World of Men

There's been a lot of talk on this blog lately of various types of World War Two ordinance, so for those of you still confused, in the 'World of Men' cover above, the girl coming down on a parachute is carrying an M3 'Grease Gun', while the dude next to her is firing an M1 Thompson sub machine gun - a 'Tommy Gun' - which the M3 was designed to replace.  As can be seen, the 'Grease Gun' is of greatly simplified construction compared to the 'Tommy Gun', thereby making it both lighter and cheaper and easier to manufacture, not to mention cutting down the risks of jamming or otherwise malfunctioning in combat.  So there you are: correct vintage firearms identification via pulp magazine cover illustrations.  At least, that's my excuse for posting this particular cover.  

The story it is illustrating is 'The Lace Panty Raiders Who Clobbered Hitler's Panzer Corps', another of those fanciful men's magazine 'true' tales of how machine gun toting women in their underwear, (led, of course by a red-blooded American male),  defeated entire Nazi armies.  Not that I'm suggesting that the idea of armies that had committed war crimes across Europe and the Soviet Union would go weak kneed at the sight of some girls in their underwear is utterly ludicrous, but another popular subject for men's magazine covers, that of Nazi's gleefully freezing, drowning, immersing in gold and otherwise torturing underwear clad women would rather suggest the opposite.  Still it was the tail end of the 'swinging sixties' (this the September 1969) issue, so the writers were probably all off of their faces on hallucinatory substances.

In fact, that 'other' type of story is seemingly referenced in another of the cover's featured stories: 'Caged Beauties in the Dungeon of the Damned' - which would probably have been the cover story if the artist hadn't had a fetish for semi-naked women toting automatic weapons.  Elsewhere, it is the men's magazine mix as usual.  Violence is represented by 'My Bare Hands to Rip Their Guts Out!', while another obsession of these publications - what perversions supposedly go on behind suburban front doors - is represented by 'Revealed: Suburbia's Latest Sex Practices', (probably doing it with the lights on).  That other sex obsession, young people having sex, is encapsulated by 'Teen Campus Crisis - Lessons in Naked Lust'.  Those were the days, eh?  When the idea of college students having sex was deemed a crisis.  Or maybe the crisis lay with the fact that t was apparently part of the curriculum - obviously, by the time I was a student, it had been dropped.  Indeed, when I was an undergraduate there didn't seem to be much lust of the campus, naked or otherwise and if there were lessons on it, they weren't being taught in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.  But hey, we're talking about the sixties here.  Not the real sixties, but rather the sixties as filtered through the lens of the American men's magazines - which were predominantly edited and written by middle class, middle aged guys making public their personal fantasies.