Erotic Postcards

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Still, photographs of coquettes were risqué yet charming. Under the celebration of a candid femininity, they catered for both male and female audiences. More than a marginal phenomenon, the sexualisation of girlhood in the social fabric denotes a collective fascination with the young body as a modern ideal of femininity. A socially ingrained phenomenon As a result, the identities of French postcard models -- as well those of the people who took them -- remain unknown to this day. In her book, Virgin: The Untouched History, Blank highlights a recurrent theme in pornographic tropes: “the tale of the skilled ‘conversion’ of resistant virgin into willing wench”. In these coded scripts, virgins hold a dormant sexuality ready to be activated by “the magic of the ‘right’ male wand”.

Because so many of these cards were destroyed it is difficult to get a complete sense of their history. Erotism often found outlets in other more social permissible ways such as seaside views and art reproductions but these types of cards can be cross referenced into other categories as well. Spicy Russian Postcards

The demise of the saucy postcard occurred during the 1970s and 1980s; the quality of the artwork and humor started to deteriorate with changing attitudes towards the cards content. Mel Brooks was on a late-night TV chat show riffing ideas for his next movie. He said he was gonna make a film about the ascent of man, you know, the rise of humanity from the apes to the splitting of the atom and mass globalisation. Brooks was firing off routines faster then the beads of sweat could pop on his brow. He looked sharp in his dark suit, white shirt, Windsor knot tie, which all kinda contradicted his nervous energy and the rumpled face that always made him look like an overworked and under appreciated insurance salesman.

The early Edwardian hourglass model was an anachronism well before the war, but the limitation of its strapped up waist had been replaced by the perhaps more severe limitation of the narrow hobble skirt; the war, however, freed the legs and bodies of the women, free to move in the world on the same wider scale as when they had had to do the work of the men. Napoleonic Wars By the turn of the next decade, motions to censor and govern public morality had failed. The year 1933 saw Prohibition repealed, and as the '30s wore on erotic photography became more visible and popular. Perhaps early 20th-century composer Cole Porter said it best in the song "Anything Goes:" The first world war sounded the death knell of the postcards age. During the conflict, propaganda postcards had helped feed the nationalistic fervour but overall, demand for postcards plunged. The attraction of youthful femininity though, did not wane. Another medium offered more exciting prospects and creative potential than serialized postcards: the cinema. Blank links the modern fetishising of virginity to the rise of capitalism during the industrial revolution. Young girls left rural areas with the hope of finding better prospects in the city. Economically and socially vulnerable, they were easy prey for unscrupulous employers and brothel owners. The temptation of a pristine body was even greater as venereal diseases were rampant.The artist tainted the model’s lips with a vivid red, a similar hue to the plinth’s velvet. The colour conveys a brazen sexuality immediately contradicted by the candour of the model. What strikes one’s attention is precisely the discrepancy between these sexual innuendos and the sitter’s youthful naivety. She proudly smiles, unaware of the paedophilic gaze she may entice in the adult viewer. The end result is deeply unsettling and exploitative. The Internet begat LiveJasmin and Chaturbate. The printing press begat Fanny Hill and Fifty Shades. The camera begat Playboy and dirty postcards. Towards the end of the 19th century two things happened at the same time, triggering the development of the erotic picture postcard: the social climate changed so that what had previously been considered obscene was now just naughty, and the postcard suddenly had its golden heyday. Inundated with Millions These early 1920s erotic postcards originated in France, like the majority of similar sexually-charged postcards of the era. In the United States, all cards of this sort were known as "French Postcards," no matter where they originated. A similar change in fashion had, of course, taken place during the Napoleonic Wars, although the changes then had not been illustrated nearly as amusingly by La Belle Assemblée as they are now by the picture postcards. The lady with the hourglass shape could hide her ankles as much as she wanted with a frilly foam layer of long skirts, but at night she exposed her raised breasts almost to the nipples.