Speaker 1: Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that's
Speaker 1: normally about the worst people in all of history and
Speaker 1: is normally named Behind the Bastards. Uh. But you know
Speaker 1: we've got something special for you this week and moving forward.
Speaker 1: But first I'm going to bring on our guests for today,
Speaker 1: Margaret kill Joy. That's me, Hi, Hi Margaret. How are
Speaker 1: you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm doing great. I'm really excited that you've rebranded the
Speaker 2: show to be Parenting Tips for the Unmarried.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is that is exactly it tip number one.
Speaker 3: Wait did you actually sen just disassociating? No.
Speaker 1: Actually, so here's the thing. Here's the thing, here's the
Speaker 1: thing that I'm behind Bastards in an introduce, are our
Speaker 1: audience too, because we're we're changing the name of the podcast. Everybody,
Speaker 1: This is a big deal.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: You may have heard the Indian Parliament is voting right
Speaker 1: now on whether or not to change the name of
Speaker 1: their country to Bahrat. And I just want to prep
Speaker 1: everybody because the instant they drop that name, your boys
Speaker 1: picking it up. This podcast is going to officially be India. Now.
Speaker 1: I know a lot of people are saying Pakistan has
Speaker 1: been in line for a while for that one. But
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Pakistan is not going to be able to
Speaker 1: change on a dime as quickly as Sophie can change
Speaker 1: the name of our Twitter account. And I think that's
Speaker 1: internationally how names get recognized.
Speaker 2: Okay, I have bad news for you about the nuclear
Speaker 2: capacity of Pakistan.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's true.
Speaker 3: But also I was disassociated again. But is he talking
Speaker 3: about the India thing again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're going to do it.
Speaker 3: We're going to do it.
Speaker 1: Incredible.
Speaker 3: I only have to listen to like every two words
Speaker 3: in your sentences and I'm still up to date.
Speaker 1: I think I think this is going to be how
Speaker 1: we make a lot more money because here's the thing
Speaker 1: behind the bastard's pretty good podcast title. Good name recognition
Speaker 1: after this time India, that's that's brand recognition right there.
Speaker 1: That's true. You know everybody, everybody knows India. Right You're
Speaker 1: gonna get people listening just because you know they're interested
Speaker 1: in in in the country or whatever. You know, that's
Speaker 1: that's that's you know, cash in the bank baby. So sorry, Pakistan,
Speaker 1: but the new India is here and it's uh, well,
Speaker 1: this week it's it's several hours of discussing Men's adventure
Speaker 1: magazines from the nineteen forties.
Speaker 3: Oh I remember why? Okay, So there are there are
Speaker 3: things you'll be showing now, Margaret.
Speaker 1: We have not we have not done with you a
Speaker 1: book episode yet. Yeah, you know, how are you feeling it?
Speaker 1: Do you think you're ready? The vibe are different, this
Speaker 1: kind of responsibility.
Speaker 2: I I'm so ready. I was born ready to look
Speaker 2: through trashy old magazines. They're trashy, right they are.
Speaker 1: So they're fascinating, Margaret. Here, here's like, is this.
Speaker 2: Boy's life or like highlights for kids? Or is this
Speaker 2: like whatever came before Playboy?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's closer to Playboy. It's it's closer to Playboy.
Speaker 1: So here's the thing, Margaret. You know, I anybody who
Speaker 1: knows you knows that you're a big You're a big fan.
Speaker 1: You love Christmas, huge Christmas, Eth And anyone who knows
Speaker 1: you knows you also knows you're a member of an obscure,
Speaker 1: pre nicy and orthodox cult that believes the actual date
Speaker 1: of Christ's birth is just bleep it out whatever you say. Yeah. So, anyway,
Speaker 1: this is a Christmas gift for you to celebrate the
Speaker 1: book you published this year, Escape from in Cell Island. Oh, Okay, good, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because your book, you know, is a is a fun
Speaker 1: fictional romp that also deals with, you know, some of
Speaker 1: the questions about like the toxicity of aspects of how
Speaker 1: men are cultured in our society, right, which is you know,
Speaker 1: one of the more interesting things about that book. So, Margaret,
Speaker 1: here's the thing. I wanted to both provide a little
Speaker 1: bit of a free Christmas time, you know, advertisement for
Speaker 1: that book, and it felt like the best way to
Speaker 1: do that was to delve into the history of like
Speaker 1: masculinity and particularly like the weird media that formed a
Speaker 1: certain chunk of men's concepts of masculinity for an entire generation,
Speaker 1: specifically like two generations before we came onto the scene.
Speaker 1: And that's why we're going to talk about men's adventure magazines. Now,
Speaker 1: most of you have seen or heard of these to
Speaker 1: some extent. They come up on social media every now
Speaker 1: and then different you know, when I worked at Cracked,
Speaker 1: we had some articles written by Sean Baby making fun
Speaker 1: of them. They're these ridiculous magazines that would often have
Speaker 1: like these garish illustrations of like a muscly man fighting
Speaker 1: hundreds of crabs, or like, yeah, Nazis and pirates grabbing
Speaker 1: like women and ripping their bodices and stuff, and like
Speaker 1: it'll have these insane titles for like different articles about
Speaker 1: like lust, slaves of the Nazi Caribbean or some shit
Speaker 1: like that, like wild stuff. But all of these kind
Speaker 1: of you know, there's a bunch of different publications that
Speaker 1: all sort of fall in under the broad category of
Speaker 1: men's adventure, and men's Adventure is sort of a genre
Speaker 1: name for a type of publication that started in the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties after World War Two, and had its heyday
Speaker 1: in the late fifties and sixties. Most of these magazines
Speaker 1: had died off by the seventies, but while they were alive,
Speaker 1: they featured a mix of risque photos, some of which
Speaker 1: were just straight up softcore pornography, some of which were,
Speaker 1: you know, a bit shy of that, and illustrations, alongside
Speaker 1: thrilling articles and short stories about extreme sports, daredevil activities,
Speaker 1: various fictional pulp tales of two fisted detectives and cowboys
Speaker 1: and adventure and shit, a lot of which was like
Speaker 1: framed as these are true stories, you know, but it's
Speaker 1: basically a fiction magazine. It's basically it's a short story
Speaker 1: magazine right, and in fact, a number of authors who
Speaker 1: were really influential by like the seventies and eighties got
Speaker 1: their start writing for these. I believe he's Mario Puto
Speaker 1: or something, the guy who wrote The Godfather the book
Speaker 1: got his start writing story. He wrote, by his count
Speaker 1: probably published millions of words in these magazines under a
Speaker 1: bunch of pseudonyms over the Oh, yeah that is possible.
Speaker 1: We'll read something he wrote today.
Speaker 2: I have so much respect for the art of like
Speaker 2: churning out pulp adventure. Yeah, it is an on the page.
Speaker 2: It is a fucking blue collar job that needs doing.
Speaker 1: And I have that the retrospect, Yeah yeah, and this
Speaker 1: is like some of these are pretty fun and in fact,
Speaker 1: at least one of them I learned something from. And
Speaker 1: some of them are incredibly gross and like reveal some
Speaker 1: of some of the worst things about a specific chunk
Speaker 1: of men in this period of time.
Speaker 2: I also love that they had to like specifically say
Speaker 2: this is men's adventure, as if like because everyone knows
Speaker 2: that like Musley guys fighting crabs is just adventure. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but you have to make it men's adventure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it has to be horny and deeply dismissive of women.
Speaker 1: And then then it's men's adventure, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, girls in here absolutely not getting a bond us
Speaker 2: ripped off by Nazi crabs.
Speaker 1: The first that you have gotten remarkably close to guessing
Speaker 1: how one of the stories that we'll be talking about ends.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 1: True Adventure was the first magazine in the men's adventure genre.
Speaker 1: It was a spin off of True Detective magazine, which
Speaker 1: had started back in the twenties. Early examples of other
Speaker 1: magazines kind of in the same field had respectable names
Speaker 1: like Blue Book, or Adventure or our Ghosi, but by
Speaker 1: the time the sixties rolled around, things had gotten decidedly
Speaker 1: hornier and cruder, with names like Climax, World of Men
Speaker 1: and Man's Story, and the kind of articles that they've
Speaker 1: published in these gotten decidedly lower as well. Is a
Speaker 1: great face right now, Yeah, Man's Story, Climax.
Speaker 2: World of Men, I've changed my opinion about the Dusk Star.
Speaker 2: We can bring the Death Star back.
Speaker 1: All of these have the straightest names for publications. They
Speaker 1: could possibly have nothing but straight With World of Men.
Speaker 3: I would not like to attend that event.
Speaker 1: The kind of articles that these public that these magazines
Speaker 1: published went decidedly lower over time as well. One issue
Speaker 1: of Man Story from nineteen sixty two features the incredible
Speaker 1: article title soft Flesh for the Nazi Monster's Pit in
Speaker 1: Hell and I cracked the reds Lust Capital It Also
Speaker 1: it also featured an early list of Oregon. Yeah the
Speaker 1: reds Lust Capital. Yes, it also featured an early listical.
Speaker 1: I was shocked to see this. I did not realize
Speaker 1: how far back my former career had its roots called
Speaker 1: ten faults that make You Repulsive to Women, which I
Speaker 1: think I've run across that exact title in modern articles before.
Speaker 2: So wait, So, actually, you and I would be the
Speaker 2: perfect people to start this magazine and.
Speaker 1: Get more enough.
Speaker 2: We could do this because both of our careers are this.
Speaker 2: I write pulp fiction and you write listicals. We could
Speaker 2: we could make this happen, Margaret right. All we need
Speaker 2: is somebody who can draw really slutty men fighting off crabs.
Speaker 2: I'm Cheryl will find it.
Speaker 1: So before we get into some of these stories for ourselves,
Speaker 1: I found a pretty interesting Huffington Post article with the
Speaker 1: title It's a Man's World that cites the Son of Illicit.
Speaker 1: It covers the history of these magazines and at one
Speaker 1: point It cites the son of illustrator Norman Saunders, who
Speaker 1: did a lot of the iconic cover drawings for these magazines.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 1: Dad told me that he felt adventure magazines were towards
Speaker 1: men who had served in the war but had seen
Speaker 1: no action, which describes eighty five percent of our sixteen
Speaker 1: million servicemen. He felt that men who saw action never
Speaker 1: wanted to think about it again, while most servicemen who
Speaker 1: had never reached a front line were doomed to a
Speaker 1: life of wondering about their manhood and the face of battle.
Speaker 1: I find that really insightful and compelling. Yeah. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you will find there's some like really direct quotes from
Speaker 1: some of these articles that makes it clear, like, oh,
Speaker 1: that is exactly who you're serving, Like, yeah, these guys
Speaker 1: who they you know, they had always wondered what would
Speaker 1: my life have been like if I'd had that sort
Speaker 1: of like searing baptism of fire, you know what. I'm
Speaker 1: maybe all of the things. And I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot of men who like think that that, like, oh,
Speaker 1: if I just had some like searing combat experience, you know,
Speaker 1: I would I wouldn't have these hang ups, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be scared in this way, i'd have the courage to
Speaker 1: do this or do that. You know, a lot of
Speaker 1: our media reinforces this attitude, which you know, let me
Speaker 1: tell you, folks, I don't think that's the most common
Speaker 1: reaction to experience in combat. I think the most common
Speaker 1: reaction to experience in combat is being very very scared.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and not liking it, wanting to avoid getting
Speaker 1: shot at again, wanting to avoid you know, getting shot again.
Speaker 2: Spending most of the rest of your life finding ways
Speaker 2: to deal with it. If it's World War two we're.
Speaker 1: Talking about, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: You actually did exactly the best thing possible. You proved
Speaker 2: you were brave enough to found well unless you got drafted.
Speaker 2: But like you helped stop the Nazis and you didn't
Speaker 2: get PTSD. Your biggest problem is that you feel like
Speaker 2: a little emasculated. Yeah you didn't, because you did support
Speaker 2: work that is necessary and just as important, and you
Speaker 2: help stop the Nazis. Get the fuck out.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, you know, you don't actually need all that
Speaker 1: many guys shooting them. What you do need is a
Speaker 1: lot of guys ensuring that we I don't know, make
Speaker 1: like a dozen battleships in a week and like no
Speaker 1: other nation in history had ever managed because of a
Speaker 1: lot of unpleasant things. Actually, but anyway, that's beyond the
Speaker 1: point here. So yeah, back to Yeah, I find that
Speaker 1: guy's description of like who these magazines were for compelling
Speaker 1: because it gets it an issue in a feeling that
Speaker 1: is still very much present today among a huge chunk
Speaker 1: of men in our country. This is why so much
Speaker 1: of the A fifteen market. Literally this the next sentence,
Speaker 1: Margaret is, this is why so much of the equipment
Speaker 1: market into the gun industry is sold the way it is, right,
Speaker 1: That's why you get guys doing this fucking like Kyle
Speaker 1: Rittenhouse shit where they show up with guns at protests
Speaker 1: because they want a chance to do something, to like
Speaker 1: shoot somebody, to be to do something that feels like
Speaker 1: this thing that they have in their heads, like the
Speaker 1: arkond of masculinity. But also they're scared of real combat, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they much prefer this this sort of thing, like
Speaker 1: there's this necessary In Ukraine, Yeah, a lot of the
Speaker 1: you get a lot of the first wave of American
Speaker 1: volunteers who went into Ukraine were like back rankers, and
Speaker 1: a decent chunk of them were like, oh my God,
Speaker 1: I did not was not ready for this sort of thing. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously there were a lot lot of guys who went
Speaker 1: in there and you know, did and are continuing to
Speaker 1: be in heavy combat. But like there's a there's a
Speaker 1: there's a desire among a lot of people for like
Speaker 1: I want, I want the thing that military action confers
Speaker 1: to me, but I don't want to like sign away
Speaker 1: years of my life to the military or anything like that.
Speaker 1: And I hope I found, you know, a way around that,
Speaker 1: right Like that that's I think, you know what a
Speaker 1: lot of this, I think that impulse is at the
Speaker 1: core of these magazines and at the core of a
Speaker 1: lot of things that are really ugly about our present society.
Speaker 1: So much of the toxicity I think in the United
Speaker 1: States right now is centered around men who never saw
Speaker 1: combat or served, but also don't have a concept of
Speaker 1: masculinity that extends beyond the ability to do violence and
Speaker 1: the capacity to convince other people that you can do violence.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: I think that's that's what these magazines are getting towards.
Speaker 1: And I think that's also like what's killing us one
Speaker 1: of the things that's killing us as a culture. So
Speaker 1: this is a problem larger than a book episode Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards. But as we've seen, some of these elements
Speaker 1: in our culture get darker and more extreme. To take
Speaker 1: from you know, gun culture again, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: media that shifted from like protecting your home and protecting
Speaker 1: yourself to like preparing to wage a war against woke groomers.
Speaker 1: This tonal drift was also present, and I find this fascinating,
Speaker 1: was also present in the men's adventure magazines of a
Speaker 1: bygone era. You can see a similar drift habin over
Speaker 1: the course of time that these magazines are being published.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote from that Huffington Post article again.
Speaker 1: At a certain point in the nineteen sixties, men adventure
Speaker 1: polps took a darker turn. They went from innocent stories
Speaker 1: of men fighting nature's beasts in the woods to more
Speaker 1: twisted fare like warring gangs of Nazi biker rapists. As
Speaker 1: author Humphrey Knips said to me once in reference to
Speaker 1: the evolution of porn magazines, you can't have brinksmanship without
Speaker 1: a brink Men's pulps went the same way as the
Speaker 1: porn magazine. They died because they had nowhere else to go,
Speaker 1: which you might think about in like the text of
Speaker 1: our culture too. But yeah, without further ado, Margaret, all right,
Speaker 1: let's let's slide off of that uncomfortable line of thinking,
Speaker 1: right and head into death crabs of our first episode.
Speaker 1: I don't think there's a Nazi in this first one,
Speaker 1: but don't worry, we'll get there. Okay. So here's our
Speaker 1: first issue, climax, exciting stories for men. Now we've got
Speaker 1: some We've got some good titles in here. You've got
Speaker 1: a drawing of a pirate looks like he's about to
Speaker 1: cut a man's face off. There, buccaneer Burko and the
Speaker 1: slave Girls. And then you've got an article on a
Speaker 1: French tourist trap that I'm gonna tell you right now,
Speaker 1: just some soft core pornography.
Speaker 3: My favorite part Peter Townsend, England's warrior playboy Joe's right.
Speaker 1: Who is Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll be talking about him.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, you're happy, you're ready for this. So this
Speaker 1: is from April of nineteen sixty and it starts with
Speaker 1: an ad about and the ads in this, by the way,
Speaker 1: give us a lot of information about the people that
Speaker 1: these were geared towards. Uh huh. The ads in the
Speaker 1: first ad in this magazine is a full pager on
Speaker 1: how you too can make big money in this booming industry,
Speaker 1: And when you read it a little closer, it's an
Speaker 1: ad about how to start a business going door to
Speaker 1: door cleaning furniture and rugs and offering flameproofing up cells
Speaker 1: that are just spraying carcinogen cocktails on people's chellranger. Like
Speaker 1: that's what it is, is like give everybody fucking cancer.
Speaker 1: This ad is mostly noteworthy because it features there's like
Speaker 1: this chunk of it where's like these men are building
Speaker 1: lifetime businesses and it's like a bunch of dudes heads
Speaker 1: with like descriptions of their success. And it's one of
Speaker 1: the most beautiful fifties guy montages I've ever seen in
Speaker 1: my life. Look at look at all these fifties guys.
Speaker 1: Like one of them's got the slicked backed, combed, fucking
Speaker 1: dapper dan ass hair. One guy's got a baffling looks
Speaker 1: like his entire fit all of his teeth have been
Speaker 1: punched out of him, and he's got like a massive
Speaker 1: bald spot.
Speaker 2: Another coups like yeah, yeah, two of them look dead.
Speaker 3: Several of them have the same problem as rondasantis where
Speaker 3: nobody taught them out of smile, so they're just doing
Speaker 3: like this weird grunt face.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. Yeah, the New York guy has an amazing
Speaker 1: look on his face. Don't understand it. The old bald
Speaker 1: Virginia man looks just the angriest any one has ever been.
Speaker 1: It's beautiful.
Speaker 2: One of them is seizure and just staring into the
Speaker 2: middle distance.
Speaker 1: So the next page has an ad for a correspondence
Speaker 1: school geared towards new dads. Now, the main thing I
Speaker 1: found interesting here is that it's cites. That's statistic that
Speaker 1: new fathers need to up their earning by five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars a year to account for a baby. That's around
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars today, while the estimated cost of raising
Speaker 1: a child per year today rages from thirteen thousand to
Speaker 1: twenty thousand a year. I just thought that was an
Speaker 1: interesting little bit of context for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Marco loves context.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true. Not yeah, Queen's context. Anyway. That's that's
Speaker 1: a bummer. That's not great inflation. No. The next page
Speaker 1: is the table of contents, which is followed by an
Speaker 1: ad for a completely different correspondence school that's like half
Speaker 1: of the ads of this paper are like different correspondence
Speaker 1: schools for guys who just kind of never figured their
Speaker 1: shit out.
Speaker 2: Is this is for unemployed people?
Speaker 1: Yeah, unemployed? I think it's for like either that are
Speaker 1: underemployed middle aged men. Yeah, yeah, you.
Speaker 2: Want to be an entrepreneur because they want easy money.
Speaker 2: I mean they're also probably fucked by the economy, like.
Speaker 1: They're probably fucked by then, or they're or they're doing
Speaker 1: some sort of a job that's just not going to
Speaker 1: make them rich, and they, yeah, you know, are are
Speaker 1: willing to fall for this shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, once we get past some of these ads, we
Speaker 1: get to the table of contents and we see that
Speaker 1: this magazine is filled with stories that have titles like
Speaker 1: Punk with a Switchblade, The Hunter Who Died Twice, and
Speaker 1: All the Girls Loved Danny. Then there's an ad for
Speaker 1: men past forty who have trouble getting up nights and
Speaker 1: have lost physical vigor. The ad informs that these yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the ad in call informs us the cause maybe glandular
Speaker 1: information inflammation, and from what I can sell, they're selling enemas.
Speaker 1: And right after the Anima ad, Margaret is an ad
Speaker 1: for the Rosicrucions.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, I talked about them on the last fucking
Speaker 2: episode of Kobe Will and cool stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's beautiful thing. There's like this upside down pyramid
Speaker 1: with a fucking uh picture of like ancient Egypt, and
Speaker 1: it knowledge that is endured since the Pyramids.
Speaker 2: That's how I have a secret society. As you see
Speaker 2: ads in the fucking Men's Adventure.
Speaker 1: I see according to this ad, you can you could
Speaker 1: join the Rosicrucis by sending off a letter to Amenotep
Speaker 1: the fourth. So yeah, that's pretty good. I've always wanted
Speaker 1: to email or to fucking snail mail a pharaoh. So
Speaker 1: the actual stories themselves, most of them are less interesting,
Speaker 1: maybe than the titles might make you think. It's mostly
Speaker 1: middle aged dad fodder. You know, there's a story about
Speaker 1: an old West hired gun in Montana. I think he's
Speaker 1: solving a mystery. There's multiple stories of like World War
Speaker 1: two soldiers and flying aces. The most interesting one here
Speaker 1: is about Pete Townsend, England's warrior playboy is a legend musician.
Speaker 1: Not that Pete Townsend, Margaret, not that Pete Townsend, Okay,
Speaker 1: he was in fact.
Speaker 2: It do you want to tell a movie.
Speaker 1: Please please, please, Sophie, no go for it. He was.
Speaker 3: I guess for lack of a better word, and advisors
Speaker 3: somewhat security guard to Queen Elizabeth's father and proceeded.
Speaker 1: To fuck Princess Margaret Princess.
Speaker 3: Martino, and then had a history of and then like
Speaker 3: broke and then she wasn't allowed to marry him. He
Speaker 3: got like forced out of the already divorced, so she
Speaker 3: wasn't allowed to marry him because they had an affair.
Speaker 3: Then they broke.
Speaker 2: He broke her.
Speaker 3: Heart, and then he continued to date other very unquestionable.
Speaker 1: Very questionable guy. The most interesting thing about his story
Speaker 1: in this magazine is that it describes Princess Margaret as
Speaker 1: the miniature Marilyn Monroe and she was not very big,
Speaker 1: like so I don't understand this at all.
Speaker 2: But yeah, very funny this next image.
Speaker 1: After this boring article, we get to the highlight of
Speaker 1: the issue, which is where we're going to spend most
Speaker 1: of our time right now, which is the article punk
Speaker 1: with a switchblade. Yeah, yeah, he's got his butterfly knife out. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the fucking the The the introductory art is like
Speaker 1: a fifties car, you know, giant fucking steel vehicle with
Speaker 1: like a scared man and a woman, a horrified young
Speaker 1: woman with her hands on her fucking cheeks, and a
Speaker 1: greaser with like a big fucking elvis pompadour and a
Speaker 1: leather jacket holding his knife to like a cherubic child's neck.
Speaker 1: The kid looks like he looks like one of those
Speaker 1: like fucking ceramic children, and like a Christmas village that
Speaker 1: you buy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and his knife is the size of a bread knife.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is, and it looks like a bread knife
Speaker 1: even know it is described in the story as some
Speaker 1: kind of switchblade. I mean the title of the article
Speaker 1: is punk in the Switchblade.
Speaker 2: Which means that the handle is like nine inches long.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of that's wrong artistically with
Speaker 1: their depiction of his switchblade.
Speaker 3: Do we get to read the story? Get?
Speaker 1: Oh, we're gonna read this story. We're going into this
Speaker 1: motherfucker right, I'm gonna I'm gonna start. The crisp October
Speaker 1: night air whipped at his tired, aching body, making him
Speaker 1: shiver inside his black leather jacket with a painted skull
Speaker 1: and crossbones across the back. His young, angry eyes stared
Speaker 1: hungrily across the narrow tar road into the window of
Speaker 1: Pop's roadside diner. Behind the counter, a balding old man
Speaker 1: in an open neck white shirt stood sipping coffee from
Speaker 1: a thick mug. Here in the cold and darkness, the
Speaker 1: kid had been watching and wanting. When he closed his eyes,
Speaker 1: he could almost taste the rich, hot coffee. He could
Speaker 1: even see rows and rows of juicy fat apple pies
Speaker 1: and dark brown chocolate frosted cakes, all the good sweet
Speaker 1: things of life waiting to be eaten. The angry eyes
Speaker 1: open and stared at the window again. If he went
Speaker 1: inside and asked for something to eat, the old man
Speaker 1: would laugh at him, push him, and tell him to
Speaker 1: get out. In the big pocket of his torn dungarees,
Speaker 1: he felt the cold hardness of the bone handled knife.
Speaker 1: He pressed his thumb against the switchblade button, knowing the
Speaker 1: safety catch was on. I hate you, daddy, oh, he
Speaker 1: murmured softly. I don't have to beg nobody. I could
Speaker 1: just walk in there and take what I want, daddy O.
Speaker 1: And I ain't gonna walk no more on this dirty
Speaker 1: old road. I'm gonna get me some wheels, old daddy O.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get me some nice shiny wheels.
Speaker 2: This is the who song, see.
Speaker 1: Margaret, authors used to know it a write dialogue, you know,
Speaker 1: before this, before we are ruined? Yeah, daddy, Oh you
Speaker 1: gotta put that in there, like three times.
Speaker 2: They know he's a greaser, and like, bring back those adverbs,
Speaker 2: you know, I mean, like people adverbs and they're writing
Speaker 2: is terrible. We need more adverbs.
Speaker 1: No more adverbs, especially when you're getting paid probably like
Speaker 1: a heartbreaking amount of money per letter here or yeah,
Speaker 1: like no way more than any writer gets today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like they probably got paid more per word than
Speaker 2: the current going rate, not adjusted for inflation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, almost certainly. Well, we're going to get back to
Speaker 1: Greaser with a switchblade. Yeah, after after this ad from
Speaker 1: the Rosicrucians. Ah, we're back, and uh, I hope you
Speaker 1: all found a new correspondence school to finally make you
Speaker 1: feel like a man or whatever. Anyway, let's get back
Speaker 1: to Greaser with a switch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hungry, but the problem is that he doesn't
Speaker 2: have food and he is the bad guy.
Speaker 1: Oh oh, that's not the problem, Margaret, that's just where
Speaker 1: that's just where we're starting. Don't worry. This is a
Speaker 1: believable villain. Okay, okay, yeah absolutely. In the near distance,
Speaker 1: headlights glowed along the hillcrest, flashed over the top, then
Speaker 1: dipped down. The leather jacket melted further back into the shadows.
Speaker 1: The kid watched the giant bug eyes sweep down the
Speaker 1: hill and then turn into the diner. The car crunched
Speaker 1: to a stop in the gravel. A moment later, the
Speaker 1: car door slammed and a man stood silhouetted in the
Speaker 1: light of the diner window. The jacket didn't move until
Speaker 1: the man was inside, sitting at the counter, smoking a
Speaker 1: cigarette and looking at the menu. Then the black leather
Speaker 1: jacket walked slowly across the road, scuffing the paper, thin
Speaker 1: soles and worn heels over the tar. A high nasal voice,
Speaker 1: screeching a rock and roll song wailed through the diner
Speaker 1: as he swung the door open. How does Sonny, the
Speaker 1: old man called from behind the counter. Pop grinned, showing
Speaker 1: twoless gums. Wary flashing eyes, skimmed over the old man
Speaker 1: and searched the room, sweeping past several wooden tables draped
Speaker 1: with red and white oilcloth, some straight back wooden chairs,
Speaker 1: a pinball machine, and the colored lights of the jukebox.
Speaker 1: There was a door in the back wall. The youth
Speaker 1: size fastened on the little man, who had turned from
Speaker 1: the counter to look at him. The little man wore
Speaker 1: money clothes, a buttersoft dark sport coat, knit sports shirt,
Speaker 1: cream colored slacks, and shiny black tuled loafers. Come on, kid,
Speaker 1: sit down, the little man said, smiling. Pop toss a
Speaker 1: couple burgers for the kid. Two more pop specials coming up,
Speaker 1: the old I realize I'm now using the same voice
Speaker 1: for popping the old man. It's the gist of it is,
Speaker 1: they're actually very nice and willing to give him free hamburgers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but this the switchblade punk just is gets angrier and angrier,
Speaker 1: and in fact, he's just like continually filled with more
Speaker 1: rage as these men try to do nice things for him.
Speaker 1: And eventually, you know, the man who buys him the
Speaker 1: hamburgers explains that he's a traveling salesman and he's had
Speaker 1: a tough life too. Write you know, he had a
Speaker 1: period of time when he was younger where where he
Speaker 1: was living a little bit rougher, and so he empathized
Speaker 1: correspondent a school to have corresponded school. It became a
Speaker 1: rich lawyer. Yeah, yeah, So the two of them like
Speaker 1: talk for a little while. And this guy Morell is
Speaker 1: like a long time ago. I was a wild, hungry
Speaker 1: punk like you. Maybe if someone would have staked me
Speaker 1: to a meal in a few bucks, it would have
Speaker 1: changed a lot of things for me. Morel's voice became softer.
Speaker 1: I had a lot of dreams once, a lot of
Speaker 1: big dreams. Unexpectedly, he spun the spoon on the countertop.
Speaker 1: It fell to the floor with a shop clatter. But
Speaker 1: that's another story, Joe Morell. That's me, friend of stray
Speaker 1: dogs and cats and hungry kids. Morel took out his wallet,
Speaker 1: and the kid's eyes grew wide. He'd never seen so
Speaker 1: much money. Morell picked out two five dollars bills and
Speaker 1: cost him on the counter in front of Smitty. I
Speaker 1: ain't begging, mister, Smitty said, between clinched teeth. No one
Speaker 1: said you were. Morrell replied stiffly, I'm trying to do
Speaker 1: something decent. Take it. Smitty ground the cigarette into the
Speaker 1: center of the top five dollars bill. I didn't ask
Speaker 1: for no favors. Morell jumped to his feet and grabbed
Speaker 1: Smitty's arm. Why you crazy kid. I had to put
Speaker 1: you across my knee and warm you're fanning. Fanny meant
Speaker 1: a different thing back then. So at this point it
Speaker 1: becomes clear this kid is deranged, you know, just angrier
Speaker 1: and angrier that these people have tried to feed him,
Speaker 1: and like any person in this any kind of drifter
Speaker 1: in this situation, when you offer him food, he pulls
Speaker 1: out a switchblade and murders the old man and takes
Speaker 1: you hostage. Oh my god. Yeah that went further what
Speaker 1: he's gonna do right, Yeah, and that's how he kidnaps
Speaker 1: the little kid. They have to like guide the child
Speaker 1: out over like the bleeding corpse of the old man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he goes. It goes very fast from like nice man
Speaker 1: offering a drifter a sandwich to the drifter murdering everybody
Speaker 1: and kidnapping them. I like that.
Speaker 2: The old Christian stories are like, yeah he was secretly Jesus,
Speaker 2: the beggar you gave money to, was like, I am
Speaker 2: your Lord and savior. What you do for the least
Speaker 2: of a you do for me. And the nineteen forties
Speaker 2: version is or sixties whatever is, they're going to murder you.
Speaker 1: God, yeah, yeah, it's uh it's very good money. So people,
Speaker 1: here's the thing. Margaret magazines back in this day, uh,
Speaker 1: were one of the worst forms of consuming media that
Speaker 1: anyone ever invented. So after several pages of the story,
Speaker 1: we're told to turn to page eighty nine. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe we'll get back to it later. But I
Speaker 1: want to talk a little bit about why this story
Speaker 1: exists because I looked into this some because I was like,
Speaker 1: you know, I think for most people of like my age,
Speaker 1: I'm sure of your age too, the like the primary
Speaker 1: like touch point of a greaser is like the fawns, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's like, that's the archetypal greaser. Maybe you think back
Speaker 1: to oh, what's that that musical? That's the just in
Speaker 1: the Travolta travolt No, the one that Travolta was in
Speaker 1: the gangs fight. You're the one that I want Greece
Speaker 1: Greece grease, right, you know? Yeah, those those are kind
Speaker 1: and yeah, I think some you know, some some West
Speaker 1: Side stories a little bit of that. Sure, I sure
Speaker 1: don't so.
Speaker 3: Okay it was bad.
Speaker 1: They are you know, the greaser is a an innocuous,
Speaker 1: charming figure generally totally like that is not what Greasers
Speaker 1: were back in the Greaser era. Right, they were the
Speaker 1: source of a bona fide moral panic.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Greasers were punks, right, They were like traveling anarchist punk kids, right,
Speaker 1: Like that was that was the attitude that mainstream society
Speaker 1: had towards the Greasers. They were poor, low class guys.
Speaker 1: We don't exactly know where the word comes from, but
Speaker 1: it probably started out as a phrase to describe motorcycle mechanics.
Speaker 1: And yeah, grease, that's that's another theory for it, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't think there's a perfectly known, like
Speaker 1: exact etymology of the term, at least from from the
Speaker 1: bit that I've read. But greaser's again in the kind
Speaker 1: of most common pictures of them are like, yeah, the
Speaker 1: fawns and stuff. But a lot of Greasers, like the
Speaker 1: first wave of these guys, were not white people, right.
Speaker 1: They were black and Hispanic kids from economically depressed areas
Speaker 1: that did not benefit from the postwar boom that characterized
Speaker 1: so much of the American experience in this era, Greasers
Speaker 1: were also tied into the very new phenomenon of motorcycle gangs,
Speaker 1: which also scared the hell out of a lot of people, right, Now,
Speaker 1: the actual term greaser did not come into common usage
Speaker 1: until the act the subculture had pretty much died out.
Speaker 1: We're talking like the end of the sixties, right. The
Speaker 1: book that kind of popularized the term greaser was Essie
Speaker 1: Hinton's The Outsiders, and you know, that book was really popular,
Speaker 1: and then it kind of that and some other books
Speaker 1: that sort of and then like TV shows and movies
Speaker 1: that had kind of dealt with greasers kind of lodged
Speaker 1: themselves in the imagination of a generation of filmmakers who
Speaker 1: were little kids in the forties. Right in fifties, guys
Speaker 1: like George Lucas, right, you know, and then you know,
Speaker 1: guys like George Lucas made films that featured greasers and
Speaker 1: kind of cemented the cultural image of them as something
Speaker 1: that was was not evil, right, But if you're going
Speaker 1: back to like the forties and fifties, they were often
Speaker 1: seen as like these are dangerous, like often kind of
Speaker 1: like foreign influences in our communities. They're violent, they've got
Speaker 1: these switchblades, which there was also kind of a moral
Speaker 1: panic about the danger of switchblades.
Speaker 2: Well, that's why we still can't wint by them. And
Speaker 2: half the stake it's just like nonsense. There's nothing that
Speaker 2: makes that a more dangerous weapon than Yeah, it was
Speaker 2: like that to carry a gun and I can't carry
Speaker 2: a yeah push button knife.
Speaker 1: Like no, it's just interesting to me that like very much.
Speaker 1: When you read this story, it's like modern conservative fears
Speaker 1: of like homeless people, a fucking Antifa of all this stuff,
Speaker 1: Like it is the same. But it's like it's it's
Speaker 1: to this figure that has been thoroughly recuperated as like respectable,
Speaker 1: like the graseres a good kid. You know, maybe he
Speaker 1: gets into a couple of little fist fights, but they're
Speaker 1: you know, he's not a bad guy. He's a you know,
Speaker 1: he's cool. He's he's like fifties cool. He's like no,
Speaker 1: they were definitely not seen as cool. They were seen
Speaker 1: as like, you know, a dangerous threat to public morals,
Speaker 1: which is cool. Like mainstream attitude was not that, right, Yeah, this, this,
Speaker 1: this story is what the mainstream attitude was, like, these
Speaker 1: are dangerous rift drifters and stuff, right, I do think
Speaker 1: that makes them cooler, But that's that is I didn't
Speaker 1: know that. I wasn't really aware of like the etymology
Speaker 1: or the history of like the Greaser is a cultural figure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's pretty sweet. So I should now let you
Speaker 1: know that. Immediately after this fascinating article follows follows the
Speaker 1: My Favorite Girl photo contest. This is uh, you're supposed
Speaker 1: to take a picture of your girlfriend, right or your
Speaker 1: wife and send it into this magazine to be published.
Speaker 1: They don't note a whole bunch of time, we will
Speaker 1: not publish this without a letter where the girl signs
Speaker 1: off on her photo being used.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this must have been a problem that they had.
Speaker 3: But I think what say, is the first one that's
Speaker 3: a child.
Speaker 1: That uh probably is a child. Yeah. So one of
Speaker 1: the fun things about these magazines is that absolutely everyone
Speaker 1: in them is fine with adults fucking sixteen year olds,
Speaker 1: not a problem that any of the people writing these
Speaker 1: magazines seem to have had. Yeah, we will talk more
Speaker 1: about that later. At least four out of five of
Speaker 1: them are probably adults. Yeah, probably, Yeah, maybe it's not great. Uh,
Speaker 1: we'll just move on here. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, and they're not like for anyone who's.
Speaker 1: They're not porn it's not porn out all these nobody's naked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And in fact, it's kind of like it's pretty quaint,
Speaker 1: like the person that we think as a child is
Speaker 1: like fully clothed and only visible from like the neck up,
Speaker 1: and is standing in front of a bar. One of
Speaker 1: the ladies is like sitting in a pumpkin pat showing
Speaker 1: off her prized pumpkins. Yeah, and not in a like
Speaker 1: way that you might be thinking, just like, not in
Speaker 1: a in all a lascivious way. Yeah, these are There's
Speaker 1: nothing like particularly objectional about the photos themselves. We're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about All the Girls Loved Danny, which, as best
Speaker 1: as I can tell, is a fantasy story meant to
Speaker 1: titillate men with the free wheeling life of a sixty
Speaker 1: style bachelor with a little black book. But since the
Speaker 1: story again, these are kind of soft core porn mags
Speaker 1: of their time. But also the time is the sixties,
Speaker 1: so like you have to be pretty soft with the
Speaker 1: soft core, right like this is this is not stuff
Speaker 1: that even even the the the most like upset about
Speaker 1: sex you know person today would not find most of
Speaker 1: this particularly risque in this magazine. There are some that
Speaker 1: are just like naked people right Yeah, But but Climax,
Speaker 1: oddly enough, is one of the tamer ones that I've
Speaker 1: come across. Yeah, So I find this interesting because it's
Speaker 1: this like literal cultural insight into this like idealized, pseudo
Speaker 1: idealized figure of like the the Hugh Hefner kind of bachelor. Right,
Speaker 1: this is the period of time in which the concept
Speaker 1: of a bachelor of like you know, this kind of
Speaker 1: like man of leisure has started, because largely because of
Speaker 1: Hugh Hefner, has started to become a thing. And this
Speaker 1: dude is very much the dude in the story is
Speaker 1: very much invented in that image. Because this is the time.
Speaker 1: It is the story can't endorse him sleeping around constantly,
Speaker 1: so it while it describes his like outrageously prolific sex life,
Speaker 1: he's like constantly exhausted by the sheer number of dames.
Speaker 1: He's got a ball every week. Right, He's just like
Speaker 1: unhappy about all of the ladies. He's got a fuck
Speaker 1: And that's why the story, by the way, yeah, like
Speaker 1: this is a story about him like falling in love
Speaker 1: and like settling down with one woman. But you do
Speaker 1: get quote, and it's, by by the way, apparently by
Speaker 1: a woman. Now, the fact that it says it's by
Speaker 1: Dorothy Glazer doesn't mean it was written by that person.
Speaker 1: Because they would just kind of stick names on a
Speaker 1: lot of these. But uh, here's here's how this thing opens,
Speaker 1: because it gives some insight into a moment in culture.
Speaker 1: Danny yawned into the mouthpiece, listening to the buzz click
Speaker 1: buzz in his left ear as he glanced idly at
Speaker 1: the pencil list in his hand. He knew the list well,
Speaker 1: he'd been working on it all evening. It was the
Speaker 1: plan for the week. Tuesday, Alice, Wednesday, eleanor Thursday, Turkish baths,
Speaker 1: Friday Flow, Saturday, question mark, Sunday poker.
Speaker 3: Can I just say, I don't care.
Speaker 1: I think it's great. So this man's living the ideal life,
Speaker 1: doesn't remember his Saturdays, and then over to poker on Sunday.
Speaker 3: I once again the question mark. I'm not even curious.
Speaker 3: I don't want to know.
Speaker 2: I know, I know it's somebody's.
Speaker 3: Like mystery thing. I'm like, well, do tell no.
Speaker 1: I'm like, he's trying to figure it out. He's gotta
Speaker 1: he's got to find a lady for Saturday or for fright, yeah, Saturday.
Speaker 1: Otherwise you know he hasn't He's not living his sixties
Speaker 1: life properly.
Speaker 2: See, But if he kept this sabbath. Holy, it wouldn't
Speaker 2: be a problem.
Speaker 1: You're right, then, he would. Then he could finally get
Speaker 1: some respite from these greedy women. Yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: hell of a way to spend a Monday night, he
Speaker 1: thought sleepily. I wish I were at the Turkish baths
Speaker 1: right now. As soon as I get Saturday night filled in,
Speaker 1: I'll hit the sack, just exhausted from writing eleven words
Speaker 1: on a piece of paper completely. It's like, you know
Speaker 1: what a Turkish bath like a a I mean a
Speaker 1: lot of times historically they are, but like a Turkish bath,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like if you've read about like Roman
Speaker 1: baths and stuff. Yeah, a success or to that. It's
Speaker 1: like a big public bait. They'll have hot poles and
Speaker 1: cool poles massages in them.
Speaker 2: But is there subtext in what he's like? Problem, is
Speaker 2: it like the dudes that.
Speaker 1: Day or like no, No, I think it's more like
Speaker 1: this is just like a place that cool sex having
Speaker 1: dudes will go to to like compare them cigars and
Speaker 1: a bath and like, yeah, talk about all the sex
Speaker 1: they're having with sixties girls. I think that's more or
Speaker 1: less what okay here? Yeah? Yeah, So as soon as
Speaker 1: I get Saturday night filled in, I'll hit the sack.
Speaker 1: But not until then, not if I have to call
Speaker 1: every number in the Little Black Book. If I don't
Speaker 1: feel Saturday, I'm really in trouble. He recognized the eager
Speaker 1: voice that answered his call, and he sat up alertly,
Speaker 1: his voice a model of cheerful charm. Hi, Gloria, Baby,
Speaker 1: how's the girl? Why Danny? How lovely to hear from
Speaker 1: you after all this time? He ignored the little dig
Speaker 1: that's the best chet Yeah dancer in the world. Eh,
Speaker 1: feel like doing it again? Say Saturday night? Saturday. She
Speaker 1: managed to express doubt and interest in the one word,
Speaker 1: and he could tell she wanted to be coaxed a bit,
Speaker 1: but Danny just yawned again and waited. After a brief
Speaker 1: silent Gloria went on brightly, Why I guess that would
Speaker 1: be all right. Saturday happens to be the one night
Speaker 1: I'm free this week, aren't you lucky? Danny smiled smugly
Speaker 1: at the receiver. Pick you up at six, baby, we'll
Speaker 1: have dinner and make a real night of it. So
Speaker 1: this is uh, yeah, it's good. We get into you know,
Speaker 1: he says, like, yes, she knew what She knew exactly
Speaker 1: what he meant. All the girls on the list were
Speaker 1: available to make a real night of it. Wonderful darling,
Speaker 1: she said, I've missed you terribly. Same here, he lied,
Speaker 1: I have to rush now, sweets see a Saturday. Danny
Speaker 1: sighed deeply, replacing the phone in its cradle. He was
Speaker 1: safe for a while anyway, and he knew he ought
Speaker 1: to be damn glad of it, but he felt sunk, miserable.
Speaker 1: He wanted a net with an ache that was frightening
Speaker 1: and its force and persistence filling in Gloria's name next
Speaker 1: to Saturday night. He thought about the past three weeks
Speaker 1: the same routine as this, the only thing different being
Speaker 1: the girls, blondes brunette's redheads, tall, short, slim, plump. Yet
Speaker 1: they all reacted the same way, willing easy, just like
Speaker 1: the girls who had satisfied him for ten of his
Speaker 1: twenty six years. Again, a lot of sixteen year olds
Speaker 1: having saxony stories. But now as long as everyone involved
Speaker 1: as sixteen, I let's not assume that.
Speaker 2: But now there were nothing worth the nice.
Speaker 1: But now they were nothing more than safeguards against his
Speaker 1: desire for a net, Although not one of them was
Speaker 1: capable of appeasing his desire. Danny stood up and rubbed
Speaker 1: a hand across his throbbing forehead. As he started to undress,
Speaker 1: he remembered his father's advice. It had guided him in
Speaker 1: perfect happiness and safety all this time, but something was
Speaker 1: wrong now. It just wasn't working as smoothly as it
Speaker 1: used to. Smoking in bed and staring at the ceiling,
Speaker 1: Danny relived what had been one of the most important
Speaker 1: hours of his youth. Of course, his twenty first birthday
Speaker 1: had been notable as a present, his father had given
Speaker 1: him an interest in his enormously successful manufacturing business just
Speaker 1: three years before he had died. But most memorable was
Speaker 1: Danny's sixteenth birthday, when his father had taken him out
Speaker 1: for a walk and manda man talk Danny. Mister Taylor
Speaker 1: had said, you're dating girls now, and you're beginning to
Speaker 1: get ideas like a man. Now. I'm not asking you,
Speaker 1: I know. Danny had shuffled along beside his father, his
Speaker 1: face flaming. Suddenly, he had shoved his hands in his
Speaker 1: pockets and couldn't say a word. And I won't tell
Speaker 1: you not to get involved. His father had gone on,
Speaker 1: I know damn well, you will anyway, so I say,
Speaker 1: go ahead. It's perfectly normal and natural. But let me
Speaker 1: give you some advice. First of all, there's safety in numbers.
Speaker 1: Go with a lot of girls, not just one. And
Speaker 1: most important of all, don't mess around with nice girls.
Speaker 1: There are always plenty who are even more willing than you.
Speaker 1: If a girl says no, drop her, forget her, she
Speaker 1: doesn't even exist. There will always be another one who
Speaker 1: knows the score, even at your age. Daddy, I guess
Speaker 1: I'm glad that he said drop them.
Speaker 2: Right, that's like oddly wholesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, better than better than I had expected. Fifty in numbers, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So he sticks to these words, you know, religiously until
Speaker 1: he meets and now Danny suddenly remembered the words his
Speaker 1: father had added, words that had never been of any
Speaker 1: importance before, because he'd never been bothered by this desire.
Speaker 1: If you persuade a nice girl, if you romancer into
Speaker 1: ignoring what she's been told not to do, she'll never
Speaker 1: let you go. She'll convince herself that it's love, and
Speaker 1: she'll hang on to you till she gets you to
Speaker 1: marry her. Be careful of that trap.
Speaker 2: Dad's advice thanks daddy, O, men hate women the history.
Speaker 3: Let's take let's take a fucking capitalism break.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's take let's wash this taste of that out
Speaker 1: of our mouths with a little bit of capitalism. Baby Jesus,
Speaker 1: we're back. So after this story moves on to I
Speaker 1: don't know, page one hundred and twelve or some bullshit,
Speaker 1: we get a photo spread for I think it's called
Speaker 1: Pigallee or whatever. It's a French tourist trap fucking magazine.
Speaker 1: They're very long ones, they're massive, and this is an
Speaker 1: excuse to show girl dancers, go go dancers who have
Speaker 1: their whole breast spared. Right, It's just like this is
Speaker 1: this is the porn part of it. Uh. Then we
Speaker 1: get to a story called The Hunter Who Died Twice,
Speaker 1: which is a story about cannibalism and I believe a
Speaker 1: zombie white hunter in the bush of Africa. It's not
Speaker 1: very good, but it's followed by another World War two
Speaker 1: story and then Buccaneer Burko and the Slave Girls, which
Speaker 1: is quite fun. I say fun, quite racist. So the
Speaker 1: story opens with the requisite boarding action by a group
Speaker 1: of pirates led by the notorious Burco, an Irish stereotype
Speaker 1: so offensive. It's almost as bad as the racist caricature
Speaker 1: of an Asian man on the cover art, like it
Speaker 1: is he is. There's like so many lines about like yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm yeah, yeah, fascinating. Yeah. So, after they defeat a
Speaker 1: merchant vessel's crew at all, discover a group of slave women. Now,
Speaker 1: this is largely a wish fulfillment story, featuring a fetishized
Speaker 1: irishman as captain who notably refuses to molest any of
Speaker 1: the captured women, although the rest of his crew is
Speaker 1: allowed to yeah, and winds up yeah, falling for this
Speaker 1: redheaded slave woman who looks like the girls back home
Speaker 1: and Tipperary. Yeah, it's a there's some like fun racial
Speaker 1: descriptions of enslave women in this that I will not
Speaker 1: be reading because they're not actually fun. Yeah that makes sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's not as interesting as the title would suggest.
Speaker 1: So instead, Margaret, I'm going to say we should move
Speaker 1: on to a new magazine, Courage from nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: and this one's got a real banger of a cover art.
Speaker 1: Here there's a fucking sled dog ripping out a man's throat,
Speaker 1: and then we've got yeah, inside a Desert Harem, Trail
Speaker 1: of the Death Dog, Confessions of a Jigglow, The Six
Speaker 1: Scanty Costumes of Diane and I Was Trapped in Terror Shrench.
Speaker 1: What an incredible list of stories. What they deserved all
Speaker 1: that that dollar award or whatever they got.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean they are all a bunch of assholes,
Speaker 2: but they they were the titles.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's craft going on in these titles, right, like
Speaker 1: as a as a man who spent most of his
Speaker 1: adult life coming up with titles for for content. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can game has to respect game gear, and Trail
Speaker 1: of the Death Jog is a fine title.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. I want to, like, I want to just like
Speaker 2: invite authors to just like rewrite because there's no copywriting titles.
Speaker 2: Just take all of these titles and write different, better
Speaker 2: stories out of them. The titles are great, Yeah, not
Speaker 2: all of them. Don't rewrite the Captain, don't.
Speaker 1: Maybe you know what I'm going to say, minimum age
Speaker 1: twenty four. Yeah, we don't need to. Yeah, we don't
Speaker 1: need to risk anything here. Yeah, let's uh, let's uh,
Speaker 1: let's let's let's let's take it up a notch people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I picked out this issue because I want that
Speaker 1: Desert harem story. But what drew my interest once it
Speaker 1: was open were the ads, which are again as perfect
Speaker 1: to dive into the male id as you're likely to
Speaker 1: see on page one week it and I want Sophie
Speaker 1: to show this to you important medical facts for every
Speaker 1: man who was past his fortieth birthday. Men too go
Speaker 1: through change of life. Doctors call it male climacteric and
Speaker 1: it's talking about like men, male menopause. It's first off,
Speaker 1: I'll be honest, I was a little impressed that that
Speaker 1: was a concept people were talking about in nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 1: But they were talking about it purely to sell vitamin
Speaker 1: and supplements.
Speaker 2: And it's about to keeping it up, right. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: about keeping your dick up. Yeah, like that, Like I would.
Speaker 2: It would be great if people talked about how assigned
Speaker 2: male people had hormonal changes and cycles. That would be
Speaker 2: fucking wonderful. We could talk about that. Yeah, but no,
Speaker 2: it's about keeping your dick up, which is fine. People
Speaker 2: want their dickup, They can put their dick up.
Speaker 1: That that's fine. I don't think these vitamins are going
Speaker 1: to You're gonna end up.
Speaker 2: Like head in his hand on the in the Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's there's like a balding man who's got like
Speaker 1: his head in his hands, presumably because his dick doesn't
Speaker 1: work due to the male climate. Derek, Yeah, I had
Speaker 1: not ever heard that term before either. It's in quotes,
Speaker 1: so yeah, it's important. Of course, when you get to
Speaker 1: the actual ingredient list of the vitamin pills they're trying
Speaker 1: to sell this guy, it's basically red bull, vitamin A,
Speaker 1: vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin B one, vitamin B twelve,
Speaker 1: vitamin B two, vitamin D, nyasin, vitamin B six, calcium creatine, iodine,
Speaker 1: and some wheat germ. Defat it.
Speaker 2: Of course, I'm impressed that there was actually even the
Speaker 2: laws passed where they had to put the ingredients on
Speaker 2: the advertisement.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, who knows if these were. If it
Speaker 1: was not, it could have just been lead. It could
Speaker 1: just be lead in caffeine. But that's what it says
Speaker 1: is in here. It's basically, yeah, primitive red. It's like
Speaker 1: the red bull you find in like a bog man.
Speaker 1: So the very next ad on page two appears to
Speaker 1: be for yet another correspondence course, and this one promises
Speaker 1: to teach you how to be a private eye a
Speaker 1: FBI investigator's it's It's also a very straight ad with
Speaker 1: like a craggy man's face underneath the text. This man
Speaker 1: is wanted by you. This man is wanted by you.
Speaker 1: He has left a path of violence, lust, greed. He
Speaker 1: is a two time loser. Every minute he is at large,
Speaker 1: death walks the streets. You are a trained investigator. Bits
Speaker 1: of evidence, each insignificant alone, fit together like a crazy
Speaker 1: jigsaw puzzle. They paint the way that leads to the
Speaker 1: man who is wanted by you. I mean, like we
Speaker 1: sell ads like this, I hope. So Margaret for the.
Speaker 2: Like you know, don't you want to pretend like you're
Speaker 2: a private eye, will send you a thing every month
Speaker 2: and you try and figure.
Speaker 1: It out to the yes yes, yes, oh yeah like notes.
Speaker 2: I'm not anti.
Speaker 1: No, I think it's beautiful. I think I think if
Speaker 1: this is a glorious commuting with our ancestors who were
Speaker 1: also hacks and frauds who had to sell out space exactly.
Speaker 1: Finally we get to the table of contents, which includes
Speaker 1: incredible titles like we Hacked through Their Flesh by Sargeant
Speaker 1: Harold Spain Cool absolutely a real name. One thing I
Speaker 1: know there was a true Sargeant Harold Spain. That's a
Speaker 1: real guy. That's absolutely a real ass dude.
Speaker 3: Ye.
Speaker 1: Then, of course Trail of the Death Dog when the
Speaker 1: grave was open, and that terror trench article next to
Speaker 1: it all is an ad for a money making shoe
Speaker 1: store business where you sell shoes door to door to
Speaker 1: your friends and family.
Speaker 2: Wait, is that what this photo is?
Speaker 1: No, this photo is from the next page, which is
Speaker 1: a It's a two page spread. On one side it's
Speaker 1: the says courage men and then has a pin up
Speaker 1: of a well endowed woman. I don't understand why it
Speaker 1: says courage men. I guess because she's so hot. You
Speaker 1: have to steal yourself to not be a criminal. I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know. I don't know what it's like.
Speaker 1: It's like that.
Speaker 2: It's probably that like what's your opener? Like bullshit, Yeah.
Speaker 1: What's your opener? That kind of thing. And it's right
Speaker 1: next to an add an ad for quack medicine psoriasis
Speaker 1: treatments for unsightly scales, crusts and patches. That really, those
Speaker 1: two together it's like, Oh, I get okay, so I
Speaker 1: get who this is for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't like our lineage very much. Right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, you've got syriasis. You're not willing
Speaker 1: to go to a real doctor for it. Here's a
Speaker 1: picture of a hot lady. Yeah yeah, it says a
Speaker 1: lot right there, So we hacked their flesh. Is a
Speaker 1: lurid story of the Korean War with a lot of
Speaker 1: racials Thurst Margaret A lot Ressler. Yeah yeah. It is
Speaker 1: purportedly written by a white American photographer for the Army
Speaker 1: embedded with a Filipino unit, and because they are a
Speaker 1: Filipino unit, they decide to just stab their way through
Speaker 1: the Chinese army rather than using guns. After that is
Speaker 1: Trail of the Death Dog, which features the poll quote
Speaker 1: the husky was strong, smart, vicious, and hated men. His
Speaker 1: muscle knew the taste of human blood and liked it.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, yeah, hell yeah.
Speaker 1: It's about a It's about a man who's like running
Speaker 1: transport roots with sled dogs, and he like picks this
Speaker 1: murderous dog to lead a sledge even though it kills
Speaker 1: all of his other dogs, like, and everyone around him
Speaker 1: is like, that dog is going to murder all of
Speaker 1: your other dogs, and then you why are you doing?
Speaker 1: He's like, but he knows the route best. I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: it seems like a bad call. Yeah. So at this
Speaker 1: point we can call this a pretty standard example of
Speaker 1: an adventure magazine. The most interesting piece in this issue
Speaker 1: is a hinge between the sad middle aged guy, wish
Speaker 1: fulfillment stuff, racism, and straight up pornography. It's a little
Speaker 1: article titled inside a Desert Harem, and unlike everything else
Speaker 1: in this series, had actually taught me some really interesting
Speaker 1: facts about history. Okay, I was surprised by that, don't
Speaker 1: get me wrong. Here's how the article opens, just as
Speaker 1: William O. Douglas of the US Supreme Court once asked
Speaker 1: a merchant why the Sudan exported so few crops. You're wrong, Afendi,
Speaker 1: smiled the merchant. We do export a huge crop, not
Speaker 1: cotton or wheat perhaps, but something far more valuable. We
Speaker 1: export slaves. Pharaoh was a girl of twelve when she
Speaker 1: was stolen from her family. For two years, she was
Speaker 1: kept with the tribe which stole her, Then she was
Speaker 1: sold to a slave trader. For another six months, she
Speaker 1: traveled the desert as the trader added more slaves to
Speaker 1: his caravan. Finally, she was sold to an Arab harem
Speaker 1: at the slave gate in Mecca, the traffic and girls
Speaker 1: is both open and brisk. Now, I was ready for
Speaker 1: that all to be bullshit. And this article is not
Speaker 1: specifically a true story. But all of that stuff is
Speaker 1: stuff that happened, actually, and I was kind of unaware
Speaker 1: of a lot of the dimensions of this. But after
Speaker 1: World War One, the area that we know today as
Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia became an independent kingdom called the Kingdom of
Speaker 1: Hejas I think is the first name. And slave trading
Speaker 1: had been illegal in the Ottoman Empire during its later period,
Speaker 1: but in Hejas it was allowed to continue once again,
Speaker 1: and a brisk slave trade opened up between Sudan, Ethiopia
Speaker 1: and the Kingdom. Right, this is a modern slave trade.
Speaker 1: As such, victims were often convinced, or rather their parents
Speaker 1: were convinced, to sell their children. This was often framed
Speaker 1: as giving them a better life in Arabia during parts
Speaker 1: of the journey where slavery was illegal. Because some of
Speaker 1: this route often included going through countries where the slave
Speaker 1: trade was not allowed, traders and their victims often disguised
Speaker 1: themselves as pilgrim on the road to Mecca. It was
Speaker 1: also not uncommon for travelers who did the hajaj, who
Speaker 1: went to Mecca to sell their servants or their poor
Speaker 1: friends who they had gone on the hajaj with in
Speaker 1: order to afford a return journey home. That is the
Speaker 1: thing that happened too. By nineteen thirty, about ten percent
Speaker 1: of the people living in Mecca were estimated to be enslaved.
Speaker 1: Many were domestic servants or Hara members, but many of
Speaker 1: them were also used as laborers like the men generally
Speaker 1: were particularly used as like agricultural laborers and the like. Today,
Speaker 1: the UAE and Saudi Arabia engage in a system of
Speaker 1: guest worker visas that have somewhat similar dimensions. I don't
Speaker 1: think it's quite as abusive, but it's pretty fucking bad.
Speaker 1: A lot of people are aware of this, but back
Speaker 1: in the day it was just straight up slavery. And
Speaker 1: when I found this article, I was kind of immediately
Speaker 1: taken by the fact that the woman in the artwork
Speaker 1: is depicted as white, and it's a pretty like, not
Speaker 1: great piece of art. I wouldn't say, if you're trying
Speaker 1: to talk about a very serious story about a social issue,
Speaker 1: it's pretty offensive. In a number of ways. All of
Speaker 1: this caused regular international condemnation. In nineteen forty eight, the
Speaker 1: UN declared slavery a crime against humanity. In nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: the British informed the US State Department that there were
Speaker 1: at least fifty thousand slaves in Saudi Arabia and they
Speaker 1: were increasingly being used by the oil industry, the red
Speaker 1: sea trade. Obviously, because they're being used by the oil industry, like,
Speaker 1: that's part of why we don't do any fucking thing.
Speaker 1: For a while, the red sea trade continued through the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. By the nineteen sixties, there had been enough
Speaker 1: international outcry that it had become an embarrassment to the king,
Speaker 1: who issued a decree forbidding the sale of slaves, not
Speaker 1: the possession of slaves, early in nineteen sixty two. Slavery
Speaker 1: itself continued to be legal for several more months until
Speaker 1: it was officially abolished that novemberses. So I was unaware
Speaker 1: of that. That's interesting. So I got to give the
Speaker 1: story credit. Yeah, it informed me about a piece of
Speaker 1: history that I was not aware of. So that part's good.
Speaker 1: What's not good is the article itself outside of it,
Speaker 1: because all everything I learned was like that first paragraph
Speaker 1: I was like, the fuck were they selling slaves in
Speaker 1: Mecca ninety five? I was like, oh, yeah, this was
Speaker 1: a thing, this is a problem, was a problem. Okay,
Speaker 1: interesting the story, the actual history is of course interesting
Speaker 1: and important, but it is just window dressing for the story,
Speaker 1: which is soft core pornography that features a young Circassian
Speaker 1: girl who is described to us as not quite fifteen.
Speaker 1: When it was her turn, she was led forward while
Speaker 1: the slave trader extolled her beauty in her skills, sexual
Speaker 1: and otherwise. Unlike the girls who had gone before, Farah
Speaker 1: did not remove her robe to get the bidding started.
Speaker 1: She didn't have to. The men standing around the edge
Speaker 1: of the raised platform of the slave block could see
Speaker 1: her face, and the spiel by the slave trader was
Speaker 1: enough to get things going. The bidding reached one hundred
Speaker 1: dollars before it began to slacken. And then it describes
Speaker 1: her taking off her clothes, which we're not going to
Speaker 1: go through. Yeah, it's I don't know, it's pretty gross,
Speaker 1: Margaret gross. Yeah, so I don't think I'm going to
Speaker 1: read the rest of that to you.
Speaker 2: It's funny because I don't usually use the word pornographic
Speaker 2: in a negative sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, but you're like, oh, yeah, no, that's yeah,
Speaker 1: that's I'll call this article about a fifteen year old
Speaker 1: girl that really yeah, yeah, we don't need that, that's
Speaker 1: not necessary. But I did think it was interesting that
Speaker 1: this horrible, deeply, deeply evil story also imparted a piece
Speaker 1: of historic information I was unaware of. We should probably
Speaker 1: talk more about the slave trade of like Circassian and
Speaker 1: Georgian and our Menian and Ethiopian and Sudanese girls down
Speaker 1: to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, that that maybe should
Speaker 1: be a topic of more discussion than it is, I.
Speaker 2: Know, And it's it's it's hard because it's like the
Speaker 2: way in which white slavery has always been used as
Speaker 2: a like a boogeyman, like to specifically, like, wait, why
Speaker 2: do we suddenly care when it's about white women as
Speaker 2: compared to like anyone, right, yeah, And then of course,
Speaker 2: like sex trafficking in general is like used as like
Speaker 2: an anti sex worker talking point currently, including like voluntary
Speaker 2: sex work. Right, And it's like so hard because like
Speaker 2: the criminalization of sex work makes it so hard for
Speaker 2: us to talk about the actual bad things that are happening, right, absolutely, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: I I And then also, of course anything that's like
Speaker 2: Islamophobia is like a really major problem, and so it
Speaker 2: makes people afraid to touch what we should be talking about.
Speaker 2: And actually, that's something I actually really appreciate about your show,
Speaker 2: is that you are willing to I mean, not like
Speaker 2: specifically look for people to condemn who are outside of
Speaker 2: certain circles, but not be afraid to say, like, hey,
Speaker 2: it's like bad when slavery happens, right, that's like I.
Speaker 1: Mean, like, look, I got I got absolutely no problem
Speaker 1: with islng, but like, fuck the Kingdom of Saudi Irayah,
Speaker 1: the Saudi royal family, I got no issues say in
Speaker 1: that show. Yeah, And it's also worth because this is
Speaker 1: a big a chunk of this and the reason why
Speaker 1: this article exists is that part of this slave trade
Speaker 1: was like white slave trade, right, So that is super
Speaker 1: that is why I writ and exciting to like the
Speaker 1: fifties mind, but like a lot of the girls that
Speaker 1: are being trafficked and boys that are being trafficked for
Speaker 1: that matter, are from like Ethiopia and the Soudan and
Speaker 1: are much more often a much larger chunk of the
Speaker 1: total number of people being enslaved by the Kingdom, but
Speaker 1: they are being forced to work as laborers in the
Speaker 1: oil industry, they're being forced to work as domestic servants
Speaker 1: more often, and so there's simply not any kind of
Speaker 1: real care about that by the guys writing this magazine. Right,
Speaker 1: they want to tell a porn story, right, you know
Speaker 1: really Yeah, anyway, Margaret, how you feeling two magazines into
Speaker 1: our exploration of a masculine fiction.
Speaker 2: I mean, like it's all as awful stuff, but I
Speaker 2: do feel like I got I'm getting off lightly for
Speaker 2: behind the Bastard's guest spot, you know.
Speaker 3: So uh it's really always very bad to say that
Speaker 3: before we've actually finished that oh fuck.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 2: And then it's like I know, I'm gonna regret having
Speaker 2: referred to these as a precursor. Although it's like, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, as a science fiction writer, I got to
Speaker 2: accept like, yeah, kind of bad people as my precursors. Right,
Speaker 2: that's just like a thing that we shouldn't be afraid of,
Speaker 2: but I can still respect. Like I love pulp and
Speaker 2: I'm so sad. It's like one of my favorite genres
Speaker 2: of movie is like the trashy road trip movie, where
Speaker 2: like they're going to or the kids want to throw
Speaker 2: the biggest party in the world.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, absolutely, and I.
Speaker 2: Just like I just want that without them being like
Speaker 2: here's the transphobic joke, or like here's when the man
Speaker 2: is raped by a woman in its humor, or you know,
Speaker 2: like like, can't we just have nice pulp that isn't
Speaker 2: fucking rat it is?
Speaker 1: It is? It is the eternal question, right can you
Speaker 1: have Animal House with all also having that director kill
Speaker 1: three people in the helicopter crash due to his irresponsibility
Speaker 1: and incompetence, Right, yeah, like is it like I don't know, yes,
Speaker 1: like he can part because it I think we can.
Speaker 1: I don't think it has to be as fucked up
Speaker 1: in gross and pedophilic as some of these articles are.
Speaker 1: I do think there has to be a degree of
Speaker 1: grossness to poulp right, not every story, but like Polpe
Speaker 1: needs to be grimy a little, you know, otherwise it's
Speaker 1: not really Again, grimey does not mean talking about marrying
Speaker 1: off sixteen year olds, but like you got to have
Speaker 1: some like the the Grease Are with a Switchblade story,
Speaker 1: I think is perfect, right, fair enough, Like that's that's
Speaker 1: that's that's fine to me. You know, it's both like
Speaker 1: intellectually interesting. It shows you this like fascinating glimpse into
Speaker 1: like the kind of cultural fear that existed during this
Speaker 1: like very much lost moment in time, in at least
Speaker 1: our pop culture memory. And it's also very funny. No totally,
Speaker 1: I mean, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 2: I would still read most of these stories just from
Speaker 2: a life yeah, yeah, yeah, God, the world is weird.
Speaker 1: Got some good news for you there marks all of
Speaker 1: all of these are available for free for everyone. There's
Speaker 1: like dozens and dozens of them on the Internet Archive.
Speaker 1: Just type men's adventure magazines into the Internet Archive and
Speaker 1: there's like a I don't know, a little I don't
Speaker 1: know what you call it, like a little file folder
Speaker 1: thing on there. You can view or download or read
Speaker 1: them all in full glorious color. There's a shitload of
Speaker 1: them on here sixty five, So yeah, you know, significant
Speaker 1: amount of reading if you're in the mood for some
Speaker 1: of these some of these stories. And we will continue
Speaker 1: with some more of these in Part DEU. But first, Margaret,
Speaker 1: you got any pluggles to plug.
Speaker 2: Well, I did write a pulp adventure novella called Escape
Speaker 2: from Insul Island and Merry Christmas. It is my attempt
Speaker 2: to write trashy pulp that is still enjoyable and like,
Speaker 2: and it still is like, and it tries to grapple
Speaker 2: with the fact that it's like. I mean, the setup
Speaker 2: is that there's some people and they go to an
Speaker 2: island full of insults and then they have to escape.
Speaker 2: It's a pretty literal concept and then just tries to
Speaker 2: like grapple with that, but it still involves running around
Speaker 2: with a shotgun and good old fun times. I think
Speaker 2: you might enjoy it. There is a there's actually not
Speaker 2: an audiobook version of it yet. There will be, but
Speaker 2: there's a print version and an ebook version, and you
Speaker 2: can read it and you can read it in afternoon.
Speaker 2: That's the great thing about I have a short attention span.
Speaker 2: You have a short attention span. I write for short
Speaker 2: attention spans. That's what I got.
Speaker 1: Yes, I also have a short attention span. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I did write a novel once. It's called After the Revolution.
Speaker 2: It does actually work for a short attention span. Even
Speaker 2: though you can't read it in one sitting, it's it's
Speaker 2: still fast paced.
Speaker 1: It's still yeah yeah, yeah, And maybe I'll write a
Speaker 1: second one if I conquer my short attention span enough,
Speaker 1: although that gets harder every year, Margaret, I know every year,
Speaker 1: especially with Balder's Gate three out, that has torpedoed my productivity.
Speaker 2: We spent the first like fifteen minutes before we record
Speaker 2: it with Sophie zoning out and me and Robert.
Speaker 1: The second might be the best video game I've ever played.
Speaker 1: Just a disaster for my getting my book.
Speaker 3: This is so fascinating. The episode's over, Okay. Behind the
Speaker 3: Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
Speaker 3: from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com,
Speaker 3: or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 3: or wherever you get your podcasts.