Unsexing Sex

Suppose adolescents were expected by the world to regard the mechanism and the mysteries of sex exactly as they regard the mechanism and the mysteries of a radio set? Suppose little Johnny, who is allowed to revel in Popular Mechanics and the Radio Digest, should have thrust into his hands a magazine which explained his sex impulses with the commonplaceness of a mechanic expounding the ignition of a Ford? Would the result be completely good? Can the little boy who is a "radio bug"+- be assumed to grow up quite naturally into an adolescent "sex bug," equally without necessity of shame? An attempt was made to answer these questions in the affirmative by a new publication, Your Body, which appeared on the news stands last week, price, 50-c-.

The cover displayed a reproduction of the marble "Greek Slave" in the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, which has the air at first glance of being a young woman clad only in police handcuffs. Aside from this bit of salesmanship by sex appeal, however, the contents of Your Body was almost humorously devoid of erotic motif. Ponderous, on cheap paper, its make-up was technically horrible.

A diagrammatic sketch of the joints of the human body interpreted in terms of the joints of machinery lay puritanically before the reader on one page. On an-other the seldom depicted organs of the male and female were similarly diagramed and explained. Drawings with nondescript. people in them much like those used in Popular Mechanics and the Radio Digest were employed to give "human interest" to the explanation of what are, after all, "mechanical" if "living" organisms.

Then there were pages devoted to the effects, positive and negative, of: wearing high-heeled shoes; developing the body by "exercises"; using cosmetics and 'hair dyes; taking anesthetics; removing surplus hair; removing the appendix; smoking; dieting to cure diabetes; undergoing the Steinach operation for rejuvenation, etc.

Over the reader who flipped the pages of Your Body stole the conviction that some "radio bug" must have conceived it and dictated its format. The suspicion appeared well-grounded. Though several of the contributors are M.D.'s, the president of the concern which publishes Your Body is Hugo Gernsback. Even before the days of "radio," his Electrical Experimenter was a magazine which catered to the "electrical bugs" who were the forerunners of the "radio bugs."

Throughout the War Mr. Gernsback busied himself with writing scientific romances for his magazine about imagined super-tanks as big as ten locomotives, a hundred, a thousand. . . . With the welling up of the radio craze he began to publish Radio News, the Radio Review and Radio InternacionaL Now this precursor of all "radio hugs" has gambled that the U. S. may have developed a new morality, may be ready to buy a sex magazine almost without sex appeal. The first issue of Your Body carried the intimation that the next copy may appear in "about six months," asked: "Would you care to see this [publication] appear as a monthly magazine?"

A sample of the new "unsexed" sex literature:

"It is rather interesting as an anthropological study of modesty to remember that our girls, if suddenly discovered naked, first quickly cover the pubic region; Malay girls cover the navel; the girls of some African tribes first cover the buttocks. Turkish and Egyptian women cover the face; Arabian women cover the hair and back of the head; and Chinese women the feet and legs. So habit and education chiefly determine the reactions to shame."

+- Slang: One who makes a hobby of radio.