'The Lesbian Epidemic - Our National Shame!'

 

Let's head into the weekend with another blast of men's pulp goodness.  I'm assuming that the cover of the August 1961 issue of Men Today is illustrating the story 'Handmaidens of the Lash of Lust' - after all, there's the obligatory semi-naked and bound woman who is obviously being given a bloody good lashing by the uniformed girl holding, well, a lash.  Judging by the uniforms, (if you can call what the female soldier is wearing a 'uniform', as it appears to consist simply of a jacket worn over her underwear), and the beard worn by the male soldier, we're in post-revolutionary Cuba.  It was, of course, the height of the Cold War and Castro's Cuba was the new communist bogeyman on America's doorstep, so naturally the men's magazines quickly promoted them to front cover villains, along the Nazis, Red Chinese and Soviets.  A few years later, they'd be joined by the Viet-Cong.  But don't worry, they haven't forgotten those more established villains in this issue - we've several other varieties of commies present in this month's edition.  

Most obviously, we've got 'Brides of Pain for the Russian Monster', a title holding out the promise of more sex and sadism being visited on nubile young girls by Godless red bastards.  Judging by the covers of men's pulps from this era, sexual sadism was a popular fantasy amongst American men.  Then there's 'The Wild Escape of the Hungarian Harlots', which I'm tempted to think has something to do with the Gabor sisters, who seemed to be everywhere in US films and TV at the time, (not to mention marrying everyone).  I suspect, however, that it is a tale of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, chronicling the harrowing ordeal of young women trying to escape those Russian commie animals as they put down the uprising.  The fact that they are described as 'Harlots' is doubtless intended to emphasise just how depraved those reds were - they even oppressed sex workers, those brave purveyors of free of enterprise and sexual exploitation.

There's also plenty of the staples of the men's magazines on display: 'Exposed! Classroom Cheats' covers the perennial fascination with those degenerate teenagers, while 'I Pick Up the Dead' conjures up unfortunate images of a story about necrophilia, but is probably a sensational tale of the mortuary drivers who have to collect the corpses of murder victims.  The best of all though is 'The Lesbian Epidemic - Our National Shame', another sensational expose of America's favourite sexual orientation.  In both men's pulps and mass market sleaze paperback novels at this time there was what can only be described as an obsession with lesbianism - always claiming to condemn it as an 'unnatural practice', while simultaneously titillating potential readers with the promise of some 'disgusting' girl-on-girl action.  This particular story headline is one of the more outrageous takes on the subject, effectively equating lesbianism with a sexually transmitted disease that threatens to 'infest' all those wholesome heterosexual American women.  Because we all know, if you get one lesbian moving into the street, before you know it, your wife, your daughter, your mistress, probably that attractive schoolteacher who lives two doors down and even the lady from the local store, will be going at it hammer and tongs - and if you are lucky, they'll let you watch...