Spicy Stories

 

The inter-war pulp version of smut, Spicy Stories was one of a number of such titles, including Snappy, Film Fun, The Stocking Parade and High Heel Magazine, which specialised in cover paintings featuring provocatively posed young women in their underwear, usually showing lots of thigh and cleavage.  With their breasts invariably straining to pop out of their lingerie, these girls held the clear promise that the contents would serve up tales of hot passion and heaving naked bodies.  The reality is that the actual stories were, like those cover girls, something of a tease, never actually giving any detailed descriptions of sex (nor, indeed, even mentioning the word).  The hottest they ever got were overheated descriptions of their male protagonists fumbling to undress their women.  The closest to erotica you got were passages like: "Wilbur found himself kissing the love giving hardness of her breasts", or "his worshiping hands found the delights of Dixie Dolly's charms and lingered on each curving breast with a loving tenderness."

Actually, "Well rounded" and "delightful" breasts are about the only part of female anatomy that is ever named or given any kind of description.  Still, in November 1933, when this issue of Spicy Stories was published, breasts were probably the only part of a woman a man could imagine getting his hands on - the so called 'permissive society' was still a long way off.  These stories were accompanied by line drawings that went a little further than the covers, with some bared breasts and buttocks.  Perhaps surprisingly, the magazine did include a number of, by today's standards, rather tame nude photos - all very artily posed and, again, focusing on the bared breasts.  As with the men's magazines that succeeded the pulps in the fifties and sixties, the accent is on titillation rather than eroticism.  By today's standards it all seems rather charmingly coy and inoffensive.  But back in the day, at least judging by the sheer number of titles, (which also included specialist genre variants such as Spicy Detective Stories, Spicy Western Stories, Spicy Horror and so on), there was quite a market for these titles amongst, presumably, the sex starved youth of the day.