In May of 1957, the very first issue of Man’s Adventure magazine (you can read the whole thing in the Internet Archive) published a story titled The Ten Hottest Kisses In History. In truth the “hottest” kisses were no such thing at all. What the story actually compiled were nine movie kisses that had been recently censored out of (mostly European) movies to suit the tender sensibilities of U.S. movie censors. (A tenth kiss photograph — the one shown in the story’s header, upper right above — is never identified or discussed in the magazine article.) Against this practice of censoring movie kisses, as you might imagine, Man’s Adventure magazine came out in cautious opposition:

Probably the toughest decision that every producer of Motion Pictures must face is, just where does the line exist beyond which he dare not go. That’s not quite as easy as you might think. Because the standards on which scenes are judged change, not only from state to state and country to country, but also from year to year. In addition, what may be fully permissible in one situation, would be unthinkable in others.

Even the judgments on what ought to be shown, and what ought not, are subject to argument. For example: are we right in attempting to divorce movies completely from life? Is it humanly possible to shield people from sex? Is nudity pornographic? Are Americans so different from their European ancestors as to make it impossible to show the former what every one of the latter takes as a matter of course?

We have a whole variety of censorship organizations, some legal, some unofficial, who attempt to set up standards for the public. Leaving out the lay bodies as beyond the interest of this article, we must still face such groups as the U.S. Customs, the Post Office, the State licensing Commissions and the various City and Town police boards.

We, of Man’s Adventure, are against censorship, per se. We believe that the Public are the best judges of their own desires, tastes, likes, dislikes, needs and interests. We feel that if the public has a distaste for any subject or scene, the resulting “death at the box-office” will do more to bring recalcitrant producers into line than anything else. We believe that while “sexy” movies would unquestionably draw in large audiences at first, merely for the sake of the subject matter, the constant repetition would soon pall and sate the taste.

On these pages, we are showing you scenes from ten movies. All of them have been censored out of the films as they appeared on your screens. Most of them are of European origin, though at least one is from an American production.

The question we are putting is not what the official guardians of Public Morals may have thought about them, but rather what you, the public, think about them?

Every single one of the European scenes was permitted on the screens of their own countries. All of them were considered normal, every-day descriptions of life in many other nations. And within those areas, none of the scenes, whether native or imported, were thought to be obscene.

Historians, their eyes on universal trends in both morality and social culture, have long commented on the Puritan outlook of the United States. They have proven conclusively, that we insist on a series of standards for ourselves in public, that we make no pretense of obeying in private. We live under a series of conventions that all of us recognize as merely formal means of expressing the obvious.

Within our sacrosanct borders, the kiss is everything. Never, heaven preserve us, shall we show one iota more. Regardless of how the audience itself may behave, either in the theater itself, or afterwards, never shall we depict on the screen a like behavior. The kiss, and only the kiss is allowed.

Well then, let us stick to the kiss. On these pages we give you a fair sample of the methods by which the kiss is performed. More than likely, they are the ways in which you, yourself, kiss.

They range in passion from the utmost innocence, to outright violence; from debauchery to love’s first dream; from tenderness to vicious cruelty. Yet all of them, the purest and most degraded alike, fell before the censor’s shears. All of them were considered too hot, too obscene, too pornographic for the pure minds of our home-grown innocents.

…

People kiss in a hundred different ways. With few exceptions, they are perfectly legitimate methods of expressing affection. Why then, can’t they be shown, publicly?

Man’s Adventure believes that they can and should. We honestly feel that there isn’t one iota of badness in any of these scenes.

Now we get to the part of the post where, if ErosBlog were the usual sort of clickbait ad-supported eyeball-farm operation that prevails these days, I’d put each of the HOT! CENSORED! KISSES! on its own page and make you click through those pages one weary page after the other, loading my modest ad banners each time and multiplying my impression-fu with those shithead bannerlords who think they run the internet. But I’m not doing that. Life is too fucking short. You could support my Patreon though; even a one-dollar pledge helps me flip this particular bird at the bannerlords — and it’s assuredly more than they would ever pay me!

Let’s move on to the kisses. Captions are as they appeared in the magazine. Here they are:

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• More Topless Sophia Loren
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• Censored Toon Mermaids And Harem Girls, 1939