The two hosiery mill men were fined $12,000 each and placed on 18 months' probation. The Government agents managed to seize 5,000 pairs of hose before they could be peddled. These, by court order, were sold at the OPA ceiling prime of $ 1.65 a pair in the office of the U.S. Marshal in Greensboro. The sale was to begin at ten o' clock in the morning. At 5 a.m. the queue began to form; when the doors opened, the line of women, four abreast, extended four city blocks. Half of them went away disappointed.
Much more intricate was another scheme for black market nylons. A silk mill in Pennsylvania got a contract to convert raw nylon into thread for glider towropes. Part of the raw nylon was systematically snitched, and accounted for in reports to the WPB as "spoilage." The "spoiled" nylon was transported to three hosiery mills whose owners were in the plot. When the FBI cracked down, it found 10,320 pairs of nylons in one warehouse, 6,500 unfinished pairs in another, enough thread to make 36,000 pairs more. Four men were indicted.
Most patrons of the nylon black market are stung in two ways: they pay fantastic prices and they do not get nylon. Travelers, and even professional merchandise buyers who should know better, have bought "Mexican nylon" in quantities. Sometimes they have misleading names, such as "carbonyl."
Dozens of pairs have turned up for laboratory analysis at the New York headquarters of the National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers. They're just rayon. You can get them at any hosiery counter in the United States; ceiling price, $1.25.
An Omaha store imported 1,680 pairs of these "nylons" in good faith and advertised them at $2.25, plus $1.85 for customs duty. The Better Business Bureau had a pair analyzed and thus convinced the merchant he had been victimized. The stockings were withdrawn from sale.
The lengths to which the gyps will go is indicated by the troubles of the Van Raalte Company. It is getting a stream of complaints about hosiery bought as nylon, stamped with the Van Raalte name and the nylon trademark and, most convincing, made with the patented Van Raalte toe. Some victims bought the counterfeits in Mexico City, some bought them from bootleggers in the U.S.; but it seems plain that the imitations were all made in Mexico.
The small amount of honest nylon wastage or spoilage that does occur in war production is allotted to manufacturers of underwear, brassieres and girdles -- never to hosiery mills. Every retailer should know that there just isn't any nylon hosiery to be had. Still, when George M. Toney wrote to 1,000 stores from a post office box address in Washington, D. C., offering nylons at $7.44 a dozen pairs, he got orders with some $2,000 cash by return mail. There is no guesswork about the money, because postal authorities opened his mail and counted it.
Ruses of the bootleggers show little originality. The driver of a delivery truck, often bearing the name of a well-known shop, stops a woman on the street and tells her that some nylons were put on his truck by mistake. She can have them at $5 (or $10) a pair. Or a peddler drifts into a doctor's office on the pretext of making an appointment. He casually mentions that the parcel in his hand contains nylon stockings -- unfortunately not his wife's size. Could anyone use them? He is typical of the shifty-eyed, furtive nylon bootleggers who canvass office buildings in the big cities.
Perhaps the limit of credulity is reached by the people who buy compounds which, dissolved in water, will "nylonize" rayon stockings. One of the big hosiery manufacturers remarked dryly, "If any chemist has such a formula, he needn't bother with the 25-cent trade. I'll give him $5,000,000 for it in cash."
After the war there will be nylon hosiery, finer, sheerer, stronger, more beautiful than ever before. Designs for the machines to make it are past the blueprint stage. But until the war is over, the Army and Navy need every pound of nylon. There won't be any for stockings except what is stolen. And there won't be much stolen. So, ladies -- don't be suckers.
In researching crimes in the wake of "Stocking Panic", it is also clear that the threat of such power plays created a panic of victimization which rivaled that of the white slave trade.
In fact, I continue to search publications for the proffered opines of "Beware the nylon stocking offered; you'll end up in white slavery!"
If/when I find some, I shall, of course, share.
Along with the joke of wooing at home with nylons, the fear of betrayals & abuses back home was part of World War II psychological operation (PSYOP) strategy. This excellent article details more than the use of nylon stockings as symbol or eroticism and betrayal, but the use of the sex drive and pornography to "motivate" soldiers. Go read it.
You might find such manipulation of the male sex drive horrific (and I do), but beneath it all is still the notion that we women are "so in love" with nylons, that we'd "do anything" to get them.
We women aren't only fools for fashion, willing to prostitute ourselves for material goods, but we are such delicate things that we can be exploited for them even without intending to be.
We are bad girls because we are weak. And we weaken our men because of it. Men know this about us, and lament the horrors which will befall us because they aren't "home" to save us -- from predatory males and ourselves.
Yuck.
Image Credits/Further Reading: Stockings Go To War scan via CQ; "Stocking Panic" article from Business Week August 9, 1941, via Smithsonian; comic mocking women from 1950 Modern Woman Magazine, via KKC; WWII German propaganda leaflets, via Psywarrior.com.
* Founding the the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, known as FACT.
* Starting the Pink Ladies Social Club, a club which supports women (performers, writers, makeup artists, directors etc.) who works in the adult industry and works to fight the stereotype of female sex workers as bimbos &/or victims coerced by men into humiliating themselves.
* Being a member of the Board of Directors for the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, an organization that works to advance sexual freedom as a fundamental human right by protecting and advancing freedom of speech and sexual expression), but with her wisdom in faith and religion.
How crude and rude of Dick to eat While walking gaily down the street (Perhaps he nibbles on the roam Because he's starved by folks at home!)
If one is to believe that a crude and rude dick's behavior is based on how well he is satisfied at home, then noman earns a Klondike bar; his woman does.
Pan Yuliang is a wonderful artist -- but one who is often discussed more for her struggle to become one (having been sold at the age of 14 into prostitution by her only surviving relative) and for her nude works (at a time when such works were scandalous).
I'm delighted to have Jennifer's insight here...
SPS: When/how did you first become aware of Pan Yuliang?
Jennifer: I was actually the Guggenheim with my husband and some relatives—roughly ten years ago. The exhibition—which was amazing--was on Modern Chinese Art, and there was just one image by Pan Yuliang on display. But it drew me over immediately; it was a typical Pan Yuliang in that it was very evocative of Matisse and Cezanne, and the bright, bold colors and distinctly Western setting (as compared to the huge propaganda-style images and much more subtle ink paintings around it) really stood out for me.
SPS: What was it that captured you & compelled you to write the book?
Jennifer: Upon seeing the picture, I went over to study it more closely. And when I read about Pan’s story (prostitute-concubine-Post-Impressionist icon; really?!) it just blew me away. I’d never heard of her before—but I couldn’t, at that moment, understand why---it struck me that everyone should know about her. I suppose writing the book was one way to try to understand her, and to try to imagine what making that sort of an extraordinary journey would be like.
SPS: How long did it take to create the book?
Jennifer: From inception to publication it was almost exactly ten years--so a long time! Granted, throughout that period I quite my job at NBC, finished an MFA at Columbia and also had my two daughters, so there were some side-trips.
SPS: Why write a novel, rather than a biography?
Jennifer: Mainly because I'd made the decision--after ten years in journalism--to try writing fiction, which I'd always wanted to do. But also because Pan's story ended up being one of those where I actually had to use creative license in order to get any sort of a complete sense of her. Even the art historians I spoke to confirmed that there is so little actually factually known about her (even the birthdate on her gravestone in Paris is generally agreed to be inaccurate) that in order to get a full sense of her life, one has to simply imagine.
SPS: You mention there is little documentation or biographical information about her... What do you think that is due to? A lack of respect for her, her art? Did her popularity increase after her death, when it was "too late" for much information? Or was it a general lack of respect for women in general? Or just a problem in general of artists from that time? Something else?
Jennifer: I think the lack of documentation was in part a combination of all these factors. But I also think that Pan herself kept a pretty tight grip on her story and was very careful about the versions of it she allowed out. This isn't surprising, given how wildly controversial both her work and her history were, and also given the fact that people tended to pay more attention to the latter than the former.
SPS: Have you seen Hua hun, and if so, what are your thoughts on the film?
Jennifer: I have. I actually knew about the film fairly early into my research, but held off watching it until I was well grounded in my own book and characters---I didn't want to risk being overly influenced by it. think I finally sat through it after I'd already finished with Shanghai in my book and was moving on to Paris. I certainly appreciated Hua Hun for its beauty--it was very well-done, and I loved the intense aestheticism of it visually. But I did feel that--like the biography it's based on--the movie portrayed Pan Yuliang as somewhat less of a self-determined woman and artist than I came to see her as. The general sense I got from watching it was that she was more or less shaped by the actions of the men around her; e.g., rescued despite herself from the brothel, guided into art and school by her husband, etc. I sensed such a strength of character and will in her paintings, though, that I really wanted to give her more of a role in her evolution as an artist.
It's been noted to me, incidentally, that some readers think i made her too strong--they don't find her particularly likeable. But my sense is (both from my own musings and from what I've heard) that she wasn't an easy person in real life to either know or to like--so I suppose in some ways that just makes me hope that I got something right!
SPS: Did she have any children?
Jennifer: She did not. The biographical info points to at least one pregnancy but (as I write [in the book]) that was terminated. She did adopt her husband's son, however; he's still alive I believe, in Anhui province.
SPS: If you could say in one sentence (of what took a decade to create) -- what you think is the sum of the book... I guess that would be two sentences --
Jennifer: The sum, for me, is really the boundless creativity and ingenuity of the human spirit (though I hope that doesn't make people gag!). The truth is, Pan Yuliang was pretty much damned from the start by so many factors--her gender, her class, her country of origin; the fact that her parents died and her uncle was an opium addict; the fact that she was sold into a brothel. It's a set of circumstances that most women would simply not have survived. And yet thanks to her resilience, talent and the sheer bravery she displayed in painting what she wanted, regardless of cost, she has left other women and artists this extraordinary example and legacy. (I'm sorry, that's four sentences and a lot of semicolons!)
SPS: That's OK -- it took me how many sentence fragments just to get near a question. *wink* Do you have a "one sentence bit" of what you hope the reader walks away with from The Painter From Shanghai?
Jennifer: That even in the most apparently dire of circumstances you still have the power to shape your own dreams, goals, life.
SPS: And, in one sentence, what did you walk away from the experience with?
Jennifer: The thrill of having had Pan Yuliang and China as a job for the past decade (how lucky is that!?), and a renewed faith in myself for actually having published a historical novel with family and sanity (at least somewhat) intact!
Call in questions and comments are welcome at 1 (646) 200-3136. (And rumor has it that a copy of The Painter from Shanghai will be given away to live callers...)
If you miss the show, you can listen to the archived show (or download it) here.
Ruan Lingyu: A Decade Of Film & Even More Years Of Tragedy
Ruan Lingyu (also known/billed as Ruan Ling-Yu, Lingyu Ruan, Lily Yuan, & Lily Yuen) is the Chinese silent film star whose works are not very well known here in the US; I myself have TCM to thank for making her acquaintance -- first via The Peach Girl (aka Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood, 1931; I'll be reviewing it soon!) & then The Goddess (1934).
Born Ruan Fenggeng in Shanghai on April 26, 1910, Ruan experienced the difficult life of a child of a poor migrant family from Canton. Her father died by the time she was six, and her mother moved away from Shanghai the following year to work as a housemaid in the home of the wealthy Zhang family. While she sent Ruan to school, by the age of 16 the young girl dropped out -- and moved in with the Zhang's son, Damin.
There was very strong opposition by Zhang's family to this tongiu (the romantic cohabitational love of 'the moderns' who eschewed arranged & even agreed upon marriages). This opposition resulted not only in Zhang not getting any financial support from his family, but in getting Ruan's mother fired as well; she moved in with the young couple. This, along with Damin's gambling & general irresponsibility, meant that Ruan must work to support the household.
In 1926, at the age of 16, Ruan spots an ad for "film actors needed" at Star Movie Studios. With the help of Zhang HuiChong, Damin's elder brother who had starred in swordplay films for the Commercial Press in the early 20's, Ruan went for an interview and audition. (Zhang HuiChong got married to Xu Sue/Wu Suxin, a rather famous actress working at the Great China Film Studios, and together they created the short-lived United Film Studios -- sometimes referred to as the HuiChong Film Company -- from 1924-1927.)
Ruan's diligence & beauty outshone her lack of education and she was cast in 1927's A Couple in Name Only (aka The Nominal Couple), directed by Bu Wancang (aka Wancang Bu &/or Richard Poh).
Prior to 1920, only a few short movies had been made in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and, much like Shakespearean works, all the performers were male, including the female roles.
Public opinion lumped actresses in with prostitutes, actually calling them prostitutes; in their defense, prostitution was one of only two options for women who wanted to work, and as proper modest Chinese women would never boast or promote themselves in public, the willingness to project themselves onto screens for everyone to see put them in the same category as the other indecent women.
She made a few films at MingXing, but it wasn't until she left MingXing and joined Da Zhonghua Baihe Film Company (which quickly merged with other companies to become Lianhua Film Company) that she found real success and Shanghai stardom. That film was A Dream in the Old Capital (aka Reminiscence Of Peking, 1929).
It is said that around this time Ruan adopted her daughter, XiaoYu; yet she and Damin have already parted from each other three times -- and between 1927 and 1928 Ruan is said to have tried to commit suicide. By the end of 1928, their relationship crisis seems to be over, but Damin continues to gamble and live off Ruan's earnings.
Ruan continues to make films for Lianhua and her popularity grows. According to TCM, in Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris says that at Lianhua, Ruan "would find her greatest successes in a series of intense female-centered melodramas, many of them engaged with such pressing social issues as poverty, class conflict, prostitution, illegitimacy, women's rights, suicide, and occasionally a political film that grew out of anxieties around Japan's invasion of Shanghai."
In 1932, during the invasion of Japanese towards Shanghai, Ruan & Damin fled to Hong Kong. As soon as the situation became stable Ruan returned to Shanghai and involved in her first leftist inspired film, Three Modern Women, which brought her to another peak of her career, pushing her into second place on the 1933 list of the Top Ten stars in a Movie Queen contest run by local newspaper & magazines.
It was in 1932, while Damin was still in Hong Kong, that Ruan met wealthy merchant Tang Jishan, the "King of the Tea", at a party; by March of 1933 Ruan had moved into Tang's home.
On April 9th, Zhang returned from Hong Kong, prepared to make a fuss with the press regarding his romance with Ruan. A few days later he signed an agreement saying that Ruan would provide him with 100 yuan per month for the next two years -- and in return he would not bother her again. Sort of a common law divorce.
On August 8th of 1933, Tang and Ruan announce their engagement.
Things continue to go well for Ruan. In 1934 she stars in Cai Chusheng's A New Woman, considered by many to be her best film.
However the press takes issue with the film's heroine, who, having been forsaken by her husband & failing to make a living from writing, was forced to become a prostitute to raise her child -- and then to commit suicide. It wasn't so much the ethics or morals of the plot which angered the press, but the film's accusation that the suicide of the woman had been a result of the press' libelous reports. The film was edited to tone down the accusation, but as the film was inspired by the life & death of actress and writer Ai Xia, who took her own life in 1934, the accusation lingered like the taste of bile in a throat... But the film was very well received by audiences and Ruan's fame soared.
Damin, likely either deeply in gambling debt, or just wanting a larger piece of Ruan's popularity (and yuan) pie, returned to extort more money from the actress. This upset Tang who, despite insider suggestion that it made Ruan unhappy, brought Damin into court on December 27, 1934, resulting in a media frenzy.
Despite public adoration of Ruan and the more or less scandalous living arrangements between herself and Damin, the couple is seen to have a common law marriage and Tang -- along with Ruan -- are accused of fanghai hunyin jiating zui, the equivalent of an attack on family values & marriage in general.
Perhaps this was due to some acceptance of Damin & Ruan's common law marriage; but Damin's old & traditional family name with its history of imperial officers also outranked Tang's "new money" and simple "merchant" status. Of course, Tang's history of divorces and affairs probably didn't win him any points either... Not that Damin hadn't been a louse too.
But in this sordid scandal, it is Ruan who looses pubic favor and is put under great scrutiny and stress. She is summoned to appear in court on March 9th, but sometime during the night of March 7th she wrote several letters & then committed suicide.
She was found dead on March 8, 1935.
It was International Women's Day.
More than 100,000 mourners were drawn to the WanGuo funeral parlour, her funeral procession, on March 14, 1935, reached over three miles long -- and three women committed suicide during it. It was estimated that more than three hundred thousand people crowded the streets of Shanghai for her last journey. The front page of the New York Times pronounced it "the most spectacular funeral of the century."
Every magazine in Shanghai ran memorial issues in her honor. Even after her death, Tang was openly insulted and cursed by the press and Star Movie Studios openly declared they'd have no part in any mourning ceremony held by Tang Jishan, saying he was "a criminal who did harm to the whole movie world, being the direct cause of Ruan's suicide."
This even after some Ruan's last letters were published, described as "tender" towards Tang, in which Ruan asks Tang to take care of her mother and daughter. It matters not. In the movie world Tang is not recognized as Ruan's beloved, official husband; he is the man who murdered her with immorality.
Clearly neither of her lovers were very kind to her in many ways, and the press' field day with her choices and status as a woman, therefore less powerful and respected, was more than she could bear.
In one of the letters written before her suicide, she writes in grief-stricken self-defense of her actions, saying that while she's aware that she's taking a risk that some may take her suicide as an evidence of some guilt, she'd rather die than to continue to face the public slander.
In her suicide note, she wrote, "Gossip is a fearful thing."
Lu Xun (Lu Hsün; Zhou Shuren), a prominent writer at the time, took that phrase and made it the title of an article denouncing the media's exploitation of Ruan. Of the media and Xun's article, however, Stefania Stafutti has some pointed things to say. In The Perception of Privacy: The Case of Ruan Lingyu (published in the International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies) she writes (link added by SPS):
Only the (male oriented) society control over human beings is questioned together with the dramatic fear of loosing one’s own face, but nothing is said on the individual right of carrying on one’s private life with no external interferences. Even if once more referring in general terms to “the feudal society of old China” the Min bao is the only journal which stigmatizes the backwardness of the film-goers, who simply like twisting the knife in the wound: the perception of privacy is strictly connected with people’s perception on what is to be "hidden" and what is to be "protected". With his article published under the pen name Mu Hui on Tai bai, which title “Gossip is a fearful thing” is picked up from one of Ruan’s letters, left behind after her suicide, Lu Xun goes to the core of the problem. As Eileeen J. Cheng points out in a recent article Lu Xun is fascinated by dead women, especially those who are somehow victimized by the society At the same time their choice of dieing is seen as having a cathartic and rather ambiguous function. The blame put on the wild circulation of details on Ruan’s personal life expresses Lu Xun strong objection against the circulation of exploitative images of women but, at the same time, strips the women of their gender issues, to sit them on a throne of purity which radically prevents them from enjoying or inducing any idea of pleasure As a matter of fact, Lu Xun stigmatizes much more the voyeuristic attitude of the readers and of the film goers than the total lack of scruple of the sensationalistic press. Being Lu Xun perfectly conscious of the enormous power of the press, who would rather expect him being more indulgent with the common readers. He goes much farer than Min bao, almost attributing to the readers a sort of cannibalization of their victims (a topic dear to Lu Xun!): “[Ruan Lingyu and Ai Xia] deaths are like but adding a few grains of salt to the boundless ocean; even though it fills bland mouths with some flavour, after a while everything is still bland, bland, bland”. Lu Xun’s utter repugnance for the mass miserable appetites cannot simply be regarded as an “ascetic” gaze towards the female world.
It is true, however, that the press kept a full-press on Ruan & her death.
Stafutti writes of it as a "voyeuristic attitude, even transgressing into the kitsch," as the media described in great detail her corpse, how it was dressed, how her hair was styled, and "about the hopeless Zhang Damin, who wiping two blood drops from Ruans’s mouth seems to have stated that they have to be considered her last gift to him." The media even missed the irony of reporting on Ruan's mother crying to the press that they were to blame for her daughter's death, saying, “It’s all because of you. You killed her. You will reckon with me.”
It would be easy to follow suit here and, 73 years later, discuss Ruan in terms of public out-cry and media portrayals, comparing them to similar gossip witch hunts of today... But I'd like to let Ruan's life and choices speak for her.
Her acting is brilliant -- and plentiful. In less than 10 years she made nearly three times that many films... 29 films in 9 years. Amazing films too, from the ones I've seen.
In them she explored female advancement & exploitation; a rigid patriarchial & feudal system built on class, which maltreated (if not out-right abused) women and men alike, yet was perpetuated by both genders; and a warm naiveté which, even should innocence be lost -- and find itself punished for its supposed immorality, could outlast & outshine the old & cold hierarchical social structure.
For her suffering heroines, Ruan was compared to Garbo; but I think Ruan Lingyu and her luminous acting stands on its own.
I'm not sure if I have this book or not... (My shelves, they sag & buck like a wild horse; and if it weren't for the boxes full of books in front of them, they'd likely tip over. Yes, organization is on the "to do" list.)
But even if I have a copy (or three) of 1961's Sexual Behavior Of The American Housewife, by W.D. Sprague Ph.D., it likely wouldn't include these marks. (Click image to read them.)
Marks and notations are something I'd never leave in a book; as a tribute to the countless kind and helpful librarians in my youth (and today too), I've never even dog-eared a page. But when I find them, I am fascinated. As is Ann Douglas, poster of these images at Flickr, who says:
My favorite part of this entire book -- the housewife title I just posted -- is this page spread. I think it's hilarious how someone (the not-so-happy wife) marked these passages with huge lines and giant X-es. I wonder if she "accidentally" left the book on bed for hubby to find one night when she was late getting home to make dinner, with the book open to the page with the mysterious markings. It makes you wonder.
How's a man supposed to choose between Josie & Alexandra, Betty & Veronica, or Ginger & Mary Anne? Well, he chooses the girl who promises the most pie, of course.
Time was that silhouette was a naughty word -- which only goes to prove that we live in a changing world. France, in 1759, had a comptroller general whose name was "Monsieur Silhouette." He introduced a number of taxes so odious that the mere mention of his name in polite society could mean pistols at dawn. Just how this epithet gradually shed its shady meaning and came to connote the outline of an object is lost in the pages of history. We chose the name SILHOUETTE for our magazine as a compliment to you... your clothes, your personality, and the home that is a gracious setting for the special beauty that is yours alone.
The art of silhouette cutting originated in Europe in the early 1700's. Prior to the French revolution, silhouettists were hired as an amusement for the royal class. The featured artist would attend the many extravagant balls and cut out the distinguished profiles of the Lords and Ladies capturing the latest fashions and elaborate wigs.
While the aristocrats were having their silhouettes cut out and eating like kings much of Europe was starving, especially in France. In the 1760's the Finance Minister of France, Etienne de Silhouette, had crippled the French people with his merciless tax polices. Oblivious to his people's plight, Etienne was much more interested in his hobby of cutting out paper profiles, the latest fad. Etienne de Silhouette was so despised by the people of France that in protest the peasant s wore only black mimicking his black paper cutouts. The saying went all over France,"We are dressing a la Silhouette. We are shadows, too poor to wear color. We are Silhouettes!" To this very day the black profile cutouts are called silhouettes. Thankfully, the negative connotation no longer remains.
However, artists like Kara Walker are resurrecting the art, using it to explore negative issues such as racism and feminism.
“I was looking at racist paraphernalia, iconography, and then at these accurate versions of middle-class Americans. I began to associate the silhouette itself, the cutting, with a form of blackface minstrelsy. Here we have these mainly white sitters or a few slaves who were documented in silhouette—but for the most part white sitters whom I identify as middle class because upper class would require a full-fledged oil portrait and that’s what I had already ruled out for myself…’No oil painting here, not going to ape the master that way.’”
“I always think about this work, this history, in terms of the body. And in terms of this act of excavating that’s been such a current and recurring theme, particularly in the histories of feminist artists, feminist writers, African-American people of color, investigating and eviscerating this body of collective experience…sometimes to the point of leaving nothing intact. I entered into this project, this idea of being a black woman artist, from the perspective of a person who has been presented with a pre-dissected body to work from. A pre-dissected body of information.”
Kara Walker's Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994) from The New York Times.
Other image credits: Kara Walker silhouette via The Whitney.
4)Found In Mom's Basement shows us the amazing vintage ad shown at the left. I have only one question: Is it always illegal to kill stupid advertising guys?
5) A huge high-five to Will (of Hang Fire Books), for helping me get Pop Tart a belated birthday gift. I selected the Sunshine Biscuit ephemera (found in a first edition of the Kinsey report) with the a wacky signed note from Verce of Hexperience. Absolutely love it! So thanks -- and next time I'll have to buy something *wink*
From back in the day when women couldn't literally be seen by their doctors; they pointed at the doll to delicately discuss what ailed them. This one is 11 1/2 inches long and available at Ivey-Selkirk.
In a study of the films from the 1930s to 1970s, historians have categorized four dominant types of roles that women played. The first one is the “Pillar of Virtue” types played by Doris Day or Julie Andrews. This category also features mothers and mammies such as Hattie McDaniel’s character in “Gone with the Wind.” The “Glamour Girl” range from sex goddesses such as Marilyn Monroe in “Bus Stop” to femme fatales such as Marlene Dietrich in “Blonde Venus.” The “Emotive Woman” is the sexually frustrated Rosalind Russell in “Picnic” and the seductive Elizabeth Taylor in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Thus, the last category, the “Independent” woman or the Katharine Hepburn type, is Barbara Streisand in “Funny Girl,” or Jane Fonda in “Klute,” the liberated woman. Throughout much of film history, women have been depicted as manipulative, sexually repressed, or sexually overt. There was also a lack of sisterhood and films with women interacting with other women in a positive light. In the 1950s, especially, we witnessed an era of “reaffirming male dominance and female subservience; movies showed women as breasts and buttocks, again idealizing women who were ‘pretty, amusing, and childish,’” (Butler, 145). Much of this female contempt has endured and remained, although it may not be as obvious as the previous decades. Nowadays, we see more sensationalized sexual roles for women as the trend began in the 70s. Women now are also shown as waifs similar to the 60s trend, which was a severe contrast to the idea image of the 50s. All in all, women are becoming an endangered species in films and taking increasingly less leading roles.
I'm no prude, but I have to wonder (again & again) why folks are always so upset by porn and nudity -- usually defending it with a "save the children!" scream of anguish while the truth is any child anywhere is aware of sex.
In many places children see their parents and other adults copulating, and it is fact that this occurred in the early beds of Puritanical America; something most would conveniently forget or slide into that didn't-know couldn't-do any-better of "less developed countries".
However, while Western cultures sigh and claim themselves superior, they doth protest too much regarding nudity & sexuality. For they've put it everywhere. Today's exhibits: Garbage Pail Kids cards from the mid-1980s.
Pourin' Lauren is clearly a Playboy Bunny. And Nicky Hickey & Marty Gras must have led to a few conversations (parental or peer).
These packs of cards/stickers with gum were marketed towards kids as a mockery of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls so that would definitely be kids, not teens or even tweens, yet it was expected that they'd know Playboy Bunnies and hickeys -- and so much more.
Like the comforting notion of a Peeping Tom.
It's pretty clear that even with the sophomoric humor, these cards are for adults to appreciate. What else could Turned-On Tara refer to? Drugs? A real human light fixture?
But then again, perhaps the risque humor is something I read into them...
There are lots of euphemisms in these cards, for a mind like mine.
But even if One-Eyed Jack isn't a euphemism for penis, do we expect 8 year olds to know Poker references? I'm guessing they understand them about as well as the poke-her references which are all around us.
In Figuring Out Feminism ~ The First Time, Gracie discusses the cognitive dissonance of growing up in the 70's, comparing feminism to a faith by saying, "Equality was as much a belief and faith as any religion back then, for as much as you heard, there was little to actually see."
Just one example:
I didn't go to any of the meetings, but Phil Donahue and copies of Cosmo (magazines left lying around in everyone's home, while the Playboys were hidden) told me of such groups. Some women gathered with mirrors to look at their vaginas and tell themselves how beautiful they were ~ a grown-up version of Free to Be... You and Me. Others, who presumably had already done the mirror thing, met to discuss sex as power, how women had it and that it was OK to use it ~ and if he didn't respond to it, he was likely gay. And that was OK too. As was the fact that you might not only find women succumbing to your sexual power, but you might prefer it. All of this likely sent more than a few women back to the mirror with questions.
But while Donahue wore a skirt (further developing my crush on him), I didn't see any other men following suit. (But three-piece suits were definitely dwindling.) And while Cosmo told us that it was OK to go to an orgy, they did so while telling women what to wear ~ which really seemed to send the message of dressing for others, not of the freedom portended.
Being of a similar age, I agree with the confusion... And the fact that even today, Cosmo mags, with all their sex talk & images, can lay 'round the house -- but for gawd's sake, hide the Playboys!
Gracie credits the Cosmo image from Cosmopolitan & Me: 40 Years Old, a post from which I will be pulling lots of future posts myself. (Just a friendly warning.)
In 1810, an English ship's surgeon brought Saartjie Baartman, a young South African woman, to London. She was displayed on stage and made to squat to show her genitals. After she died in 1816, her brain, skeleton, and genitals went on exhibition in Paris, where they remained until 1974.
Baartman, dubbed the "Hottentot Venus," was a victim of colonialism at its most vulgar. She plays a generative role in "Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body," a sweeping, gutsy, and provocative exhibition organized by curator Barbara Thompson at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.
I'd never heard of Baartman. But now I'm fascinated -- in that ashamed awareness of those who rubberneck in ignorance which is combined with anger and sorrow for the woman herself.
From a collector's standpoint, the following reminds me how many nude African female postcards I see:
Partial nudity was common in 19th-century Africa, but imagine the reaction of Victorian-era Europeans landing there, greeted by bare-skinned natives. They deemed Africans primitive and erotic, applied anthropometry - the measuring of body parts - to attempt to understand them, and sent postcards home, many with photos and captions intended to titillate and reinforce presumptions of white racial superiority.
That woman labors under a great matrimonial disadvantage in not being able to pop the question no one will deny. It forces her to take what is offered to her instead of the thing for which she would ask if she had the privilege, and even when leap year removes the bar against her speaking out in meeting it does her little good, for it finds her with no precedent to guide her, no experience to be a lamp to her feet.
I am rather obsessed with watching the old What's My Line? & I've Got A Secret episodes. The shows' charms lay as much in the panelists themselves as it does with the guests (including "famous" folks I've never heard of) and, of course, the numerous delights that such vintage television provides. I've mentioned my delight in calling panelists names, simply because of what I'm continually discovering about them, but sometimes I'm just darn cruel.
For example, I'm so rigorous in my negative comments about panelist Dorothy Kilgallen's chin, saying things like, "I must Google to see if there's record of the incident with a horse that must have stepped on her face," that hubby was starting to become immune to them.
But now I feel badly about that... And not because hubby rolls his eyes at me with silent judgement for my rudeness or with boredom.
In deciding to investigate Kilgallen's chin, I discovered that Frank Sinatra and I held the same views on it. Performing in Vegas, Old Blue Eyes called her "the chinless wonder", and at the Copa, he said, "everyone in New York is here tonight except for Dorothy Kilgallen... she's out looking for her chin." Just more to love, or hate, about Sinatra, depending your personal views on the man.
But in discovery of such statements, I learned more about Dorothy Kilgallen, history, culture -- and myself -- than I ever could have imagined.
Kilgallen was more deeply entrenched in the romantic, mysterious, fascinating world of the late 50's and 60's that I prefer to live in, at least research wise.
Kilgallen left a small Hollywood career for that of a journalist. She was not only a gossip columnist, but a crime journalist -- which makes her more than the stereotypical female press person you think of, but a woman ahead of her times pursuing a profession deemed unsuitable for females. She also became the first woman to fly around the world.
But more than this, she was a woman. A woman who, lonely in her marriage to a cheating husband, turned to singer Johnnie Ray, a man 14 years younger than she, for what would be not only a passionate love affair, but a long-term one as well. This is where the feud with Sinatra is said to be at least partially rooted:
Sinatra had loathed Johnnie Ray from the moment the young musical upstart hit the scene. Ray's conquest of the pop charts in '51 (the top three spots all at once occupied by the same artist) had come at a time when the once (and soon to be again) successful Sinatra couldn't draw headlines unless it was for indulging in his penchant for punching paparazzi. So in '51, Frank was outraged to see that his place in pop music's upper echelon had been replaced by a skinny, half-deaf, androgynous cry-baby who all the scandal sheets proclaimed as a raging homosexual, and he was further incensed by the fact that the love of his life Ava Gardner had a star-struck obsession with the singer. Frank harbored a lifelong grudge.
Dorothy Kilgallen had been less than flattering to Sinatra in her popular opinion columns, citing his violent behavior and brooding public persona.
All of this melted my cold negative commenting heart a bit, but there is more.
On Aug. 3, 1962, Kilgallen became the first journalist to refer publicly to Marilyn Monroe's relationship with a Kennedy. Within 48 hours, Marilyn was found dead of a drug overdose at her Los Angeles residence. The inquiry into her death was marred by numerous unanswered questions and contradictions in the medical findings.* Dorothy publicly challenged the authorities with tough questions. For instance, she wrote, "If the woman described as Marilyn's 'housekeeper' [Eunice Murray] was really a housekeeper, why was her bedroom such a mess? It was a small house and should have been easy to keep tidy." Kilgallen also wanted to know "why was Marilyn's door locked that night, when she didn't usually lock it? If she were just trying to get to sleep, and took the overdose of pills accidentally, why was the light on? Usually people sleep better in the dark." And she asked, "Why did the first doctor [to arrive on the scene] have to call the second doctor before calling the police? Any doctor, even a psychiatrist, knows a dead person when he sees one, especially when rigor mortis has set in and there are marks of lividity on the surface of the face and body. Why the consultation? Why the big time gap in such a small town? Mrs. Murray gets worried at about 3 a.m., and it's almost 6 a.m. before the police get to the scene."
Kilgallen wrote that "the real story hasn't been told, not by a long shot." Such bold reporting was not common in American journalism at that time.
In a case of what can now surely be called foreshadowing, this is eerily similar to the death of Kilgallen herself, just a few years later.
On November 8, 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her own home. A death with equally strange details, powerful connections, and a poor investigation of its very own.
She was found by her hairstylist, Marc Sinclaire, who after discovering her, told friend Charles Simpson, "When I tell you the bed she was found in, and how I found her, you're going to know she was murdered."
Things amiss include:
Kilgallen not sleeping in that room or bed.
A woman who was normally cold, putting the air conditioning on when it was cold outside.
Kilgallen routinely slept in pajamas and old socks, no make up etc., yet she was found not only wearing a peignoir set, but with hair and makeup in place as if she were going out.
Kilgallen had a book, The Honey Badger, by Robert Ruark, laid out on the bed next to her, but not only was it not in the proper position for her if she was reading it, it was a book she'd already finished reading & discussed with friends -- and while Dorothy needed glasses to read, they weren't found in the room.
There was a drink on the nightstand by the bed, but where Kilgallen sat, it was out of reach.
Oh, and while we're at it, those first at the scene say there was a piece of paper by the door, eluded to by some as a suicide note, but it was never produced and no one claims to have read it.
While there are many other curious things about the way cause of death was noted (and by whom), the story officially touted is that Kilgallen, like Monroe, had over-dosed, either as a suicide or more likely by accident.
As Kilgallen wrote about Monroe, why would a woman seeking to sleep, wear an outfit she never wore, put herself in a room so cold as to be uncomfortable, not remove her eyelashes -- or at least the very uncomfortable to lean upon hair pieces, get a book she's not only already read but then not bring along her glasses, and put a drink (medicated or not) on a table near the bed but then place herself such that she would not be able to reach it easily? And all this in a room she didn't sleep in?
Curiosity only grows when one discovers what Kilgallen had been doing in the years between Monroe's death and Kilgallen's own.
Just months after Monroe's death, on November 22, 1963, JFK was assassinated and Kilgallen was not only upset by the event, but was investigating it. She didn't believe the Oswald story at all, and when Jack Ruby shot Oswald, she arranged to have a private interview with Ruby.
No one is certain what was said in that interview, but Kilgallen often said she had something big, which would crack the JFK investigation wide -- and then some. She continued not only to investigate, but pen columns about it too, and it was said that the Ruby interview and other details would be published in her forthcoming book, Murder One, which was contracted to write for fellow What's My Line? panelist, Bennett Cerf, & Random House -- published without any such chapter(s) after her death. Kilgallen's file of notes on all this, seen by a number of persons, has yet to surface. Both the known and unknown details are fascinating -- and the stuff for conspiracy theorists, such as this article, Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen? by Robert Morningstar.
As easily drawn into such things as I can be, I'm leaving the threads here for you to follow-up as you choose, while I continue a different path.
What strikes me, shames me too, are other thoughts....
I don't like to reduce people, especially women, to such symbolic status that their humanity is removed, but in this case, Marilyn and Dorothy represent far more than just themselves.
While not complete mirror opposites, it's clear they each offer moments upon which to reflect upon their differences. Marilyn Monroe's wish for the sort of respect and admiration Dorothy Kilgallen had is widely documented. And Dorothy, who loved opulent surroundings and personal glamour, likely wished, at least from time to time, for some of Marilyn's beauty and to be seen and coveted in such terms. Neither was granted their wishes, of course, but such personal and private dreams are larger than just these two women.
If the woman of beauty, a man's plaything, is understood to matter less in this world, her afterlife continues to grow her legend. Monroe's beauty & status as sex icon only gathers more strength, even if she herself is batted about and accepted as a pawn at the whims of men and society.
If a woman's intelligence, however threatening, is supposed to matter more than earthy beauty, why is Kilgallen the less known? Her valor and strength are not reported and commented upon, even upon the anniversaries of her death. She is not revered -- in fact, she's nearly lost to history already.
We may never know what happened to each of these women. Their stories may or may not be tied to such grand crimes and cover-ups as the conspiracy theorists argue. But the really horrific facts are the if, how, and why these women are remembered. Conspiracy cover-ups aside, our collective societal values have been uncovered, and I do not like what I see.
Or what I myself have said and done with comments about Dorothy's chin.
If you can hear me now, Dorothy, you have my most sincere apologies.
Something Old, Something New: Barbi Benton For You
Tonight, relaxing from a day of hunting, we are listening to records.
Yes, good old vinyl.
Last week, when out and about, I bought a Barbi Benton album, Something New (Playboy Records). I bought it not for the musicality (and having listened to it, there's nothing really to comment on), but for the giggle factor; I just wanted to call my sister and tell her I had a Boobie Benton LP.
Yes, my sister and I called her Boobie Benton.
I'm not proud of it, or anything.
But let's face it, back then our knowledge of Ms. Benton came from her appearances on Hee Haw, and while we knew nothing of her link to Hugh Hefner, Playboy After Dark, or even that Hef and Playboy existed (yet), we weren't blind. At first, Barbi's corny sexualized costumes may have not meant much to we wee girls, but as we grew (and feared further growth) into puberty, we became more than a bit self-conscious...
What do immature humans do in uncomfortable situations or with uncomfortable feelings? Mock the thing that brings them to mind, duh. (Note: This is normal & find for kids, but adults really should mature their minds along with their bodies.)
So, Barbi Benton became Boobie Benton. And Adrienne Barbeau was -- you guessed it -- Adrienne Barboob. (You don't want to know what we called Connecticut Avenue when we played Monopoly without our parents around.)
Ironically, while sis and I were often too naive to appropiately deal with our feelings about boobs, or know that Hee Haw was inspired by Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, we both were sophisticated enough to realize that Laugh-In was the far more biting & better show.
Back to Boobi...
Barbi Benton was published in Playboy, including covers, but she was never a centerfold... Do you think that has to do with the relationship with Hef? Like he either felt territorial or feared accusations of cronyism? Of course, it could just have been her choice.
But I am struck by how fresh, cute and innocent Barbi's look is compared to Hef's current type (and by that I mean the same plastic blonde bimbo look his girls have had for decades). Barbi Benton more exemplifies the original Playboy magazine ideals of sex not being dirty, that it's something everyone does, including the girl next door.
How far Playboy has drifted in that regard... Much to my personal disappointment.
Today Benton is still beautiful, if blonde, apparently a pottery loving interior decorator, and while her bangs live on, some think she hasn't aged well on the inside, saying, "Some women can age gracefully, trading physical beauty for inner strength. I wanted Barbi to be one of those. Instead, she is a black hole of bitterness, disconnected from reality, obsessed with the few short years she felt alive."
Yikes. (I couldn't get the video to play, so I can't comment.)
But the real burning question on my mind is: Where's the Internet Homage to Sugar Time!
Sugar Time! was the short-lived television series which starred Benton (Maxx), Marianne Black (Maggie) and Didi Carr (Diane -- shown at left on Match Game, via), as a girl band ready to make it big.
Where are the 70's TV fans who should be making pages and posts, if not an entire site, to the show? I vaguely remember it... It's sort of fuzzy -- and bouncy in my recollection. But then I must be on the right track, as it was the show which caused the term "jiggle TV" to be coined. Certainly that merits some actual archival interest, right?
[Will we] ever be able to understand the degree to which sexuality is a 'locally constructed' or a transcendent, 'trans-historical experience of Eros'.
John Coulthart of Feuilleton and I had been discussing my eroticizing specific non-erotic artworks. He suggests it's simply the sublime in the illustrations, the "sinuous Art Nouveau curves"; I believe it may have more to do with something else...
I wrote:
Does anyone else find such illustrative style, and in fact most illustration in fairy tales etc., very erotic? I mean it’s not sexual, and the stories aren’t (necessarily) so either, but something in the epic nature, the good v. evil, combined with the fantastic puts me in such a frame of mind…
Also as noted in my comment, I'm not sure where I'm heading with this train of thought. Even after a discussion with my husband on this (an astute judge not only of art and graphic design, but of 'me' and my thinking), I'm still not much clearer.
I most definitely agree that Art Nouveau is sexy. But I still believe there's something more than just the style at work here.
I'm no closer, really, to being able to articulate what it is I am trying to get at, what I am feeling here... And in part, there's a reason why.
In all honesty, I've put off posting this for quite some time as I'm beginning to think (fear) that all roads lead back to Girlie Town. That somehow, in my mind, there's nothing really to point to other than a romanticism of the classic female variety, for which I feel on the defensive -- as if admitting my gender, created in no small part by (and also in spite of) our pervasive & insidious culture, is some how a fault, a flaw which will haunt me... rendering any past and all future posts to simply the opinions of a girl.
While I cannot be other than what I am (even if in my entitled position of "being in process"), there's something about being stamped A Girl which undermines credibility.
If my eroticism of Art Nouveau is boiled down to the simple "because you're a girl", then it's not only condescending to my gender but to myself personally.
My character, education, experience and opinions (which are a result of all the former things) are suddenly dismissed. I become predictably female and my opinions impotent in such simplicity (even if living as a female is anything but).
It's very much like artist whose work receives the stamp of Pop Culture Favorite. While the focus should be on the fact that the "pop" stands for "popularity", folks deride the value of the work. Ultimately, an artist communicates, and if the message is accepted, becomes popular, then ought not success, real not (only) monetarily, be the stamp given? Yet, the relationship seems to most often be a direct but inversely proportionate one. The more people like it, the less it is respected; as if mass adoration/adoption must equal "watered down" and worthless.
My (perhaps very) female reaction, however complex it might be, to Art Nouveau becomes watered down and worthless by virtue of its very direct relationship to a large number of persons, i.e. the female population. And I don't like it.
Especially when Art Nouveau has the very same sublime curves as I.
From my email to Love & Radio's Nick van der Kolk (I told you he'd appear here, so don't look so puzzled):
Speaking of Bedouin... Did you happen to see, on TCM's Sunday Silent, the (silent) documentary, Grass? The kicker was the bio on Merian C. Cooper afterwards, where he and the director mock the "lady author"... Huh. Now that I'm thinking about it, I should make a post about it.
And post about it I now will.
Last Sunday I watched Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life on TCM. It's a sweeping epic of a silent film. A naturally dramatic documentary, with the (apparently) famous scenes of 50,000 tribesman (and their vast herds -- 500,000 horses, donkeys, sheep, goats, bulls and cows) crossing a swift Karun River. I personally was more struck by other images. Men, many in little more than loin-cloth-esque garb, sitting in the snow to remove their cotton shoes (deemed, as the title card stated, about as practical as bedroom slippers), then proceeding, barefoot & carrying shovels, to create a zig-zag path for all to follow up the snow and ice covered 15,000-foot-high Zard Kuh (the highest peak in the Zagros Mountains). It's amazing.
But perhaps I should back-up a bit.
Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life is the 1925 film made by s Merian C. Cooper & Ernest Schoedsack, documenting the journey of The Forgotten People, a branch of the Bakhtiari tribe, from Angora (modern-day Ankara, Turkey) to the Bakhtiari lands of western Iran, in what is now the western part of Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province and the eastern part of Khuzestan.
If the names Cooper & Schoedsack are at all familiar, it's because they made the original, definitive King Kong (1933).
However, as the biography I'm King Kong!: The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper (shown after Grass, but without record at TCM) informs us, the names Cooper & Schoedsack shouldn't be known -- in fact, couldn't be known, without Marguerite Harrison.
The three had met in Poland, during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. Cooper, a bomber pilot during World War I, had spent time in a POW camp, yet after that war he was instrumental in creating the Kosciuszko Squadron, a group of young American airmen who had volunteered to help Poland. When he was shot down over the Ukraine and captured by the Russians, Cooper was sent to the Gulag. There, he was saved from starvation through the intervention of Marguerite Harrison, a woman who became an American spy because women were not allowed to be war correspondents. (Ah, such delicate flowers should not use the pen, but slink around the swords.) He managed to escape, and poor Harrison would need to wait several years to be released.
So, when Harrison puts up half the money to make Grass and insists upon coming along, Cooper, naturally, feels indebted to do so.
The "hysterical" part is during The Exploits bio piece, when Schoedsack voices his opinions post return from filming Grass.
In a recorded interview, Schoedsack speaks freely, saying that women are pains in the ass; they can't help it.
He sympathizes with the Arab leaders in the migration, saying they were responsible for thousands of their tribe and the livestock, and here they were catering to a woman who required her own sleeping quarters etc. He says (and I'm paraphrasing) that Harrison "tried not to be a pain in the ass," but "she couldn't help it", she "was just a woman." Apparently Schoedsack was also greatly irritated by her continual application make-up before every filming -- even though of the three, Cooper, Schoedsack & herself, she was the only one in front of the camera.
The film script for King Kong was written by Schoedsack’s wife, Ruth, who, according to in Mark Vaz in Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, based the it on conversations she remembered between Cooper and her husband about their travels and exploration. (Including Grass & Chang.) Hence, Marguerite Harrison, was the inspiration for the the "unwanted woman" Fay Wray played on the King Kong expedition.
Today's Sexual Harassment; Yesterday's Employment Plan
This would be a WTF moment, if you didn't have the proper context. In this case, the context is WWII women's publication, with the humor playing up how desirable women -- as employees -- were, & the lengths an employer might go to depicted as similar to good old fashioned woo-ing.
High-Five Fridays provide the chance to not only be nice, but for me to catch-up on missed posts I should have made during the week. Here's what you almost missed this week...
#2Vintage Pulchritude has lovely vintage erotica. My only complaint is that of the typical collector -- where's the information on the object/photo? But if you just like to look, never mind my collecting concerns and enjoy the antique art nudes.
#3 I'm not just a smut collector -- or even just a collector; I'm many things. But another area of collecting I'm into is religious items; I think any smut collector has to note, but not necessarily like, the connections between sexuality and spirituality, especially when it comes to organized religion. It's like the other side of the coin, I guess. So this anti-Christianity antique postcard is very interesting.
In my best Monty Python imitation I say, "And now for something completely different..."
The purpose of this meme is to give high-fives to 5 people, posts, blogs and/or websites you've admired during the week. I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 5 high-fives on Friday. Trackbacks, pings, linky widgets, comment links accepted!
Visiting fellow High-Fivers is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your High-Fives in others comments (please note if NWS).
Upon learning that the Trix Rabbit "is probably the most striking example of a cereal trickster who closely follows the mythic conventions of the North American tricksters in particular," I began to ponder "tricksters" again.
In case you are too lazy to click the above link (tsk tsk), here's some info from Tricksters and the Marketing of Breakfast Cereals, by Thomas Green, The Journal of Popular Culture (Volume 40, Issue 1, Page 49-68, February, 2007) that you'll need to keep along with the class:
In his basic form, the Trix Rabbit resembles mythical trickster figures in that he is an anthropomorphized animal, like the hare trickster Wakjunkaga. He exhibits the insatiable hunger typical of Wakjunkaga, but not for foods typically associated with rabbits. He desires only the Trix brand breakfast cereal, and is willing to cheat and deceive in order to get it. In the early days of Trix, the variations on the specific disguise that the Rabbit adopted were still closely identified with the plot premise: He was attempting to appear as something other than a rabbit, so a little old lady or astronaut disguise would do. In more recent years the disguises have begun to take on the form of whatever the advertisers perceive as popular with kids at the time, so in the 1980s the Rabbit disguised himself as a breakdancer, and, most recently, a karaoke singer. In any case, the Rabbit is using these disguises, to appear more human than rabbit, which emphasizes the way in which the Trix Rabbit most closely corresponds to the archetypal Radin/Jung trickster.
Jung, in particular, theorized, in a now largely discounted but still interesting way, that the trickster figure represents the psychological state of humanity making the transition from animal to human. Using Radin's description of Wakjunkaga as a touchtone, Jung describes the trickster cycle as demonstrating how the trickster gradually comes to greater levels of control over his selfish, predatory, animalistic impulses—associated with animal physical forms such as the hare, the coyote, and the raven. In this way, according to Jung, Radin's trickster evolves into a thereomorphic culture hero who sacrifices himself to give gifts to humankind, which is the hallmark of humanity in this scheme (144).
But what Green doesn't tell you may put your breakfast cereal in a whole new red light.
The Winnebago Trickster cycle of forty-nine stories is central in his book, The Trickster and is the most referenced trickster figure of his writings by subsequent students of Native American tricksters. According to Radin the translation of the tricky one in a Siouan language of the Winnebago is wakdjunkaga; accordingly this specific trickster cycle is also known as the Wakdjunkaga Trickster cycle.
(Please note, there are several spellings of wakdjunkaga (Green used "wakjunkaga" and I've also seen "Wisakejak" & "Wisakedjak" for the Cree trickster.)
Among the forty nine stories are the story of Wakdjunkaga taking his extremely large and weighty penis from the box off his back where he carries it to send it across the river to impregnate a chief's daughter and the story of the talking laxative bulb consumed by the trickster resulting in effluent scatological comedies.
According to Glinden, Radin concludes his study by saying:
The overwhelming majority of all so-called trickster myths in North America give an account of the creation of the earth, or at least the transforming of the world, and have a hero who is always wandering, who is always hungry, who is not guided by normal conceptions of good or evil, who is either playing tricks on people of having them played on him and who is highly sexed. Almost everywhere he has some divine traits. These vary from tribe to tribe. In some instances he is regarded as an actual deity, in others as intimately connected with deities, in still others he is at best a generalized animal or human being subject to death (155).
But the effluent scatological comedy plot thickens... as Glinden writes:
Trickster myths are found in nine of the eleven Native American Regions (Hynes 3). Koshare, Koyemshi, and Neweke are trickster clowns of the Pueblo people who display wanton voracity, sexual and otherwise, but are confined to ritual ceremonies (Leeming 46). Other common animal-person tricksters besides the Hare and Spider are the Raven and Coyote. "Coyote…easily the favorite…crosses tribal boundaries with as much ease as he crosses moral and social ones. He exists is the West from Alaska to the great deserts, he is everywhere on the Great Plains, and he ranges even to the East Coast"(Leeming 48). Coyote is often a teacher by counter-example as he employs base human traits including lying, cheating, and sexual misconduct.
It should be noted at this time that tricksters are not really thought of as shape-shifters; they may have the ability, but the key is that the trickster is disguised, just as the Trix Rabbit, in order to fool or expose foolish things. Trickster may fool, be fooled, but he also teaches; this is his purpose.
Also, the trickster is not male or female but rather is genderless meaning that a trickster may be of any gender -- but they are not Two Spirit People, expressing the gender continuum.
While a trickster may appear as any gender, most often they are depicted as male. This is for two reasons.
One, in stories where the lesson lies in sexual misconduct the male member is most useful -- nothing illustrates sexual impulsivity like a penis!
The other reason lies in cultural constructs which allows and disallows freedoms based upon gender. In Transformation Of The Trickster, Helen Lock writes of the cultural situationality of trickster gender:
...both Landay and Jeanne Rosier Smith, in Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (1997), which focuses on women writers, make the crucial point that tricksters are culturally specific. In the patriarchal societies that produced the archetypal tricksters Hyde discusses, the very qualities that enabled the trickster to operate belonged culturally to men, or, as Landay puts it, “[I]n a sexist society, the male trickster clearly has the advantages of masculinity: mobility, autonomy, power, safety” (2). These advantages are in themselves gender-neutral, but are gendered by cultural association. Trickster is not gendered—only cultural perceptions of the freedom and mobility necessary to be trickster. Thus, premodern tricksters were imagined as primarily masculine, though with gender-changing abilities, while the alchemical age saw Mercurius as fully hermaphroditic (representing also the “female aspects of matter” [Nicholl 32] as part of his elusive ambiguity), but gave this transformative spirit the masculine name of the god whose powers they perceived it to embody; and now, particularly in modern Western literature and culture (although such figures abound elsewhere, also), Landay and Smith find many female trickster figures, from Toni Morrison’s Pilate to Catwoman. Each age redefines the trickster it needs, as the boundaries of the possible, in this case for women, continue to shift; and although Hyde may be right that there are no modern tricksters in the sense of the archaic archetype that depended on a world of polytheism, it seems more appropriate to say that tricksters have always resisted the confinement of archetype, and modify and transform it whenever a new age gives them a chance.
Speaking of new age...
I find it interesting that there are a number of tarot cards which feature Coyote Trickster. On one hand, this is due to a popular resurgence of interest with Native American culture, sometimes on a more pop level than a scholarly one. But it certainly makes sense that tricksters would hold an appeal to those who like to deal with symbols, including not only authors but those who use tarot cards.
There is something fascinating about the mutability of tricksters which easily lends to twists, modifications and new or different interpretation. My Daughter of the Moon Tarot, a very female centric tarot deck of Dianic Wiccan principals, offers a Coyotewoman card which is optional to use rather than the Pan card (the only male card in the deck -- and a positive male energy card).
It was, strangely, this Coyotewoman card which made me once obsessed with tricksters.
Which is not surprising, given my Judeo-Christian up-bringing. From Glinden again:
Taking note of this is to underline a fundamental difference in the psyches of Native and non Native Americans. Inherent in Christian mythology is the concept of tragedy as one can fall from a rigidly defined sense of order. When there is no coherent order to fall from, rather a creation birthed from paradox that is inclusive of both sacred and profane, there is no tragedy. Tricksters bring instead comedy, a communal adhesive.
Oral stories were told for specific reasons within the separate cultures of Native Americans; the revered storyteller tailored the story while speaking to distinct people of the group being addressed. It is difficult to ascertain the full extent of the messages from these historic trickster stories as they were respectfully told to and altered for the people they were told to, which also accounts for the myths' mutability. However, the trickster is prevalent in contemporary Native American literature. The messages are apropos in light of the movement of Native Americans to deconstruct old stereotypes of American Indians and renew a vital consciousness about their identities and clearly accessible to the contemporary reader.
...while Playboy was naughty, most advertisers played up the suaveness rather than the nudity aspect of the magazine. Vivitar ran with it and worked some female objectification into their ad.
I confess that when "The Dinner Party" first appeared, I was a bit shocked at the crudeness of its chosen metaphor. But over time, the project has grown on me, and seeing it for the first time in person reminded me why gender makes a difference in our appreciation of the world. C. has taught me how women are never free from the sexual pressure of objectification, whether taunts and catcalls on the street, or the never-ending reminders by the media how women are expected to look beautiful and be sexually-available to men at all times.
These photos are of swimming sensation and film star Annette Kellerman in the waterfalls of Kingston, Jamaica, for the filming of A Daughter of the Gods -- the photoplay was released October 16, 1916 (reissued by Fox Film Corporation in December 1917, in August 1918, and in February 1920).
In 1907, Annette and her father left London to seek greater fame and fortune in America. New York theater operators, however, were not impressed and found her swimming costumes offensive to American moral sensibilities. In spite of the General Slocum disaster little progress had been made in teaching women to swim and Annette was appalled by the cumbersome dress and pantaloon combinations that prevented American women from swimming. "I can't swim wearing more stuff than you hang on a clothesline," she reportedly said before walking on to Revere Beach near Boston wearing a one piece bathing suit that exposed her shapely form and bare legs. It was an act of defiance that resulted in her arrest and imprisonment for “indecent exposure.”
When her case came to trial she admitted violating the law but asked the judge how many more women would have to die because they didn’t learn to swim? “What difference is there from these legal costumes than wearing led chains around our legs?” She brought to court a man’s suit onto which she had sown leggings, making a one piece suit that technically conformed to the law, which required women to be covered from neck to toe. The sympathetic judge agreed to drop the charges against her, in return for her promise to only wear this swimsuit. The resulting newspaper headlines and outpourings of public support tolled a death-knell for Victorian attitudes towards women's swimwear and fashion and gave young women and girls a role model and encouraged them to swim. It also made Annette Kellerman a star.
If this swimmer-turned-movie-star-with-scandals sounds at all familiar to you, you're probably thinking of Esther Williams and her role as Kellerman in the 1952 film Million Dollar Mermaid. Williams had such great respect for Kellerman that Williams titled her autobiography, The Million Dollar Mermaid, after the movie she made about Kellerman's life. Which includes the years of athletics, stage performance and vaudeville (see the Keith-albee New York Hippodrome program) prior to her movie career.
But Kellerman would make a splash in Hollywood. According to Bikini Science:
In vector momentum terms Kellerman begins in the movies fully clad in 1909, bares her legs in 1914 (AK1410) and is fully nude in 1916. Covered to not-covered in seven years--and that's not just the story of Kellerman, it is the story of the era.
Kellerman's nudity is not Hollywood's first, but she is the first big-name star to appear à natural on the big screen. And the first to display an active role as opposed to a static poser, a relative modesty difference.
In the 1911 film The Mermaid, Kellerman became the first actress to wear a swimmable mermaid costume on film -- and in 2006, MermaidFX is said to have created a line of costumes based on the designs worn by Annette Kellerman (and claims to have the rights to her name & copies of Kellerman films -- which I find no proof of, nor reasoning for).
In 1914, Kellerman wrote a script for a film called Neptune's Daughter, which cost a modest $35,000 to make but which was the first film to gross $1 million in ticket sales.
Then in 1916, she was nude in A Daughter of the Gods.
A Daughter of the Gods was the first Hollywood production to cost over $1 million, with it's lush 1/2 mile long sets and a cast of over 20,000 extras. And it was well received. Sort of.
In it, Kellerman plays a girl who, disconsolate after the death of her bird, hurls herself into the ocean only to be reborn as "Anita, a daughter of the Gods," also described as "a mysterious beauty." A convoluted plot involving characters with names like "Chief Eunuch," "Fairy of Goodness," "The Sultan," and "The Arab Sheik" results in Anita vanquishing the "Witch of Evil." Though the film, like Neptune's Daughter, had a complex narrative and bewitching visual effects, it was Kellerman's unclad figure that formed its centerpiece. "Beauty is the keynote of the film. Beauty and symmetry of the female form," noted Moving Picture World. Male spectators sought out this very quality. A West Virginia woman made "four deep gashes in her husband's head" with a potato masher following the release of A Daughter of the Gods. "That scoundrel went to see that Annette Kellerman movie three times in three days, and he'd tell me every night what a pretty form she had," complained the angry, masher-wielding wife. The lifting of Victorian sexual mores clearly presented new difficulties for many an American housewife, not to mention her vulnerable spouse.
While A Daughter of the Gods was a great success, the film lead to a formal banning of nude scenes in the US motion picture industry in 1917. (The rumor is, some enterprising Chicago guy took the nude scenes and inserted them into underground trade films called called Charles Chaplin comedies -- I'm searching, but so far no luck on finding any actual leads on either the films or the gentlemen who produced/distributed them.)
However the film & scandal thrust Kellerman into international stardom. And as a result she was the highest paid working woman in the world, earning as much as $5,000 a week, for almost ten years.
It is said that Kellerman wrote and published several books -- including How To Swim (1918), Physical Beauty: How to Keep It (1919), and a book of children's stories titled Fairy Tales of the South Seas (1926) -- and wrote her unpublished autobiography, My Story.
She also wrote numerous mail order booklets on health, beauty and fitness; and in 1924, according to this program, she had a fitness club in LA:
Annette Kellerman has formed a club for women who are interested in gaining health and physical beauty in addition to enjoying all the advantages by a high-class country club. All members of your family enjoy privileges under your membership. Her club-located near Los Angeles-is the only one of its kind in the world where physical education-diet-swimming-tennis-golf-indoor and outdoor sports and pastimes may be enjoyed year round. Write Miss Kellerman today! Her booklet tells the full story of this interesting development-Miss Kellerman's life work. Dear Miss Kellerman: Please send me the booklet about your club for women. Annette Kellerman Country Club 500 Metropolitan Theater Bldg., Los Angeles.
In the graceful 'perfected' forms we did not see condemnation of our own imperfect forms. We did not see beauty, walk away with the message that we must change ourselves to reflect art, and then complain that we were being brainwashed into doing so.
Was it fair to either men or women to be compared to the classic statues of ancient Greece? Those bodies sculpted of marble in the Archaic & Classical periods were glorified ideals. Not just body-beautiful in terms of proportion & fitness, but forever young as even the elderly were depicted in their physical prime. Such physical perfection was the definition not only of 'beauty' but of 'piety', 'honor' and other values. Where were the complaints that men and women alike were harming themselves trying to obtain the impossible? Where were the complaints of a youth-obsessed culture? Why haven't I read about spouses who, having kicked one another out of bed for eating crackers while not looking like Greek Gods, no longer fornicated?
Did anyone think to scream bloody murder at Leonardo Da Vinci for the Mona Lisa? Yet who among us could copy that enigmatic smile? None. However I've not heard of any suicides, facial mutilations, or deep depressions from the female population of the 16th century. Nor have I heard that the population dipped because men, dissatisfied with the smiles of real women, refused to get laid.
Was it fair to women for Peter Paul Rubens to portray the ideal woman as full-figured & voluptuous (his now famously "Rubenesque" women), when the masses, the majority of the population in the 17th century, were thin? They were thin from hard work, poor sanitation, and other issues of health & economy, and the full-figured standard of beauty was again based on rarity, and indeed unfair. Did they bitch & moan of the unfair standard of beauty, link it to health problems of excess, and demand their government impose artistic standards? Model standards? Did men suffer great unhappiness because they would never be satisfied with the more common thin bodies of real women?
She wonders if it's film or something else which has us confused:
Somehow we as a culture have forgotten that the photo, the TV show, the film, the talking heads and swaying hips selling us stuff, are each artful creations of their own. Skillfully created to move us to consume and screw more often than to motivate us towards 'beauty', 'piety' and 'honor', yes. But skillfully created nontheless. It's art.
And perhaps that's the real distinction on this continuum of art... It's not the skill required but the value it seeks to emulate, emote or force us to emit. It's in this territory that the 'art vs. porn' debate has long fought, that blurred line between 'beauty' and 'arousal'. Beauty is a virtue; arousal is a verb. But they meet in there... somewhere.
We'd like to make the distinction between art and artifice, the differences being critical to our acceptance of its value, yet we won't take responsibility for what those distinctions mean or how we choose to act upon them.
Is the camera to blame? Does the camera add envy along with those 10 pounds? Are we no more savvy than the Aborigine who fears that magic box will steal his soul? Why don't we see the distinction between representation & repression, between objectification in art and the self-imposed objectification we choose, rendering us victim to some to oppression we are only too willing to act upon ~ like a recipe. We see a pretty picture and we don't just imagine wanting it or being it, we must be it.
But is it really film which confuses us? Or is it that we no longer intend ~ even pretend ~ that we're responsible for our own actions?
...We don't need more legislation to protect us from ourselves; we just need to start taking responsibility for ourselves.
This promo piece (measuring approximately 13.5 x 11.25 inches when fully opened), dating from late 1940's to early 50's, was from "your electrical contractor", and boy is it a hoot -- err, about hooters.
A Bumper Crop by Sample Simon
Emil J. Weber Your Electrical Contractor San Francisco
I WANDERED IN THE GARDEN
I love fruit and in my time, I've sampled varieties from many lands and every clime.
In this little brochure I present hard, but happily-won knowledge, some gained on the campus, but none in college.
Sample Simon
Then, once you lift the flap (you have to -- boobies beckon!), you get a billboard warning:
DO NOT LOOK INSIDE
PROCEED ONLY AT YOUR OWN RISK
Apparently you, like I, are only more determined to see what our favorite electrical contractor, Mr. Weber, has selected to show us -- specifically, that which Simon has sampled.
Opened all the way we see 17 sketches of women whose breasts are clearly visible beneath clothing -- each depicting a specific form of produce...
Apricots I love or not -- Depending on what they've got.
Oranges so round--rich in Vitamin C Are good for the vision.
Crab apples -- if not too green Are a marvelous treat.
Cranberries -- every one really is A delectable bite.
Give me luscious PLUMS and Let me dream!
Nature with man her goodness shares In the succulent PEARS.
Those ripe red CHERRIES Hold hidden dangers.
Prune is a little flirt! Gets in jams and desserts.
X-??? An experimental fruit Yet undeveloped.
Cucumbers look harmless but -- Are they?
Cocoanuts--It takes plenty of paring To reach this treat.
Many states of PEACHES fine. But I'll take Georgia's any time.
Avocados are quite all right For the "educated" appetite.
Honeydew I love to eat Cause it's so naturally sweet.
Grapefruit is very "calorifc" And big ones are terrific.
Watermelon -- AH......... So big -- so satisfying!
Pumpkins -- when they're round and Firm they're best of all.
Turn of the century (1900's) postcard featuring one man between two women, his arms about the waists of each. Text reads: Cultivating the "Waist" Places.--
Theochrom Serie 1230-56, printed in the U.S.
A humorous play on waste lands, those lands which have not yet been made property but which may be reduced to that condition, be it the desire of an individual or a group (a country or politician in the name of colonization, for example, or a religious group in the name of God). All of which fall under the category of sheer greed.
The issues of waste lands, conquest, emigration, war, and dominion as ordained by God were quite fascinating to folks in the late 1800's and early 1900's.
For more, see The Rights of War and Peace, including the Law of Nature and of Nations, translated from the Original Latin of Grotius, with Notes and illustrations from Political and Legal Writers, by A.C. Campbell, A.M. with an Introduction by David J. Hill (New York: M. Walter Dunne, 1901).
HARRY ORLANDO, SWING, SINNER, MILLIONAIRE, CROONER
HELL ON WOMEN, KING OF THE DOLLS
"STRONG MEAT" HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
"SUPER-SATURATED WITH 100 PROOF SEX" GALVESTON NEWS
BOOZE, BRAWLS, SEX, SCANDAL
"SHOULD BE PRINTED ON ASBESTOS PAPER"
THE KING -- out sexes VALLEY OF THE DOLLS
The back of the paperback:
He's the Bit-Time pop-singer whose sexy saga has "SET TONGUES WAGGING FROM COAST TO COAST." Detroit News
"IF IT'S SEXCAPE YOU WANT, THIS IS IT." Cleveland Armory
VALLEY OF THE DOLLS sizzled the move queens - now it's Harry Orlando's turn; THE KING
"A BLOCKBUSTER" Library Journal "GRAPHIC AND GUTSY" Worcester Telegram
What's the best about The King is probably what also makes this book the worst. I've not (yet) read Valley Of The Dolls (though I will; I'm such a huge fan of Beyond), so I can't make any comparisons to that work; but it's safe to assume that The King falls into the genre of trashy books. Books, like those by Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins, that I salaciously read years ago. Books which once would have been qualified as great beach reads, with saucy romps and glamorous settings; pure escapism. Books which have now been supplanted by chick lit.
However, what's rather unique about The King is that the main character is male, and we see the world through his eyes as well as several other male leads as supporting cast. While women abound (several even with key or pivotal roles) we see little through their eyes; these characters begin and end as female rolls, if you catch my meaning.
I can't say this is a rare peep into the male psyche -- and truth be told, there are little surprises when you read so many trashy books-- but it is more than a bit refreshing to have the bull-shit set aside in terms of pretense. Heck, it was illuminating -- I thought I had heard all the slang &/or derogatory terms for women, but there were a few revelations, like quiff. Apparently this word predates the current use of the word for 'vaginal fart', drawing from the original definition of the word, a prominent forelock, which certainly makes sense. I am not misinterpreting the multiple and near exhaustive (despite a plethora of other words such as quim, snatch, twitch, and gash) use of the word. Take this passage, taken from page 371, where Orlando admires his notches but realizes the emptiness of such conquests: "You've had the Louvre of lovers, the queen of quiffs, and what have you got in your pocket to take home with you?"
And before you feminists get all pissy, it may soothe (or further upset you) to know that Italian-Americans are Wops, blacks are Niggers and well, you get the idea. The 60's, for all the stuff you read about racial equality, weren't the most racially kind times; and this book doesn't even pretend to be. Enjoy a slice of racial stereo-types with your hair pie (though, I'm not certain that 'hair pie' was actually used in this book -- you get the idea, tho, right?)
But now I'm getting ahead of both myself and Orlando.
The King is filled with sex, yes, but it's not the sex we are used to reading about today. Or is it? I don't know what you've been reading, but when I read a 'graphic' and 'sexy' book, both tab A and slot B are described, usually in detail, along with every step of the action. But in The King, well, it's (nearly) everything right up to those parts. It could be the time, or it could be further evidence that it's all about the thrill of the chase. But in any case, if you expect to find your panties wet from all this action, you'll be disappointed.
If, however, you enjoy a sordid tale of celebrity scandal, well, then, The King should fit the bill. Even if most of the celebs it outs are no longer filling our tabloids, or are dead even, this is fun.
Reading The King doesn't require the use of Google to discover that the lead character, Harry Orlando, 'is' Frank Sinatra (who was really unhappy with this book). Nor will you miss the other celebrities of the 60's hiding behind clear plastic retro bubble umbrellas.
Orlando's be-friended political candidate, the one whose campaign he helps at the request of the candidate's powerful father, is the ill-fated President Kennedy, and so covers the connections between entertainers and politicians. Bland actor turned presidential hopeful, Grant Campbell, is clearly Ronald Reagan. There are assorted smaller characters resembling 'a rat pack' if not the Rat Pack. (Interestingly enough, the black comedian on the late night talk show seems to be Nipsey Russell.) And the respected reporter, Bill Temple, could be very loosely based on James Bacon, but the main pivot points of this character focus on the personal & bitter swing Sinatra -- err, Orlando, makes from Camelot to the Republican party.
Since the babes aren't too fleshed-out, or, rather, aren't much more than flesh, it's hard to point to the not-so-cleverly disguised female celebs from that time period -- other than one who clearly, to me, seems to be Monroe. (She would have to appear in a Sinatra tale somewhere; and I bet the softer approach was due to her death just years before Cooper began writing The King. Then again, the women just don't matter here.)
In this work of fiction politics and social change are clearly characters -- as well masked as Sinatra supposedly is. The role of communism is actually played by communism, but the fictitious Friends of Victor Wade plays the Christian Right/Moral Majority or the friends of Falwell, as shown in this passage:
It was Temple, following up on a tip, who discovered that Wade and his friends were more than simply braying anachronisms. It was Temple who tracked down the proof that the executive level of the group was riddled with racists and boobs who were dangerous in their boobism. "Our sole function," announced Victor Wade, "is to educate every loyal, red-blooded American citizen on his inalienable right to speak out against all enemies of freedom. We have no other design." In truth, factions of the group, quietly but definitely directed from the top, had been successful in wrecking mental-health programs in many small communities, had infiltrated PTA chapters with members who persuaded passive majorities that this history book would have to be dropped because its interpretations of American history weren't patriotic enough or that the teacher with the funny-sounding foreign name would have to be bounced because of vaguely dangerous ideas he held. Pressure had been successfully put on librarians and bookstore owners to drop from stock books which, because of their political, ethnic, or moral slants, furthered the subversive cause. An astonishing number of men running for local political offices as liberals or moderates had been defeated, thanks to red-herring attacks by Wade Friends--attacks dealing not with the candidates' liberal or moderate views but with rumors about the candidates' sexual preferences or long-forgotten adolescent rebellions.
(Fiction or not, you didn't think I'd pass up an opportunity to remind everyone how important it is to not remain passive majorities puppeted by the right-restricting political right -- did you?)
Now that you've got the cast of characters, I see no reason to ruin the possibility of you actually reading this book by giving away too much of the plot. Most of it centers on the 'boys will be boys' stuff of babes, friendships and relationships among men, how men get their power, booze & more babes (or how they perhaps waste their power), all set in the swingin' 60's.
For the most part the juicy-joy of this book isn't about the plot; it's about the retro romp. Highly recommended -- and the cheap thrills can be found cheap at thrift stores, at Amazon, and on eBay.
Its themes were more seriously, intensely, and disturbingly frank. Very dark but very realistic. And it explores fetishes filmmakers still shirk from.
I had no idea that the 'very dark' (and perhaps 'fetishes') referred to yet another Nazi theme... I am not trying to beat a dead horse here, and even toyed with not posting this (at least for awhile), but this is from a slightly different angle than my recent posts (1, 2)...
The story line revolves around Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), a concentration camp survivor, who runs into her former captor and lover, SS officer Max (Dirk Bogarde), who is now a night porter at the Vienna hotel she is staying at with her husband.
The film has been considered everything from tasteless to arousing, from blaming the victims to missing its potential, and, of course, as anything but feminist.
The film is aging well. Now people are seeing more than the 'potential' but seeing that perhaps it has realized them.
Where once Robert Ebert said, "I can imagine a serious film on this theme—on the psychological implications of shared guilt and the identification of the slave with the master—but "The Night Porter" isn't such a film," now others are suggesting that the film has in fact done so.
Perhaps this is still a case of 'too soon' and as the years pass and taboo of showing Nazis as anything other than evil (and therefore incapable of having any real emotion, or sex we can imagine as pleasurable for another) the film will grow in it's credibility.
We like to imagine that the stars of our erotic dreams, as they pose with such poise and promise, are, if not blissfully happy, then some sort of underground rebels, pushing past the limits and norms to just do what comes naturally.
This phenomenon, wherein we view the act of creating porn as escapist as our viewing it, is a normal part of porn purveyance. And it's one that often finds us under attack.
Such frivolous behavior is bad enough, but when involving erotic images and ideas it is even far more dangerous. It's as if, somehow, that imagining her photographed gaze is just for us, and that envisioning she is as equally pleased 'seeing us' as she is delighted knowing why we gaze back at her, that all of this is somehow at once both dissimilar and more dangerously out of touch with reality than it is with any interaction with mainstream media.
(If I were to begin to undertake the pro-porn argument today, I would surely remind women of soap operas, both daytime and prime time version; girls of boy bands, boys of comic book & anime characters; and men -- those heterosexual men who deny use of female imagery -- of their lopsided obsession with sports figures -- any of which is equally as warped in its idolisation and fantasy... Yet somehow still deemed less offensive and risky than porn. But I won't get into all of that argument today.)
While porn in general presents these potential problems, at least in theory, porn from the past has additional pitfalls. For example, we have a tendency to romanticize the past.
We like to remember the past as those less complicated times "when a man was a man, and a woman was a woman," and no place is this more true than with our vintage erotica. But I'm here to tell ya, porn, even vintage porn, is not always pretty.
Sure, there is porn that's less-than attractive (down-right weird, even); and yup, like in any business, organization or group of people, there are always a few bad apples which make things scary. But I'm talking more about what the adult industry reveals about the rest of our culture...
Flip through the pages of any "man's publication" and you'll find not just nude photos, but there, in those printed pages, a stripped down picture of the culture & the times in which it was produced.
Like a portable men's room, the 'talk' that occurs in men's magazines is as au natural as the status of the models. It's not that these publications are necessarily less than literate; it's not that their minds are simply in the gutter. But most of these magazines shoot from the hip. They are direct, frank, and don't pussy-foot about. It makes sense, for how can you expect pages of naked broads not to be surrounded by equally revealing stories?
The term 'explicit' is normally reserved for erotic stories (and directions, we hope), but this matter of leaving nothing to be implied or hinted at is a common tone in sex magazines. Sure, there's playful innuendo, dirty puns, and other word play for nimble tongues, but the mere fact that all this sex talk can go on means the publication is censor-free. Every day matters, like the politics of the times, cannot be forbidden in a place (publication) which wishes to convey to its members (subscribers) that there are no holds barred here. How can they invite -- nay, propel -- readers to undress the models and caress themselves if there are indeed taboos? If free liquor cannot be sent along with the publication to loosen inhibitions, then the articles and other content must convey, "Speak freely, brother; it's OK here. Anything goes!"
Case in point, this copy of Hollywood Follies (Greenwich Feature Syndicate, NY, Wayne Sabbath, Managing Editor), scans of which have been placed throughout this post.
From 1943, this issue clearly embraces the wartime mentality with the images of sailors and females with sailor caps, sending a military message. But it's the cover tag lines, "Follies for Victory" and "Jokes to Jerk the Japs," which really announces it supports our American troops.
I don't post the racist, sexist and dehumanising bits here to proclaim them 'good' or to condone them; nor to embarrass or dirty the image of our troops today. But the (supposed) humor in this old publication provides much insight into our American culture at that time. The jokes and tone may be are in bad taste, but this was 1943 and we were at war. Something more than mom, apple pie and the flag were needed to rally and replenish the troops, so gash and trash-talk it was.
Perhaps the most shocking thing I found flipping through the pages of this rather small bi-monthly vintage magazine was this cartoon of what appears to be officers at a cocktail party talking about a woman. She is wearing a near backless black dress which reveals number on her back and the caption reads, "Darn subtle, these Nazis."
How shocking and horrific to see the Nazi practice of ID numbers tattooed on Jews and forced prostitution made into a sex joke. It's enough to make bile rise in my throat, make me want to rip the publication to shreds.
But as a collector, an amateur historian, this dreadful comic is one link to the past. And while I too would much rather prefer to think of days gone by as more simple and pure, this copy of Hollywood Follies makes it clear that the good old days were neither simple nor pure.
There were good times, good days, but there were also bad things and bad ways. Just like today. So perhaps it's better to think of them just as the old days. Or at least force a reality check on ourselves now and then by reading the trash-talking articles as well as looking at the gash photos.
If every woman in our society sparkled, it would have the same uniformity as we would were every woman quiet and retiring. We know, when we think about it, that beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, and thus a woman who is interesting to one man can leave the second cold. Women who are interesting to men are frequently an enigma to other women…
Before you read this discussion of how we can become more interesting, think of this: Not every man wants an interesting woman any more than every husband wants or could even tolerate a beauty. It is a very difficult thing to be a woman.
Since neither Deanna nor I have the sheet music, she's contacting the seller, Joel, of www.sheetmusiccenter.com, for a follow-up article on "coon" music. I'll post the follow-up when she's published it, but I couldn't wait to show off this old cover with a man with a key standing outside his caged girlfriend.
This is what I could find out.
It's by "The Originator of Ragtime" or "The Father of Ragtime" Ben Harney. The Rag-Time Ephemerist has an article on Harney, Ben Harney in Context, which doesn't illuminate the cover art or the song itself much, but the online article does quote from The New York Clipper (September 26, 1896) which covers Harney's time with the Boston Athenaeum Star Specialty Company (touring under the aegis of Andrew J. Hughes, proprietor of Boston's Howard Athenaeum Theater):
His coon songs gained enthusiastic response. He was assisted in the gallery and on the stage by 'Strap' Hill, a colored dancer and singer.
In the article (again, only part of which is available online) there's a tantalizing bit more on "the negro" in question:
Based on the recollections of Harney's wife Jessie, the authors of They All Played Ragtime identified his "stage assistant," "Strap" Hill as a "young Negro ragtime player and entertainer ... from Memphis" whom Harney first met either in or on his way to Chicago in 1893.3 Clipper citations make it clear that Harney and Hill worked together, on and off at least, from the fall of 1896 until the fall of 1898
Vanessa Anne Hudgens, star of the Disney made-for-kids TV movie hit "High School Musical," is under fire because of a nude photo circulating on the Internet. The photo, shown below, was taken for a boyfriend. According to Reuters:
A representative for actress Vanessa Hudgens confirmed on Friday that the image is of the 18-year-old performer. The picture shows her smiling and standing naked directly in front of the camera in what appears to be a bathroom.
"This was a photo which was taken privately," Hudgens' representative said in a statement. "It is a personal matter and it is unfortunate that this has become public."
Kudos for admitting it -- even makes me think that Vanessa is a real person rather than one of those Disney-bots they churn out. (Though we all know there will be hell to pay from the corporate rat mouse.)
What strikes me about this, and is the reason for posting it, is that 'we' are all so freaked out by actions like this.
The photo isn't horrible -- isn't in my mind 'porn' in the nasty way even if it's clearly designed to turn someone on. It's a very natural thing to do. Those of us who have taken such photos raise your hands -- and the rest of you are liars (or have some intimacy or body issues).
Why do we become so upset when celebrities are discovered to have lives, including sexual ones? Why do we kid ourselves that they are not human beings with sex urges (among other things) -- even while we admire, covet and lust after them? People are people.
Why do we freak-the-hell-out when we hear a celeb is a sexual human being?
Yeah, sure she's a product of Disney, marketed for tween consumption, but even then these are people (made of marketing, not in some Disney lab) and so they have lives.
According the the press, "some parents" were outraged:
"She's damaged," Renee Rollins-Greenberg, a Los Angeles mother of two, told Reuters. "She's got this teeny-bop audience, young pre-teens and younger, who are admiring her and thinking she's this wonderful, pure innocent person. Eighteen is awfully young for this kind of display."
"I'm devastated because I have an 8-year-old for which I now have to have an explanation," said another Los Angeles-area mother, Rosie Konkel. "She's always looked at this character as a very smart and proper young lady."
Damaged? Wow. That's overly harsh.
This mom thinks 18 is awfully young for this kind of display? Hey, does she remember what she did at 18? And even if this mom had no sexuality of her own at that age, does she forget we send our 18 year old babies off to fight wars? Eighteen: Young enough to die, but not allowed to be nude.
To the other mom, the one who is devastated at having to give an explanation to her daughter, I have to wonder how her 8 year old would even know? Is she unsupervised on the Internet? If she's so precious, why don't you supervise and control the media she views? And why would this need an explanation anyway? Why don't "some parents" teach their kids the following:
1) An actor or actress is not the role they play. They are human beings who may have little or nothing in common with the characters they play.
2) Adults have the right to participate in and make their own decisions regarding sexuality.
3) Having sex or posing nude does not mean you are not "a smart and proper young lady" (or gentleman). or "damaged". (Heck, posing nude doesn't automatically mean you are having sex, for that matter.)
So, get over it, America. (And that includes you too, Disney.)
In this final installment Tom opened a can of worms for using the words 'tragic' and 'aging' too close together. Reading Tom as I do, I didn't make the mistake some posters did assuming him to be anti older women. But I can't help but feel the elephant in the room...
It is tragic that humans age as they do. This is especially true for women. Beauty, for all its non-conformity as far as fashion, is tied to youth, health and the ability to conceive. That's basic biology. It's so tied to this that it's true for those who do not want children and, going out on a limb here, it's still a part of non-hetero mate(ing) selection. Youth, with its supple un-lined skin and full healthy hair, signals prime health conditions -- and that is what secures the species. Screw what leads the herd; eat the weak, maimed and unhealthy stragglers at the end of it.
Yes, we are more capable of emotional and intellectual attraction 'above' that of our 'true' animal relatives. We can fall in love with and remain (happily) in love with the infertile, the sick, those minus limbs, the dying; but forgetting we are animals too means trouble. Sperm meets egg, hormones race, penis and/or nipples erect, and much of that is biology and our very own damn animal parts. Much of it is affected by youth or the loss thereof, so don't kid yourself that we humans are free from all that. It's there. It's one of the many layers in our sex onions.
As a woman, I mourn the loss of youth and what it means. Not just the attraction, not just the 'pretty,' but the reminder that I am moving from the front of the herd to the back where there is real trouble. This is why we 'higher animals' nip, suck and tuck among other things. We want to hold onto the middle for as long as we can. It's not just vanity, it's linked to survival.
And I call it a tragedy. For no matter how the other layers of our sexual onions are telling us about and directing us via romance, companionship, a swell sense of humor, and other learned or imprinted attraction methods, none of these things slows down the wrinkling of skin, the greying of hair, the slacking of bellies, bottoms and breasts. So even if our giant, wise, clever brains and affectionate, caring, pretty souls continue to increase the value of our spirits, we age in body.
I don't mind admitting that I absolutely loved my young body -- I love my body now too, but I'll admit I notice what is and isn't as taunt and firm as it once was. I loved more how I looked at 20 than I do at 40. (Where the head was at is another tale entirely.) I felt as wonderful as I looked. Losing that sucks. Losing this blush of youth means we are devalued as sex partners. Again as a woman, one who likes sex, I mourn that loss.
Which brings us, in some fashion or other, to the other discussion Tom Paine's posts prompted.
On a personal level the main reason I remain the anonymous collector here is because I don't wish to invite trouble. As noted before, simply collecting this stuff puts you if not on the defense at least at the ready to defend yourself from folks who just don't understand.
My being a woman who likes nudes is 'bad' enough. As a female collector and admirer of female nudes (which I began with) means my sexuality is open to interpretation. I pretty much laugh it off but this affects others. If I am a lesbian, then what is my male husband? And while he laughs it off too (honestly, we both have a bi streak), this matter of people discussing our sexuality is a inappropriate. I don't spend half the time worrying about who is before me (and who they are or might be screwing) as those who spot my collections do. I do enjoy looking at images of nudity and sex, as well as reading about it, but pondering a person's sex life? I think it's presumptuous, rude and, like asking what another person earns in salary or wages a year, it's none of my damn business.
And then there is the matter of displaying such things in your home -- especially if you have children about. And currently this isn't a laughing matter because I know authors of erotic who have had child protective services evaluate them for such a thing. I don't want those sort of problems.
Fundamentally I am anonymous for the ease of things -- but it angers me too. Why should I have to do this? Why should I have to shield and 'protect' family and friends from such associations when nudity, sexuality, is completely natural and normal?
Being a child of the 60's (technically born in, however those first few years I was but an infant), I do believe that if you're not part of the solution you are part of the problem. So sitting back resting on my anonymity feels like I am wrong there too.
While I'd truly like the world to be free enough to sexuality as a whole, I do realize this is not so. And any battle I would pick on behalf of being part of the solution would mean I was selecting this battle as one for those I know and love as well. So I let the cool waters of unselfishness sooth the agitated heated waters of these unjust realities.
And while the above is 90% of my reasoning, there's a remaining 10%...
If y'all knew who I was in 'real life' you'd have expectations about what I should say, what I shouldn't say, and what I should have said better. Being anonymous allows me the freedom to guess and, yes, to just throw shit out here now and then. Which kinda goes back to the other 90% because then my reputation, lowered somehow say by a quick posting on my mourning beauty, would affect those I love.
And while it would suck to be considered 'sub par' on my (perceived) abilities, I could handle it -- even if it meant that on top of fading youth and beauty this loss in status means I'd really be moving from the front of the herd to the back but fast! -- but the loss of status would be much harder for my husband and kids. Who would want to be related to that dumb sex obsessed blogger?
Years from now, people will see this photo and know 'what vintage' it is.
While I cannot say what form 'beauty' and 'the erotic female' will take for future pleasure seekers, the perky breasts with tan lines, the complete 'Brazilian', the pose, and the incomplete headless female form will speak of our times just as natural pubic hair speaks, mainly, of earlier times.
(Viewers of my collection who frown &/or are repulsed by my magazines featuring women with natural body hair mistakenly guess these are hirsute publications because of our current dislike of women with pubic hair. It takes some explaining to get them to understand that while razors were around, bush was as exciting in sight and texture as the complete removal of it supposedly is today. It wasn't until bikinis and other fashions became the norm that trimming was even a 'grooming' issue -- for women.)
Preachings of feminism and body hair aside -- and even discussion of standards of beauty and desire being not just a social construct but a cultural response to economics left for another time -- the point I'm getting to is that there are markers & clues to the periods of time from which objects come. Clothing, hairstyle, makeup, the cars on which bodies sprawl, other objects can offer clues; but so do body types themselves.
While fashions themselves come and go, so do the standards of beauty rise and fall like the heaving breasts of an excited woman. Learning to see the beauty, or at least acknowledging another form of beauty, is often a struggle for some collectors of nudes and erotic art works.
Interestingly, at least to me, is the notion that for most of history (being just that, his-story), the idealized standard of beauty is not only recorded, but that the recordings show woman's willingness to conform to it.
Before you think I'm going all patriarchal on your ass, let me remind you of the fact: This is a patriarchal time.
I'm not going to argue this fact, nor complain about it (at this time), or even justify it (I do have my theories, after all). But for now, I merely want to point out the dearth of documentation which shows the female desire to be desirable.
The defense of this, as much required for my own sanity as any other feminist reading this, will likely be a plethora of postings. But as unsettling as this is -- and it is -- at this point it would be incredibly silly of me not to note it.
Woman [In the audience]: I'm back in school at DePaul, working a lot with anthropology and the idea of sex and how it empowers women, etc. Basically, answering this lady in asking you, I guess, the idea of sex, anthropologically speaking, is a power dynamic and there are many women whose agenda has been to, because they felt wounded, because they had felt raped or pillaged or whatever we go through in our society, that sex is kinda scary. So I think what you are up against is a bunch of fear from this society that's been told that the power dynamic is really that and you're trying to say "trust"-that the power dynamic can be really healthy and it can be good and so what if there's somebody in bed that's stronger, one weaker, what the gap is. How do you guys feel about that?
Becky: I think it's partly an uneducation or an unsocialization and I think that really in our society, porn might not be fully accepted. I think that's how it is. But I definitely think the communication needs to happen, more so than it does now in our culture. I think that the communication between parents and their children needs to be more open, the sex education that happens in the schools. People on a base level need to be more comfortable with their sexuality, in general. Before you get to whether or not you want to watch porn, it's like you have to be OK with who you are, OK with your body. From my perspective, I think one of the common problems feminist pornography has from getting out there is that women don't even think that they can watch pornography and that it's not even made for them, so why would they even go there? So I think, though, at its base, it has to do with education.
The Love Gamble, by Harold Morrow, "The adventures in love of a girl who could be "all things to all men."
From the front flap:
Eleanor Curtis innocently flirted with danger and learned, to her sorrow, that all men were not to be trusted. She learned, too, that she possessed an abundance of what men termed "sex appeal." And, since men apparently laid their plans to ensnare unsuspecting girls, Eleanor decided to do the baiting and trapping herself. She would make other man pay for the injustice one her. She would discover what type of girl men seemed to desire, and she would thenceforth try to be that type! It would be a grand, gay game with her. "A man will do anything for the girl who knows how to handle him," Eleanor reflected. "No man is going to hurt me again. If there's any hurting to be done, I'm going to be the one to do it!"
How little Eleanor realized what she was putting herself in for! If she could have known how hopelessly, madly, men would fall in love with her... how easy it would prove to captivate them...
Here is a highly exciting tale of a self-appointed female "Don Juan" stringing three successful men along a merry path, each blissfully ignorant of the existence of the other two, until the crash comes -- and then, well...
I got this at a flea market this weekend, and while a vintage book like this, at just $2 and with a copyright date of 1932 is fun enough for me, what sent me over the edge was the min-review of sorts written on the jacket itself. In a tight ink script it reads, "No Good this story, Feb 4 1935.
I was excited before, but now I can hardly wait to read it! Will I agree with the previous owner? Is this a warning of content? Or a literary one?
He wrote numerous books and magazine articles on a variety of subjects ranging from sports stories for boys to self‑help books, and books dealing with psychic phenomena and ESP. He also wrote many plays, some of which were produced on Broadway. The screenplay for the movie "Mark Twain" produced by Warner Brothers was also to his credit, as well as the movie "Are We Civilized." He was world renowned in the field of psychic research and conducted experiments with such prominent persons as Sir Hubert Wilkins, famous Artic explorer, Dr. J. B. Rhine of Duke University who coined the terms parapsychology and ESP, and astronaut Neil Armstrong.
In a two-part article written for TV Guide in 1964, best-selling author of The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan claimed that television has represented the American woman as a "stupid, unattractive, insecure little household drudge who spends her martyred, mindless, boring days dreaming of love--and plotting nasty revenge against her husband." Almost thirty years later, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Susan Faludi suggested that the practices and programming of network television in the 1980s were an attempt to get back to those earlier stereotypes of women, thereby countering the effects of the women's movement that Friedan's messages had inspired in the late 1960s and 1970s.
I'm also not surprised.
But this was complete news to me:
NOW formed a task force to study and change the derogatory stereotypes of women on television, and in 1972 they challenged the licenses of two network-owned stations on the basis of their sexist programming and advertising practices. Although they were unsuccessful in this latter strategy, NOW and other women's groups provided much needed pressure when CBS tried to cancel Cagney and Lacey, a "buddy" cop show and the first primetime drama to star two women. Conceived in 1974 by Barbara Corday and Barbara Avedon, two women inspired by critic Molly Haskell's study of women's portrayal in film, Cagney and Lacey was originally turned down by all three networks, only getting on the air after eight years. Producer Barney Rosenzweig worked closely with organized women's groups and female fans to support the show during threats of cancellation, after CBS fired the first actress to portray Christine Cagney because she was not considered "feminine enough," and during periods when the show aired controversial episodes on such topics as abortion clinic bombings.
The best era for women on screen was not the forties, as has been commonly assumed. The best era had nothing to do with ladies with big shoulder pads and bad hairdos watching their boyfriends light two cigarettes at the same time. It had nothing to do with women apologizing for their strength in the lat ten minutes of every film. It had nothing to do with weeping and constant sacrifice and misery.
Those movies may be enjoyable. We may like those movies. But they don't represent the best in women's pictures.
The best era for women's pictures was the pre-Code era, the five years between the point that talkies became widely accepted in 1929 through July 1934, when the dread draconian Production Code became the law of Hollywood. Before the Code, women on screen took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, held down professional positions without apologizing for their self-sufficiency, and in general acted the way many of us think women only acted after 1968.
They had fun. That's why the Code came in. Yes, to a large degree, the Code came in to prevent women from having fun. It was designed to put the genie back in bottle -- and the wife back in the kitchen. We'll discuss this wretched Code later, and at length. But suffice it to say, to a surprising extent, it succeeded.
Another assumption that needs disposing of is the notion that directors are more important than actors. That may be true enough sometimes, but if we're talking about pre-1940 American film, the opposite is more often the case. Indeed, it's pretty pointless to discuss pre-1940 American film as the art of the director when, in most instances, the stars and the producers called the shots.
Personality was something revered and worshiped in twenties and thirties cinema. People and faces were things to be marveled at. For the first time in history, human beings had the privilege of sitting in the dark and looking at the faces of other human beings, often beautiful ones, thirty feet high and lit up with emotion. Audiences became addicted. They wanted nothing but to bask in and contemplate the faces and personalities they encountered on the screen.
Keep in mind, the close-up was something new back then, newer than the movies themselves. The close-up had only come into widespread use in the second half of the 1910s. Before that, people not only never got to see a close-up in films -- they never saw one in real life. Real life does not allow people to look at strangers so coldly, worshipfully, appraisingly -- and safely. Is it any wonder then that audiences, in the first flush of this amazing new-found privilege, became entranced and fell in love -- or that studios catered to that love? Or that it took a full generation for the huge, loving, glistening, soft-focus close-up to seem corny and to fade from view?
In a cinema that worshipped faces and personalities, the stars were, simply enough, people whose faces and personalities were deemed worthy of such contemplation. Their movies answered the need their essences inspired. Their movies were like the rock videos of today. They existed to put the star over, to capitalize on the image, and sometimes to advance the image. The stories were like little myths created around a screen personality, there to provide the audience with the opportunity to look at and think about the star.
Image -- the public's idea of a personality -- was everything. Studios packaged images, sometimes clumsily, sometimes obviously, sometimes slickly, sometimes with great sophistication. And occasionally, when forced to follow a performer's lead, they helped to create something powerful and socially important.
Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer were stars of the first order who emerged during the image-conscious era of the mid-twenties...
...When Garbo and Shearer started their careers, there were only two kinds of women in the movies. Actresses' images were confined to one-dimensional roles straight out of the nineteenth century. A woman of sexual power was evil, if she chose to exercise and enjoy her power. And a nice woman stayed virtuous, even if she did, like Clara Bow, put on a short skirt and go dancing every night. Those were the choices, vamp or ingenue. Take one or the other. Everything else was just a variation on a theme.
Garbo, by nature aloof and mysterious, was forced to play the vamp, a role she hated. Shearer, who radiated integrity, was forced to play the innocent ingenue, which frustrated her. So they rebelled. Over time, and with some struggle, they persuaded Hollywood to drop the stereotypes and greet a new day. They made the movies safe for real women, and a flood of actresses followed them.
It didn't happen all at once, but they were able to succeed thanks to certain shared advantages. First of all, they had clout. Each had the power that goes with popularity, and each had that power by the time she was twenty-two. Secondly, they worked at MGM, the studio that cared the most about cultivating stars over the long haul. Thirdly, they came along at a time when censorship was relaxed. And finally, their careers happened during a period in history when audiences could not get enough of movies about women.
The last point is all important. Since 1960, female stars have been second-class citizens, but in the twenties and early thirties, women dominated at the box office. The biggest stars were women, and it was a rare month indeed when a male face turned up on the cover of a fan magazine.
Offscreen and on, nothing was more interesting than woman's stories: Women got the vote and were increasingly attending college and pursuing careers. ten times more women were enrolled in public colleges in 1920 than in 1900. Hemlines were raised from the ankles, where they had hovered for centuries, to just below the knees. Women got to throw away their corsets. In place of corsets, women wore brassieres (a new invention), bound their breasts for a boyish look, or like Garbo, Shearer, Madge Evans, Jean Harlow, and many others, went braless.
Bobbed hair was part of the new freedom...Short hair was loose and liberating. Young women started wearing makeup, too -- and flaunting it, powdering up and applying lipstick in public. To the older generation, this was scandalous. Makeup was regarded as immoral, something associated with bohemians and prostitutes. So was smoking... Meanwhile, the availability of diaphragms, spermicidal jellies, and pessaries in the twenties resulted in real changes in sexual behaviors.
...To see (Garbo & Shearer's) films and those of other pre-Code women is to wonder where the American cinema might have gone had censorship not forced Hollywood to change course.
The cover features a clearly recognizable Candy Barr, which is important because while the contents page has a pink-colorized photo of the same model with a rose, I didn't recognize her, nor was she credited.
This is why it's so hard for a collector to see magazines cut up like this -- you can't verify models. Even if the publication didn't credit the models, a good collector can research to find verification of what models were in what issues, but when pages are found loose, you can't even tell what publication they were from. (The contents page only lists Candy Barr on page 15 -- but if I have that page, so far I have not discovered it.)
Back to what I do have and what I discovered...
In November of 1956, Body Beautiful Publications birthed a new baby, Jem magazine. I say "birthed" because publisher Danny Ross compared the starting of the new magazine to having a baby in this, the first issue, under the heading "Diamond Dust" which seems to be the publisher notes section. Here's an excerpt:
Like a baby, a new magazine must be named. And friends and relatives of the Mother-Publisher will come forth with beauts. Among those suggested for this publication were Suave, Debonair, Jewel, Gala, Fiesta, Carnival, Circus and a number of equally eye- and ear-catching titles. The Publisher, however, liked Gem and since it is a time-honored custom to defer to the wishes of those who have just presented the world with a new offsrping it was decided Mother Knows Best, and Gem it was. Until the matter came to the attention of a female member of the staff. She came up with that little touch that would occur only to a woman.
"Why not spell it JEM?" she suggested.
And so JEM it is. Which proves you should never underestimate the power of a woman, or the devastating effect of her touch.
***
At first it was planned to JEM a slogan by which it could readily be identified. Something like "LS/MFT," "It Floats," "Even Your Best Friends Won't Tell You," or "They Satsify." But the best thing we could think of was "All The Nudes That's Fit To Print," so that phase of the project was dropped.
***
Anyway, the new baby is home from the hospital and safely in the hands of you -- its foster parents. We hope you like it. As for the staff, their attitude toward the new baby can best be summed up by what the hen told the square egg: "You were an awful pain, but I finally laid you."
Things to note are:
Of the seven suggested titles, nearly all of them went on to become actual magazine titles with one publisher or another.
By the time this issue hit the stands, Jem had a slogan: Jem, A Treaser Chest Of Rare Spice.
One of the suggested slogans was "LS/MFT," which I had to look up, but didn't explain completely why this would be a good slogan. Perhaps another euphimism lost to time... It's sure been played with, even today.
Also in the "Diamond Dust" section was a "Daffy Dictionary" entry, which I mentioned to Gracie and she quickly made a post about -- beating me to this article myself.
In my excerpt there's clearly a condescending attitute toward women, but it is also delicately clothed in words of worship. However it's important to note Gracie's post because Jem, while a vintage men's mag, definitely pushed the boundaries of condesention into blatent sexist behavior.
In fact, Jem was rather well known for such a sexist editorial policy. This cover of the 1958 March issue is an example of that. Here a topless French maid scrubs the floor while a dapper gent lords above her.
(Image from a private collector who allowed me to share the scan -- thanks DB!)
This editorial slant remained with the magazine (some claiming it even increased over time). Most collectors do agree, however, that the very best issues of Jem were the first few years. During these years Jem had high production standards with wonderful photography and an imaginative, playful design.
One of the reasons Jem was/is a favorite is that it has lots of photos -- and color photos.
Lovely photos of Jayne Mansfield and Anita Ekberg, each "A Jewel From The Jem Box."
In the first issue, the poster babe (two pages, but not in the center like a true 'centerfold') Betty Brosmer is featured as the official welcome to Jem.
Posing in a lovely sheet peignoir, Betty profers a come-hither gaze and champaign for two. The text reads, "WELCOME to JEM with a toast To Gaiety, Beauty, Entertainment from Betty Brosmer."
Note how Betty's face has transformed. The photo used in the magazine seems to have been airbrushed as the copy I have shows less lines on her face and more defined cheekbones. (I'm not saying Brosmer needed such things -- on the contrary, I find it interesting how even the slightest things in such a beautiful woman are 'imperfections' to be corrected.)
In keeping with the birthing metaphore, let's look at bit at the Jem family.
Jem was one of the Body Beautiful Publications, part of the Joe Weider family of magazines and the body building empire.
Betty Brosmer herself married Joe and became Betty Weider in the 60's.
From that point on, Betty, who had been the highest paid pin-up model in the 50's, became a real Weider and virtually stopped modeling and became an active participant in Joe's health and fitness empire.
When most folks think of Joe Weider they think of all his male muscle magazines.
These vintage muscle mags were controversial and even were tested by US censorship laws. From the New York Times dated April 29, 1957:
Magazines Indicted for Indeceny
The Union County grand jury today returned indictments against the publishers and distributors of seven national magazines on charges of conspiracy to sell indecent literature. The true bills are the first of their kind in New Jersey, according to Prosecutor H. Russell Morss, Jr.
Consiracy is a misdemeanor punishable by up to three years in state prison and a $1,000 fine. Among the publishers indicted was Body Beautiful Publications, Inc. (Wonderful Weedy)
(I wonder what Betty thought of this? She herself had refused to pose for Playboy because she of her self-imposed rule to only do chaste cheesecake shots.)
Wonderful Weedy, a not-so-affectionate nick name for Joe Weider, and his publications upset the suposed 'real keepers of the sport of body building,' including Harry B. Paschall, managing editor of Stength and Health. Here's how Harry responded to the news of Body Beautiful Publications indictments:
We are not in favor of censorship as a rule, and we believe in the fundamental freedom of the press, but there are certain cheap publishers who will stoop to anything to make money, even the perversion of children. It is about time some action is taken to stop this sort of indecency.
It is an odd twist of fate that at practically the same time the York Chamber of Commerce was honoring the York Barbell Club and Bob Hoffman with a testimonial plaque, the Union County Grand Jury (where the Weedy enterprises are located) was indicting Mr. Wonderful for consiracy to sell indecent literature. Perhaps the Mills of the Gods grind slowly but they grind exceeding small.
Weedy and his group of unscrupulous hirelings have been spouting for a long time about their idealism and how they were martyrs to the cause of pure, unsullied bodybuilding. They write letters to credulous columnists like Dan Parker (who should know better), of the N.Y. Mirror, telling how Bob Hoffman is the big, bad wolf who runs A.A.U. weightlifting to suit himself. They fail to bring into the open the fact that they themselves are mainly engaged in the business of selling dirty pictures and dirty magazines.
Anyone who takes one look at their current publications, such as Jem, and their small, dirty homo books Body Beautiful, and Adonis, cannot fail to see the category into which such literature falls. Indecency is a mild word for it. Pornography is better.
The Weedy books cannot be sold in their own home city. They have been banned by the League of Decency. Yet thousands of credulous lads, not yet dry behind the ears, take for truth the wild mouthings of these imitation experts, when they read the sensational articles in their trashy magazines.
Perhaps their long career of fooling some of the people some of the time is drawing to a close. Perhaps the Great Imitator (he has recently copied the labels of Hoffman's Hi-Proteen products so closely they can almost be sold as the real McCoy) may be forced by public opinion and the law to go back to his original slum hideway, where he and his pals can still make a living peddling French postcards. Apparently you can take a kike out of the slums, but you can never take the slums out of the kike.
Well, well, wel... If Weider's muscle men mags were dirty and obscene, what should we make of the racism of Paschall?
But unlike other basic drives, sex is different from food and water in that we can satisfy ourselves without actually achieving the goal of the drive. Arousal and orgasm can be achieved without contact with another human being yet be just as satisfying (at least in the physical needs department), while thirst and hunger may only be sated with water and food.
Does being a woman grant automatic entry into a feminist art show? Are women still oppressed, or is feminism itself a relic of the '70s?
Still Fewer Women
Given the stats, feminism, boiled down to a demand for equal rights, is as necessary as ever. Staging a show of women artists remains a feminist act, even in 2007.
Women account for barely one-fifth of solo exhibitions at New York galleries, according to the curators, who tallied the numbers from hundreds of venues. That figure is up from the '70s but down from the '90s, when the proportion peaked at 24 percent. Rather than wring their hands, the curators offer a corrective. It's a refreshing tactic amid a current wave of nostalgia for feminism.
Two women painters show images of fetishism, homosexuality, masturbation in Beirut art show:
Artists Nayla Karam and Maria Sarkis are displaying their Warhol-like pop art in a joint exhibition at a gallery in the Lebanese capital's northern Christian suburbs.
In "Auto-eroticism" for example, Sarkis presents a sensual depiction in green and pink of a woman who may be masturbating, a hand under her panties.
In yet brighter colours but smooth lines, another painting called "The Mirror" shows a close encounter between the faces and breasts of two apparent lesbians.
"I've been working on the theme of eroticism for a year. The 'morally correct' is a relative question which changes with time," Sarkis said.
The fine arts graduate from the Lebanese University, who is in her twenties, said: "In the 19th century (French artist) Gustave Courbet was banned from the universal exhibition of 1855.
"Today, he is considered one of the great masters of the Realist movement," she added, referring to Courbet's "The Origin of the World" which shocked many people of the time with its graphic depiction of female genitalia.
These women face more than the issue of 'Time' and its passing to make themselves and their art more acceptable:
Leon Khanamirian, a 25-year-old banker, said that "in the Middle East, men are allowed to express their sexual fantasies in a vulgar manner, but when (women) artists paint sexuality, it suddenly becomes a scandal."
Hassan Mekdad, 52, called the paintings shocking, however.
"The artists would have been killed if they lived in an Islamic neighbourhood," he said.
, by Annie Sprinkle, and is in 
, edited by William Ewing.
