The Home for the Literarily Bent
Archive for October, 2009
Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties
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Sin-A-Rama front cover
Edited by Brittany A. Daley, Hedi El Kholti, Earl Kemp, Miriam Linna, and Adam Parfrey
Published in 2005 by Feral House
Subtitled “Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties,” the bulk of the coverage in Sin-A-Rama is concerned with the sex paperbacks published in the early to mid-1960s, before the relaxation of obscenity laws.
The first section consists essays by and about many of the people responsible for creating the sex paperback industry. Highlights of this section include Robert Silverberg’s “My Life as a Pornographer”, Stephen Gertz’s “West Coast Blue”, and Brittany Daley’s “The Lost Artists.” Unfortunately, the essays are scattershot and fail to construct a clear narrative.
The second section consists of cover galleries divided into various themes. The covers are wonderfully reproduced in bright colors on bright paper.
The final section of the book is a bibliography of publishers including their active years, cover artists, authors, and sample titles. There is also a listing of various authors and their pseudonyms. Despite its short length, this section is the jewel of the book for paperback collectors.
As a devoted fan of sex paperbacks from the 60s, I had high expectations for Sin-A-Rama. While I was disappointed with the first section’s lack of cohesiveness, the cover galleries and reference materials in the back make this book an indispensible reference that I will consult for years to come.
The New Man and 20th Century Problems
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The New Man and 20th Century Problems front cover
by Newton Riddell
Published in 1909 by Riddell Publishing
Back in high school I had the misfortune of attending an assembly where we were forced to listen to lectures from a “motivational” speaker. How anyone is supposed to be motivated by someone who couldn’t find a better job than speaking to disinterested high school students remains one of life’s persistent memories. I actually suffered through several of these ne’er-do-wells. There are only two that stand out in my mind.
The first was the ex-con covered in some of the worst tattoos I’ve seen. I remember that he tried to spice up his introduction with some bad slapstick comedy and then proceeded to tell us about how we should stay away from crime so we wouldn’t be like him. His message would have been more effective had he owned up to the fact that as a result of his life of crime he had to take a shitty job trying to motivate high school students – that prospect might have frightened me to stay on the straight and narrow.
The other that I recall was the Christian sort. Because I went to a public high school, he had to keep his religious beliefs thinly veiled. He praised the virtues of delayed gratification and he encouraged us to go the chastity route. He was on tour and pushing his book. I actually thumbed through a copy of that tripe and discovered a poorly researched tome that fully embraced the teenage moral panics that were all the rage in the 80s: Satanism, heavy metal music, etc. I recall very distinctly that he misidentified the title of a heavy metal song he claimed was directly responsible for several suicides. Of course expecting a high degree of accuracy from the high school motivational speaker is a fool’s errand.
What does that have to do with Mr. Riddell and The New Man? Not much actually. While I couldn’t find much information on Riddell, he apparently wrote several other books and was known in his time a temperance proponent. His, apparently, self-published book makes frequent mention of his lectures. How successful he was as a speaker, I don’t know. But having read the book and Riddell’s philosophy, I imagine that any teenager forced to listen would have been as unimpressed as I was when I had to suffer through motivational speakers in high school.
Riddell lays out a philosophy for a “new man” who “shall combine in his nature the best elements of the types revealed in history – physical strength plus noble birth, plus commercial enterprise, plus intellectual power, plus Christ.” It’s all a bit much to go into here and isn’t particularly interesting.
Just as I ready to give up on the book, I came across the racy disclaimer that kept me turning pages: “Parts I, II, III and IV deal with the problem of sex and are intended for private reading…” When Riddell says the “problem of sex” he isn’t kidding, he literally thinks that sex is an activity which must be avoided even within the confines of marriage. He goes on at great lengths about how a man is perverting the sex act by thinking of his wife in a lustful way.
Riddell’s aversion to sexuality is so strong that I am left to wonder its source. If his book is taken at face value, Riddell seems likely to be one of those rare men who cuts off his own penis in the pursuit of purity. Alternately it seems possible that his aversion to sex was a reaction to a severely repressed homosexuality. While the latter seems more probable, the former seems much more entertaining. Either way, you have to figure that any woman he married lived a life of frustration.
At any rate, Riddell’s preoccupation with sex as an act to be avoided was exceedingly humorous. I imagine many of his contemporaries found it just as comical. While I wouldn’t go out of my way to track down a copy of the book, reading it was worthwhile if only for its unintended humor.
Make Your Own Sex Toys
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Make Your Own Sex Toys front cover
Written by Matt Pagett
Published in 2007 by Chronicle Books
The cover of Make Your Own Sex Toys promises 50 quick and easy projects, a count that is probably accurate if you have a very loose definition of what constitutes a sex toy. While I don’t have a hard and fast definition for what is and isn’t a sex toy, I would imagine that for something to be a sex toy it should either turn you or someone else on.
The first section of the book focuses on toys that are designed to turn yourself on and includes projects like drilling a hole in a bar of soap, drilling a hole in a melon, and knitting a “Willy Warmer.”
Perhaps my standards are too high, but a bar of soap with a hole in it doesn’t seem at all sexy. In fact, fucking a bar of soap is one of the least sexy things I can imagine (and that’s ignoring the fact that soap makes a terrible masturbatory lubricant). While Pagett recommends warming the melon for maximum pleasure, I’m trying to picture anyone whose recurrent fantasy is to get a good piece of melon. I prefer melons that come in pairs and are attached to a woman. To each his own I suppose.
By far the silliest project is the Knitted Willy Warmer or as I have come to think of it, the cock Koozie. With the possible exception of Red Hot Chili Peppers fans, absolutely no one will find themselves aroused by the sight of your manhood sheathed in yarn like the extra roll of toilet paper on top of the commode at grandma’s house. Seeing anyone in such a state might be hightly amusing perhaps, but definitely not arousing.
The book continues in a silly vein suggesting such unlikely toys as a cell phone in a condom, a quilt (!!!!???), and homemade body wax.
Despite the lighthearted tone, it is clear that if this book is a giant prank, it is a prank the author isn’t in on. Taken as a whole the projects listed in the book, are more likely to turn you or your partner off than on. The net result is a book that does more for chastity than every Baptist church meeting ever held.
The Furies #1
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The Furies #1 front cover
Edited by the Furies Collective
Published in 1972 by the Furies Collective
Most of the materials I find and review on this site come into my possession in a rather ordinary way – I either purchase them online or at a bookstore. Not so with this radical lesbian feminist newspaper.
After several hours of driving back home from a much needed vacation, I decided that visiting the roadside antique store would be a nice respite from the otherwise dreary drive. By chance, the store we stopped at was going out of business and had everything on sale for half off. The store’s inventory was the ordinary collection of old furniture, miscellaneous household items, and so on that make antique shopping a rather rote activity. As I looked through the miscellany, I did not expect there would be anything that would raise the ire of even the most devoted Pentecostal, so I was completely surprised when I came across this yellowed newspaper. I couldn’t help but wonder how the paper made the journey through the years and miles to be in my hands. I came up with no fewer than a dozen possible scenarios some of which bordered on conspiracy theories.
Imagining the newspaper’s journey reminded of the cheesy soft core movie Secrets of the Satin Blues. I saw it on late night cable many years ago. The movie’s premise is that there is a magical pair of blue panties that turn any woman wearing them into a sex-crazed nymphet. The movie follows the panties as they change from woman to woman. Thinking back on that movie, I can’t help but wonder what sort of woman upon finding a mysterious pair of panties decides to try them on? I have never seen a used pair of underwear and wondered what they might feel like on. My thought upon finding used underwear is usually “gross.”
Whether or not The Furies followed a path similar to the skanky panties of Secrets of the Satin Blues I will never know, but I am inclined to imagine the route they took was more than likely rather boring.
But I digress. The Furies newspaper was published by the Furies collective. In many ways a product of its time, the collective lived communally. According to one account I read, the collective practiced a unique form of free love where everyone in the collective had sex with each other. The collective also strove to be at the vanguard of a new lesbian feminist movement that rejected middle class hetero-centric patriarchal values.
One of the more interesting things about The Furies is that it is undeniably the product of all the values its creators strove to reject. While the tone should rightly be regarded as a reaction against the prevalent culture of women’s magazine, the content mirrors women’s magazines throughout time. For instance, the article “Women: Weak or Strong” while starting out as advocating self-defense for women quickly descends into championing the beauty of what is commonly known as a butch look. It really isn’t too far afield from the beauty tips a traditional women’s magazine might offer for attracting men. The article devoted to gossip is similarly predictable.
One very interesting thing about The Furies is how it affirmed (and doubtlessly helped form) many negative stereotypes lesbians and feminists as man-hating crazies. Consider for instance the following from the article “Such a Nice Girl”:
Only after I had kicked out my husband did I see how much heterosexuality had blocked my real understanding of men and male supremacy. I could let myself remember the disgust I had initially felt about fucking. I realized that every fuck is a rape even if it feels nice because every man has power and privilege over women, whether he uses it blatantly or subtly. My “liberated” husband kept me down not by violence but by making me feel guilty. He wanted me to be a strong woman as long as my main worries were about his feelings, problems, and “oppression”. In a conversation, when the guilt tactic no longer worked on me, he sat in disbelief, and I saw him consider whether to fall back on the male power which he had always had in reserve. As a heterosexual I had always had to double-think, “well, my man is an exception” every time I got close to the truth, that male supremacy is the source of all oppression, and that every man benefits from it. As a lesbian I have begun to experience how it will be fundamentally different as women begin to build our own world. As long as I gave energies to my man, I had not experienced that tremendous difference.
“Every fuck is a rape”!? Really? There are so many levels of lunacy in that statement that it’s hard to figure out where to begin. The good news for sick fucks like me is that if every sex act between a man and a woman is a rape, my own predilection for fusing sex with violence is completely normal. Actually I find the idea of being normal far more disconcerting than I find the idea of being a freak but….
The notion that all sex between men and women is rape raises all sorts of troubling questions. If a woman cannot have the freedom to make poor decisions how can she ever hope to have any sort of self-determination? This is really the crux of the problem with The Furies: rather than subverting the paternalism the contributors condemn, they merely want to replace the paternalists with themselves. One cannot help but be reminded of the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm wearing the farmer’s clothes.
Nonetheless, if you can set aside these shortcomings and read The Furies as primary source that documents the history of the gay and lesbian movement there is much to appreciate. If you would like to read this issue of The Furies, it and several other issues are available online from the Rainbow History Project at http://www.rainbowhistory.org/furies.htm
Sex and the Armed Services
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Sex and the Armed Services front cover
By L. T. Woodward, M.D.
Published in 1963 by Monarch Books
L. T. Woodward is a pseudonym for the prolific science fiction author Robert Silverberg who apparently has quite a devoted following in his chosen genre.
Another in the long line of fictional psychiatric studies presented as legitimate case histories,
Sex and the Armed Services is an entertaining example of a sex pulp published before the Vietnam War and sexual revolution. While the descriptions of sex are fairly vivid, they avoid being lurid.
The book is divided into fairly predictable chapters that mirror the stereotypes of its time. For instance, the chapter devoted to homosexuals claims that gay soldiers actively recruit naïve young men into homosexuality. Female soldiers are described as either nymphomaniacs, frigid, or lesbians. There is also much discussion of overseas romance, prostitution, and extramarital affairs.
Most of the stereotypes seem quaint today. However, there are a few that are particularly shocking when read today. Most striking was the case of the rape victim Rosalie. Rosalie is described as a tease who wanted to remain a virgin until marriage. Because of reputation as a tease, her rapist was given a suspended sentence while Rosalie was discharged as being unfit. If that bit of blaming the victim wasn’t surprising enough, a “psychiatrist” reviewing the case made this observation sure to rile victim advocates everywhere:
“…I’d say the best that could have happened to this girl is what Daniels (the rapist) did to her. Maybe he smashed up the complex of neuroses centering about her virginity, and left her free to live a normal life.”
Overall, this is a fairly entertaining, if un-titillating read.