| Vintage Pulp | Oct 8 2009 |
Above is an October 1955 cover of the men’s magazine/tabloid Sir!, with a story about Yale’s famous Pig Night we’re certain was borrowed from an identical Hush-Hush story published in September 1955. Most of the old scandal rags didn't have many actual reporters on the ground, so instead they relied on a network of stringers and paid informants. When all else failed, they simply rewrote material from other tabloids, or sometimes even mainstream publications. Sound familiar? It's the same process used by websites today, and back then the practice generated the exact same type of complaints about journalistic integrity. Once again, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The only difference is the old tabloids never really threatened the mainstream media, (though a couple of imprints were top sellers), whereas today's metastasized internet does call into question whether standard media can survive. Only time will tell. A few more issues of Sir! appear below. 
| Intl. Notebook | Sep 16 2009 |
All very interesting, but then we come to this slightly more obscure reference to Yale and Pig Night parties. Intriguing, no? So, since we have a collegiate theme going today, let’s take a closer look at this. Yale during the 1950s had a thriving frat culture of rich young men sporting well-developed senses of entitlement along with a hair-trigger willingness to party like it was 1999. One house in particular, Delta Kappa Epsilon, was the jock frat. And we all know how sensitive jocks are. Pig Night was an annual ritual in which DKE pledges were sent into New Haven to invite townie girls to a fraternity dance. At midnight, the lucky ladies were gathered and an announcement was made in front of the entire frat. The girls had not been selected because they were beautiful, or interesting, or fun—but because they were the ugliest girls the pledges could find—i.e. “pigs.” Big laughs all around.
The girls invariably stormed out, angry, or humiliated, or tearful, and that made it all the more fun. All this from a frat claiming to seek candidates who “combined in the most equal proportions the gentleman, the scholar, and the jolly good fellow.” We don’t know exactly when DKE’s Pig Nights ended, but we did find references to them continuing while George W. Bush was president of the frat during the mid-’60s. We draw no conclusions from that, although you might. But remember—fucked up as it is, back then Pig Night would have fallen into the category of good clean fun. Not that it was truly harmless—just that the victims were unfairly expected to pretend it was. Today, nobody would tolerate such an event. Which is good, because though we’re vocal here at Pulp about the sad decline of movie, book, and magazine art, we’ve also said before that we think human beings are slowly getting better.
