Men Yesterday

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..or, "What daddy hid in the closet and thought you didnt know about."

 

Wild animal covers were typical in the early to mid-fifties...There were tigers...

 

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...and whales...

 

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....there were polar bears, and polar bear hunters...

 

 

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...then nature began to fight back. Hunters and escapees were sorely bitten, stung and chewed upon...

 

 

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..sometimes they were mobbed by little critters...

 

 

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...but sometimes by real monsters...

 

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..mind you, not all the big white hunters and treasure seekers were men...

 

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.. in fact pretty soon the leading men became bit part players in their own dramas..

 

 

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..until basically there were no heroes at all, just heroines, who quickly became damsels in distress...

 

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...but the boys didnt give up all at once. No sir! They kept right on rescuing....

 

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..and blowing up stuff whenever the chance arose...

 

 

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...all hunky and sweaty in their tiny boats...

 

 

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,,,until someone in sales realised that the ones with damsels sold more copies...

 

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..and the covers began to get a little, well, you know - salacious...lovely word... sa-lay-shus...just rolls off the tongue and sort of wraps itself around your mouth like a ...but, er, harrumph! Anyway...

 

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...and somebody got to thinking they were beginning to look a bit like the old true crime and sensation mags published from well before the war -ah! the war! What fond memories!

 

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..some of those had some pretty fast ladies on the cover, yes siree, bob! (In fact some were more scary even than giant komodo dragons...)

 

 

 

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..'course not that these hunky men in sales, ex-war heroes all, were exactly scared of giant komodo dragons or fast women.. after all they'd fought a war not so long ago in Korea. They just preferred to keep them tied up so they could keep an eye on them...

 

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..why sometimes they'd even dress up in gorilla suits and pretend to scare the women - especially the pretty ones who tended to ignore them in the street...

 

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..and it was pretty clear thatr normal, healthy, red-blooded, reg'lar fellows out there felt the same way because they just kept on selling more mags!

 

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..you could feed women to piranhas and sell more mags...