Nationally Uninformed

Another one for the 'they'd never get away with in now' file, this July 1969 issue of National Informer takes us back to a time, (not so very long ago, let's not forget), when rape was still a subject that it was seemingly OK to joke about and write fake stories about.  It is important here to remember that National Informer was a supermarket tabloid from the lowest tier of the business.  We had such publications here - I well remember the likes of Reveille and Tit-Bits, a pair of weekly papers that specialised in sensational headlines, although the did at least carry some real news stories.  Then, of course, there was the Daily Sport, which at least made its stories so bizarre that it was obviously not meant to be taken seriously. The National Informer was a close relative to the men's magazines I sometimes look at here, but with an even greater emphasis upon sex and in a cheaper format.  But, to get to the point, that headline - 'Watch-a-Rape Clubs' (new and exciting, apparently), is, even by the standards of 1969, both spectacularly insensitive and audacious.  Even taking into account that 'rape' was a much more loosely used term than it is nowadays, (there was prevalent an underlying idea in much media that forcing a woman into sex without consent (male rape was simply not acknowledged back then) was somehow simply an extreme form of 'rough sex'), it is pretty tasteless.

But, as we've seen previously, misogyny was the name of the game in these sorts of male-orientated publications.  It is an interesting example of the way in which the pop culture of yesterday can seem completely alien to a contemporary audience.  You can't help but think 'did people really buy this shit?'  But the fact is that they did.  More than that, they thought nothing of such content, it was accepted as the norm.  I'm not saying that, in this case, people reading in this issue of National Informer actually believed that such things as clubs where you could go to see a live rape actually existed, but they would have thought it OK to joke about such things.  National Informer wasn't even presenting this stuff as a satire on the sexual objectification of women - it was simply for the purposes of entertaining and titillating their largely male audience.  (The more I think about it, the more surprised I am that there weren't things like 'rape clubs' - maybe not with actual sexual assaults, but rather simulated rape - back in the sixties and early seventies.  Sadly, I strongly suspect that there'd still be a market for them now).  If you'd like to read the whole story, then Pulp International (where I borrowed the image from), has reproduced some of the interior pages here.  Sadly, though, they don't include the page that would satisfy my curiosity and tell me what 'sex transplants' are and why we wouldn't be anywhere without them.