| Sex Files | Sep 20 2010 |
National Informer offered readers sexual advice. Our advice—don’t listen.
The cheapie newspaper National Informer, of which you see a September 1971 cover above, began as a rightward leaning tabloid of the post-pulp era that later increasingly tried to distinguish itself by posturing as a repository of sexual advice. In this issue its articles manage to confirm readers' suspicions about the new decade's loose morals and construct stimulating sexual fantasies. For example, the “deaf and dumb sexpot” in panel five is an archetype of the sexually available woman, but sadly she’s French, thus accessible only to those evil socialists across the sea. Just can’t win, right?
But even as these and other articles offer up sex with a hint of political division, the photo captions suggest that the editors perhaps didn’t take their own content seriously. In panel three, a subhead reads: Some wives turn to lezzies when they’re turned off on hubbies. In panel eight, in the story Commies Oppose Sexy-Looking Frauleins, a caption under a nude photo of a blonde deadpans: Commies don’t like stuff like this. And in the report on How You Can Replace Sexual Ignorance with Sex Know-How, the caption under a nude couple explains: Breast sucking is great, with proper know-how.
In our view, there’s no way the editors couldn’t have been chuckling when they wrote those lines. Certainly, the presence of the crackpot psychic The Amazing Criswell (in panel five) doesn’t lend any credibility to the proceedings, especially when he predicts that astronauts will find cockroaches living on the Moon. So was National Informer taken seriously by its readers, or was it all just low comedy? At this point we don’t know. But as we mentioned in an earlier post, we have a collection of Informers, so as we continue to share them, you can decide for yourselves.
