The Girlie Magazines

...She is peculiarly American, too...

...Not to mention Mr...

...High society...

...There is nothing odd about this, for Coca-Cola is a peculiarly American product...

...And there is no doubting the popularity of this type: "Irish" McCalla claims 3,512 offers of marriage by mail in 15 months of modeling...

...as an intellectual, he cannot ignore them...

...Its favorite model is a carefree-looking lass called "Irish" McCalla who extends to 40.5 inches "in the north...

...usually pictured sprawling in Southern France, is contrasted with "Bohemia," which is represented as equally irresponsible and promiscuous...

...Perhaps that's why Kathy Marlowe is a good deal like it??with the same sparkle, and zip, and kick...

...So do we...

...Politics slips in alongside this lather of sex...

...Verbum sapienti sat...

...Irving Klaw, who boasts that he can sell you pictures of models, "being spanked while Bound and Gagged (Mis-Bondage series) . . . in Knee and Thigh Length Boots . . . shackled in wristcuffs and leg chains . . . in chained Chastity belt and shackles . . . wearing rubberized garments, rubber gags, rubber girdles, and other rubber items...

...The Venus de Milo measures: bust 38 inches, waist 30 inches, hips 42 inches...

...The average hip measure of these girls is between 33 and 35 inches...

...Night and Day demonstrates unequivocally what might be called the pin-up psyche, specializing in colossally busty girls...

...Wagner prefers to go light on sociological and psychoanalytical conclusions, and to present instead the unvarnished surface...

...Night and Day for April 1953 regales us with photographs of a monopede, a lovely blown out of a cannon, another girl clad in leather, a female contortionist whose body has been lacquered with gilt paint and powdered glass ('"the glass can cut into the skin...

...These are printed on pulp and offer monotonous photographs of models in desperate underwear and stilt heels...

...it means revealing some portion of the feminine anatomy in a manner that is provocative, but proper...

...The interesting aspect of these measurements is the narrow hip girth beneath the large pectus provided...

...No survey of pin-up magazines, however, would be complete without Bizarre: A Fashion Fantasia, a handy pocket-size affair resembling the English London Life in its heyday...

...The result...

...Gala for January 1953 contains only one of such direct attacks in the form of a pictorial article showing "a line of modern Venuses, all shapelier than the Greek goddess," and concluding that the "modern beauties of today are ten times more appealing" than the lady who lingers in absent, untroubled calm under her cupola in the Louvre...

...A vicarious revenge for the truck-driver, cigar-store audience is provided by the question raised: Why should a class which is financially inferior to themselves pose as superior in any way...

...German strippers, and the final story of a Swedish immigrant girl who seems to have been sliced up into rather small pieces, since it is probable she was disposed of through the porthole of a ship...

...In the good old days, there was fun almost every day of the week...

...The new pin-up is always protected from criticism??or from such "busybodying" interference as that of the Gathings Committee??by her reiterated patriotism...

...The hypocrisy of censorship abets all this...

...Then there are Wink, Titter, Eyeful, Beauty Parade, Flirt...

...Other models make Jane Russell seem somewhat skinny and include the fabulous Tempest Storm (the "storm in the north," who boasts a top deck nudging 43 inches), as well as Evelyn West, who has insured her "treasure chest" with Lloyd's of London and claims to have invented a brassiere with a built-in ripcord...

...In the "vice" articles, a horribly unrepresentative picture of America "after dark" is shown...

...This is the first of a number of articles which The New Leader will publish analyzing various crevices and cracks in the national cultural fabric...

...It is odd to note how strongly this ideal, with its fecund lines and emphasis on the normal reproductive area of a woman's body, is being contested by this pin-up type...

...Candid Whirl for June went all the way...

...Let's drop that word "proper," shall we...

...While The Pocket Book of Old Masters is banned as "obscene" in Dubuque, Iowa, a pin-up photo agency advertises, and sends through the mails, the soiled underclothes of its models as "souvenirs...

...In Night and Day for last May, one can find the following copy accompanying pictures of women wrestling in mud in Germany: "It is a long time since the Municheers have seen any real German sport...

...The new pin-up is boyish from the waist down...

...If the montage shocks you, remember that this is what millions of our fellow-citizens, young and old, gape at every year...

...They simply consist of eighty pages or so of pin-ups...

...Tawdry and tasteless as the girlie magazines are, they, too, are part of our life...

...the Editor of Art and Camera asks in a recent issue providing some interesting "acrobatic" nude studies for the assistance of artists...

...If not actually photographed under a Stars and Stripes rippling in the wind, she is likely to be accompanied by the following copy, taken from Cover Girls Models and not an ad: "If you should travel around the world, you would find that no matter how strange were the people and the places you encountered, in every land there would be at least one familiar and friendly reminder of home ??Coca-Cola...

...Bizarrerie abounds in these "news" items...

...From Night and Day one descends a rung to another large group of cheesecake mags, smaller but bulkier...

...Indeed, Margaret Mead ascribes the new high in American girls' breasts to penis-envy...

...There are many engaging snaps of young maidens dressed to the maxim, "il faut souffrir pour etre belle," and everyone is "proper...

...The periodical's correspondence is of the type to be found in The Englishwoman's Domestic Journal of the 1860s...

...This group has just burgeoned another member, an "expose" called Confidential which was recently exposed in no uncertain fashion by the New York Post...

...Popularity contests and polls appear each issue, Marilyn Monroe emerging from one not long ago...

...The Post showed that the publisher of this magazine was a busy man indeed, having posed as the male model in his pages in the guise of a slave trader, an amorous guitarist, an African hunter and a rather corny-looking cop, right down to "Jules Latour, famed bra designer...

...Night and Day also is typical of other girlie magazines in its "vice" and "high-society" articles...

...Cost: 25 cents...

...The intellectual can, and does, ignore them ag a person...

...Circulation: 705,000...

...Bizarre is a prosperous, plushy bi-monthly of some seventy pages, lavishly illustrated with photographs of high-heels in close-up, long hair, masks, chains, ropes, and pig-tailed film stars in frills and untidy-looking boots...

...The picture of the artist drawn from these pages is the anti-intellectual stereotype of the "longhair," but unlike "high society," to whom sympathetic envy is extended, the "long-hair" is shown as a luxury society can ill afford...

...For what it's worth, girls' slacks now boast of fly-openings in this country...

...Night and Day offers tell-tale correspondence, sexy girls, gruesome or bizarre news items, three pages of "Notorious World Crimes," and small ads characteristic of the genre...

...This, in turn, has nothing to do with the lank high-fashion model currently glorified in the Luce press...

...it showed a bare-backed girl actually being flogged, over the enlightening caption: "Women were lashed publicly until just a short time ago in Britain...

...But to gauge the society in which one lives, one must note, sadly but definitely, that pinups bulk larger in the national unconscious than the civilized efforts of "little" reviews...

...A large (Life-size) periodical, it is produced monthly between glossy, colored covers, invariably exposing two pin-ups...

...She Is American Beauty at Its Best...

...No matter how lascivious, obscene or plain perverted the pose of the model shown, provided the nipples of her breasts and the center of her body are covered (if only with what has been called a "diamante jockstrap") all is well and a second-class mailing permit may be obtained...

...She Is the American Dream??the Pie in the Sky Every American Man Wants??She Is Incomparable...

...Geoffrey Wagner, novelist and critic, is the author of The Venables and The Passionate Land, and has contributed to the Saturday Review and other periodicals...

...Peep Show for January-February gives us a male amputee, a scantily-clad woman suicide, dwarfs wrestling, a pin-up with hair to her knees, a lady lion-tamer, some speedway smashes, Hamburg taxi-girls and a female impersonator...

...Are you shocked to find the montage on the next page appearing in The New Leader...

...It may be true, as Eliot and others have pointed out, that in the long view of history only the precious fragments called "high" culture have meaning...

...In a future issue, we will publish his discussion of the new violence in our movies...

...Night and Day is representative of the largest group of these magazines, including Scope, Police Gazette, Pix, Picture Follies, Picture Fun, Paris Life, See, etc...

...On the whole, these are far more wholesome than the rather exotic Night and Day group...

...You shouldn't be...

...Man to Man for January ran an article called "If Russia Should Win," showing the usual busty blonde in tattered skirt and half-mast neckline being trampled underfoot by a giant boot: "Our girls would be helpless under the boots of the Asiatic Russians...

...The presentation is more homey...

...Proper" is the operative word in cheesecake, or girlie, magazines...

...The titles of a few recent letters: "More About Shoes," "A Matter of Obedience," "More About Corsets," "A Tyrant on Toes," "Earrings for Control...

...Nearly all the captions under these girls, however, are fairly suggestive: "Two For Tease," "A Pair of Beauties," "So Much Such," "All Wool and A Yard Wide," and so forth...

...Lonely readers are invited to write in to models...

...One high-fashion model told me the other day that she had had her back teeth extracted in order to give her the necessary "gaunt look...

...Hitler and his brownshirts, who got their first real welcome in Munich, had a keenly developed sense of fun...

...Though The Birth of a Baby may not be exhibited, a gentleman from Frankfort, Indiana currently advertises in U. S. Camera, a respectable organ, that he has sets of German atrocity photographs for sale...

...A growing variety of some sixty different girlie magazines, deforesting Canada, loading our newsstands, and consuming the lives of thousands engaged in their production??all legitimized under the euphemism "proper...

...The latter, with her ambiguous sexuality, is quite a different phenomenon...