Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from Golden State thrift stores, estate sales, and flea markets.
Picture Life, the Pocket-Size Magazine of People in Action
Date: June, 1955
Publisher: Zenith Publishing, New York
Discovered at: Cordelia Junction Antique Mall, Fairfield, MA
The Cover Promises: Sex is a great danger facing teenagers today. Also: Check out the stars in her firmament!
Representative Quote:
"Inside the shed, Lucy started shivering, and Jack attempted to warm her with his body. Before they knew it, they had been kissing each other in a way they never had before, and the boy began to fumble at the girl's heavy ski clothes." (Page 10)
In the future, when media companies sext their thrice-a-minute updates directly into an eager population's brainsticks, news in America will at last be reduced to nothing but its perfect, truest form: images of undressed young women stamped with words like "Call this hotline to report the perverts who enjoy this."
Until then, Americans will have to content themselves with important press reports like CBS's "Lingerie Ad Too Sexy for TV?," which duly shows all that too-sexy lingerie, and the groundbreaking "30 More Inappropriately Sexy Ads," which alerts consumers to all of the ads that morality insists they should avoid.
This tendency is exemplified in Picture Life magazine, which is just like regular Life except for its tininess, its steady parade of bikini beauties, and its belief that Florida looks like Fred Flintstone's tie.
The back cover demonstrates the magazine's nuanced take on sexual mores.
They eat fungus and nuts! And, Lord, where even to begin with the race-baiting of the boxing teaser, which makes a punchline of a near lynching? Elsewhere in the issue, Willie Mays is described as "unsophisticated," as likely to be corrupted by "fleshpots," and as possessing a "big head" that might derail his career. It's unclear whether the unidentified writer means Mayes' ego or his actual physical head, and this is no help:
And, incidentally, before we get to the dangers of teen petting, here's the article about those cavewomen:
Is this the secret society all the Bushes were in at Yale?
Next: Animal Pics and Hot Petting Action!
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:
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