'Is One Man Enough For Any Woman?'

 

Last time we looked at a Battle Cry cover, it was from October 1967 and featured a couple of blondes with swastika arm bands and whips torturing a guy strung up by his feet.  This one, from a few months later, June 1968 to be precise, is no less lurid.  Interestingly, the cover doesn't seem to be illustrating any of the stories given strap lines.  Which wasn't unusual.  Indeed, sometimes the covers didn't seem to relate to any of the magazine's contents, being there simply to draw in the punters.  This one certainly has all the ingredients one associates with men's magazines of the era: imperiled and bound young woman, blazing guns, soldiers, conflict.  I must admit that, on first sight, the cover did leave me somewhat non-plussed.  I assumed that the cover was illustrating a World War Two scenario - the GIs and their equipment on one side, guys waving German-style grenades on the other - but the 'Germans' seem to be driving a US built White Scout Car, (the front end design was later used as the cab of the M1/M3 Half Tracks).  

Closer examination made me doubt that they were German soldiers - they seemed more Asiatic in appearance and the uniforms didn't seem right, unless the artist really couldn't draw coal scuttle helmets.  It did occur to me that they might be meant to be Russian, (the machine gun mounted on the vehicle is of a Soviet design), after all the White Scout Car was supplied to the USSR under lend-lease.  Then I realised that the answer was obvious: they were meant to be North Korean - the machine gun and Scout Car could have been supplied from the USSR via China.  So it was illustrating a Korean War scenario.  But still one not related to any of those story teasers, which instead focus upon that other obsession of men's magazines: sex.  So, we learn that Miami Beach is 'Sex City' and 'Every Man's Paradise', amongst other things.  I would like to know the answer to the question 'Is One Man Ever Enough for any Woman?' - in my limited experience, most could do without even one.  Particularly one who got all their information about sex and women from magazines like this.  While on one level these old magazines now seem quite amusing in their relentless quest to tease titillation for men, on another, the levels of misogyny they represent, (women are simultaneously objects of desire and to be feared as cruel whip-wielding, drug dealing, sexually voracious vixens), are quite shocking.  Not, of course, that such views of women have disappeared - they've just become less overt.