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So, Picture Life presents black people as violent, horny, unsophisticated athletes, and foreign women as prone to animal skins and the mouthing of giant bones. In this deluded Eisenhower-era mindset, sex is something enjoyed not by middle America but by the lower order of species -- it's not just primal but prehistoric.
Interestingly, throughout Picture Life, the actual lower species come off squeaky-clean:
For all its many pages of bathing beauties, when it comes to the actual sex promised on its cover, Picture Life is chaste and scolding. Here's that "picture report" on "The Danger Point for Teenage Lovers":
(Click it to see a larger version.)
Rather than lurid, this is sad: After a moment of "warm friendliness" in a stairwell swells up with "tension, excitement, fear," a goodhearted, fully-dressed all-American woman sends her paramour away, and then suddenly feels very lonely. She's not even warmed by the knowledge that she resisted the descent into British-style bone-munching.
A couple paragraphs of accompanying text are even sadder -- and even more disingenuous on the part of the editors. After describing an all-the-way hookup much lustier than the one in the photos, and insisting that "more than 11 million young Americans will soon face a crisis of flesh and spirit," Picture Life quotes Dr. Philip Polatin, author of The Well-Adjusted Personality, on the subject of teen lust:
"We must acknowledge as perfectly normal and healthy the existence of sexual desires in students of sixteen to twenty-two years old. Sexuality cannot be abolished."
The article's next line is astounding: "But Dr. Polatin adds a note of hope."
Your Crap Archivist doesn't care what note of hope this might have been. Instead, I'm stuck trying to wrap my mind around this: Picture Life reports that sexual desire is normal and healthy and cannot be abolished, and then feels obliged to give us reason to hope?
Also in Picture Life: 16 full pages of cheescake; ten barbecue recipes; an illustrated history of brainwashing; ads for improving your vocabulary; puppies in stockings, cups, old-timey reporters' uniforms; a horse in a jet:
Hey, you could do worse than following @studiesincrap or @ExhibitionistSF on the Twitter thing.
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