The damsel in distress has been an artistic theme ever since Perseus rescued Andromeda. It is a product of our sexual mores: Punishing young people for their sexuality leads them to associate punishment with sex. Appealing to their moral conscience may repress their behavior, but leaves their imaginations to run wild. Social barriers to sex lead to deviant behavior. Physical chains replace more figurative restraints.

Consider, for example, this woman’s sexual fantasy: “I also have the ‘classic’ fantasies – being a kidnapped maiden, tied up in scanty rags, and just as the evil henchmen are about to attack me, the hero comes and whisks me off, but I assist him in fighting off the bad guys, with karate, etc …. No
‘weak damsel’ for me!�

http://www.scribd.com/doc/15428/friday-nancy-forbidden-flowers-more-womens-sexual-fantasies

Actually, she seems to be pretty helpless, until the hero arrives, which brings us to the point: As her helplessness increases to 100%, her moral responsibility declines to 0%. Whatever happens, it’s not her fault, she’s just the victim of these evil men.

However innocent the maiden, she knows in her heart that rape is an ugly business, so the arrival of the rescuer is an essential element. Tarzan never failed to rescue Jane, or Superman, Lois Lane, or Popeye, Olive Oyl. Legitimate romantic involvement was presumed to follow, but seldom got beyond the first kiss (if that). Despite all handicaps, a true damsel remains virginal until the hero arrives, and generally a long time thereafter.

Detective fiction is a much more recent invention, usually credited to Edgar Allen Poe, and it did not at first include damsels. The women in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue� (1841) were bloodily murdered by an ape . . . oops, not much fun for them! However, the damsels eventually began creeping in. In “The Hound of the Baskervilles� (1902), Sherlock Holmes rescues Beryl Stapleton, who has been bound, gagged and assaulted by her own husband. (For a lady to be bound, gagged and assaulted by someone other than her husband was probably too indelicate for the standards of the time.)

About this time, men’s magazines began to appear with color covers featuring pretty girls, though not true damsels , because they were seldom in any danger. But with the general relaxation of social mores, they gradually lost interest in wearing a lot of clothing. Meanwhile, the genre of detective fiction was growing him popularity, led by writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

With the spread of the Great Depression, it was harder and harder to get 10 cents from a man’s pocket. Detective magazine covers got more lurid and their contents more sensational. Around 1933, the economy hit rock bottom and, suddenly, the damsels were everywhere, often without much clothing, and always in terrible danger.

The same publishing houses that published detective magazines also published pulps of other genres: adventure, horror, science fiction and western. Frequently, the artists and writers were the same, and there was little to distinguish the detective magazines from the rest, other than the words “Detective� or “Mystery� in the titles.

A newsstand in the 1930s must have been a colorful place, full of scantily-clad heroines being threatened with guns, knives, whips, branding irons and fates which even today remain indescribable. However, the conventions of pulp fiction demanded that the good guys win in the end, so in the stories themselves, the heroine was usually delivered from whatever horrors menaced her on the cover.

In the 1940s came a backlash: In an effort to clean up his city (the center of the publishing industry), New York Mayor La Guardia demanded that the gaudy magazines with their poorly-dressed women disappear. Meanwhile, the war increased printing costs, and the pulps had trouble competing for newsstand space with comic books, which were cheaper to produce.

The detective magazines didn’t entirely disappear, but the new ones (such as “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine�) depended less on newsstand sales. The female victims in the stories were simply murdered, instead of being menaced by hooded cultists, and therefore ceased to be true damsels. The colorful damsels moved over to the covers of comic books.

Then, the Second World War changed everything.

People who had survived bombing and banzai charges were not much impressed with the horrors of pulp fiction. But the great majority of men, who had never had their manhood tested in action, were left to wonder about it . . . and they wondered a lot. This created a market for men’s magazines which featured not only Nazis and evil Asians, but adventures of all kinds, and frequently a pretty girl in need of rescuing.

Meanwhile, the mainstream magazines were moving away from painted illustrations and more toward photos or graphic art, so the illustrators naturally moved to where the jobs were. The result was some strikingly good covers on appallingly junky magazines. This art remains highly collectible today, even though no one is much interested in reading the stuff inside. The covers were good enough that you could argue they had artistic merit and therefore were not subject to the pornography laws.

In the early Sixties, there was another relaxation of moral standards, and the men’s magazines became openly sadistic. Women were no longer simply being menaced, they were being tortured or even raped:

“Alicia shuddered at the terrible agony to come as the evil Ling Yung raised the glowing implement of torment. Again he made his outrageous demand and again she had to refuse.�

Some people enjoy that kind of thing, but I would call it a waste of beautiful illustrations. Certainly, not many women would like to read it . . . about as many as like being burned with hot irons. One mark of the damsels genre is that it is often read and written by women, and this went way beyond that.

In the 70s, the men’s magazines disappeared as the proliferation of open pornography lured away buyers. Detective magazines of the cheaper kind continued to feature covers with women in peril, but photos replaced painted illustrations, and the photos were increasingly amateurish. Inside, rewritten newspaper stories, for which no author had to be paid, replaced fiction. Fewer and fewer people were interested in reading such stuff, fewer and fewer did.

The damsels are still an part of our culture: Anyone who has seen “Buffy� or “Charmed� knows what I am talking about. The golden era of the magazine covers is behind us now, but the covers themselves with be around forever in electronic form.

Earl, I don’t consider my agenda ‘political’ at all. But I do have one — would I have been writing this blog for five years if I didn’t?

Most of all I’d like to thank the main writer, Bacchus, for your humor and curiosity through which you find so many great pictures and quotes to comment on and show the readers.

In your comment right above you specify “I do not judge or condemn anyone for their inner fantasy life. And I do not allow my commenters to do it unchallenged. I especially do not allow them to say “you’re sick and you need to get helpâ€? during a discussion of what fantasies and images turn people on.”
Thank you, Bacchus! Both me and my fantastic, open-minded lover (who found this blog and recommended it to me) truly enjoy this very fine, intelligent, erotic and sexual spot on the Internet!

All the way from Denmark,
sincerely,
The Sprout

P.S. I apologize for my written English if it’s bad. I don’t use it as much as I’d like to…

As someone with a deep appreciation of old pulp art and fetishes in all their variety, I’d like to clip and keep Bacchus’ comments above for use in just such debates.

The tendency of “enlightened” souls to disapprove of, and even condemn, the entertainment of another era,and the erotic fantasies that it stirs, is apparently endless.

That said, I am constantly surprised (mostly pleasantly) at how much American popular culture from the 30s and 40s is explicitly BDSM-obsessed, and I can’t help but wonder if it doesn’t say something profound about our national discomfort with our own sexuality.

Good thing we’ve gotten over that.

Oh, wait….

The condemnation would be bad enough in its own right; but, they also feel perfectly justified to make up and desiminate “facts” with no basis in reality – just as long as those “facts” discredit the things they don’t like.

The pathetic part is the holier-than-thou, smug, self-rightiousness they bring to the exercise. They always operate as though their fear based prejucies are foregone conclusions among all healthy, right-thinking people.

The NY Times magazine published a very interesting article on this subject by Steven Pinker just yesterday. Very much worth reading.

That said, your comments here have taken on a judgmental and condemning tone. You won’t get many more approved if you continue in this offensive vein.

For one thing, you’re forgetting that women drawn in colorful inks are not real women. A civilized person can separate fantasy from reality, and can erotically engage with fantasy situations which would repel him or her if they happened in reality. It’s not “a problem” at all — it’s the folks who can’t separate reality from fantasy who have the problem.

For another think, you’ve deeply and badly misunderstood (or deliberately mischaracterized, I’m not sure which) the roots of fetish sensibility. Most women who enjoy “erotic peril” in its many forms (whether we are talking a good whipping, a kidnap-and-rape fantasy, or some friendly bondage sex) are not former victims of abuse, and it’s considered quite offensive in the BDSM community (not to mention ignorant) for vanilla commentators to suggest otherwise. The level of offense only goes up when you seem to suggest that nobody should have BDSM sex with anybody who actually wants it and is turned on by it.

But that’s almost irrelevant, because your point there is a huge red herring. You’ve condemned an entire genre of erotic art because you don’t think it should be erotic. When it was pointed out that perhaps you lack the erotic vocabulary to appreciate the (very slightly sublimated) eroticism of the genre, you came back swinging, basically insulting anyone (but me in particular) who might appreciate the genre but then veering off to falsely paint as victims any women who might enjoy the situations depicted in the genre.

That’s a red herring because (remember?) we are talking about colorful inks on old crumbly acidic cardboard (not actual women). You’ve said, in effect, that anybody who is turned on by images you disapprove of has a problem and needs to get help, even though those images have no basis in reality.

That stands in direct opposition to one of my fundamental philosophies here on ErosBlog. I do not judge or condemn anyone for their inner fantasy life. And I do not allow my commenters to do it unchallenged. I especially do not allow them to say “you’re sick and you need to get help” during a discussion of what fantasies and images turn people on.

You want to do that, do it on your own blog.