Today on Britain’s respected Guardian webpage, writer Mariella Frostrup muses about the prevalence of pornography in modern society and asks whether it’s harmful. At Pulp Intl., with few exceptions, our nude images are merely quaint, which raises the questions of whether they were ever considered harmful, and if so, why and when they came to be seen as artful. We are well aware that the airbrushing away of womens’ genitalia—something that was general practice at the time these images appeared—was seen by many rights advocates as a type of violence against women. After all, what was so dirty about female genitalia? Didn’t their erasure peel back the mask from a male-dominated society’s desperate efforts to control female sexuality?

Then along came Playboy, which challenged archaic laws designed to prevent mass production and mass mailing of pornography. Compared to what you see here today, Playboy represented a quantum leap. Its women looked less like Renaissance paintings and more like real human beings. By increments it beat back legal challenges, and eventually Penthouse, Playboy, and other newsstand magazines began to show pubichair, and then actual sex organs. Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner was hailed as a First Amendment hero as well as a defender of womens' right to control their own sexuality. But pretty soon it was clear that women had won only the right to sell their sexuality—the control remained exclusively male.

Mariella Frostrup’s Guardian piece is like others written before. It suggests, like all those articles from earlier decades, that there’s a bright white line in erotica that has been crossed and that society is suffering for it. We can’t comment on the harm aspect, but we do see a line. Basically, old porn, because of its paper format, depended upon the labor of dozens of outside people—printers, film developers, pre-press personnel, postal workers, newsstand owners—and required such an investment of capital that 95% of its producers served the middle ground of taste and depicted acts that, with perhaps the added twist of one or two extra participants, were taking place in private anyway.

The internet changed all that. So if there’s a bright line, it lies where the internet atomized porn and turned much of it into a performance art, a sideshow that somehow has taken over center stage with acts that are most certainly not already occurring in private. Call us crazy, but even though these images were produced before we were born weprefer them to the new stuff. They don’t depict merely bodies or an act, but an entire lifestyle of beaches and gardens and all the warm thoughts and simple desires such places entail. This issue of Folies de Paris et de Hollywood appeared today in 1966. If it was ever offensive or harmful it isn’t anymore, so enjoy it as an artifact of an earlier age—not a better one by any means, but certainly a more artful one.

Yet another piece of the treasure trove we picked up in Denver last year, This Was Hollywood is a compendium of anecdotes and photos from the supposed Golden Age of Hollywood. We say “supposed” because the magazine was printed in 1954, and at that time the 1920s and 1930s were the Golden Age. Today of course, the Golden Age is considered to run from the 1920s all the way to the early 1960s, and we can only assume that eventually the ’70s and ’80s will be considered part of the Golden Age, and we’ll all be sitting around saying how they don’t make movies like C.H.U.D. anymore.

Above, the cover and ten interior scans from Folies de Paris et de Hollywood #50, published 1955. Hard to believe it’s been almost a year since we posted one of these. It’ll be a lot sooner than that when we post our next. 

Above is the cover of the NYC based tabloid Suppressed from this month in 1955. This issue shows Suppressed in full bloom—bold, brash, fearless. Within the next two years a series of Hollywood lawsuits against scandal magazines would begin to make editors wary of being dragged into court for committing libel and slander, but 1955 was still the heyday for celeb bashing, and Supressed engaged in what might be best described as open warfare against film stars. Here’s a small sampling of some of the gut punches in this magazine:

We could go on, but you get the point. We’ve written many times on this website that nothing in media is truly new, and this is yet another example. Click over to any muckraking celebrity blog right now and you’d think journalism, as well as simple grammar, went down the toilet around the year 2000. But no, they were always in the toilet. Remember, Suppressed and its brethren Confidential, Whisper, On the QT, Hush-Hush, et.al., were not fringe. By itself Confidential was the biggest newsstand sellerin the U.S. These publications were powerful. Like modern American cable news, they assumed leading roles in making the public swallow false political memes—a commie under every bed, a black man in every bed, and the loose women who made it all possible.

Some call it cheesecake, glamour, or even smut, but we prefer to call it preserving the ephemera of history. For instance, this image by the renowned mid-century photographer Bruno Bernard, aka Bernard of Hollywood, did not exist on the internet a moment ago. And now it does. See how that works? So think of us as archivists, and yourselves as researchers. That probably won’t help if someone sees you looking at this image, but hey, it’s worth a try. 

The West German magazine Hamburg-Hollywood-Paris willingly surrenders to the one-woman French army known as Brigitte Bardot. Oh, the humanity. A big chunk of the issue—number 14, 1960—is devoted to her. Nothing much to do but let the images speak for themselves. 

July 13: Small town: a place where there’s no recreation for single folks once the sun goes down.