 It's time for a Man to Man discussion. 
Man to Man magazine was launched in December 1949 by New York City based Volitant Publishing, the same company behind Sir, Laff, and True. And indeed, sir, the magazine's a laff, true enough, not in the sense that it's terribly funny, but in the sense that it's wonderfully distracting. The issue you see here was published this month in 1952, with cover model Loris Pederson, and interior photos of other models, showgirls, and beauty pageant contestants, all striving for celebrity status, but all pretty much lost in the mists of time. Not that we're denigrating them in any way. With celebrity status usually comes financial independence, and the possibility of achieving that is reason enough to grasp for the brass ring, even if, like all the women here, you don't make it. Besides, we all grasp for that ring, one way or another. It's just that in show business, you do it in public.
Along with the many figures in Man to Man, there are also facts. At least, things purported to be facts. For instance, you learn that in 1952 London was the “world's largest paradise of prostitutes.” By definition, that sounds more like an opinion, but whatever. It struck us that only in a men's magazine would you come across the words “paradise” and “prostitutes” in the same sentence about civilization's oldest vice. There's also an article about taxi dancers, women who worked at nightclubs and took payment to dance with men. Apparently the going rate was a dime, and the article asks if the practice was immoral, its insinuation being that the practice groomed women for prostitution. We suspect most customers probably just wanted momentary companionship, but it only takes a minority of bad apples to spawn more vice, and those unpleasant men—like death, elections, and the end of baseball season—always seem to come around no matter what you do.
At least women get their revenge in this issue. An article on supernatural strength features art by Mark Schneider depicting an angry woman slinging a seated guy airborne across a room, chair and all. It's possible she had just learned what's in a typical men's magazine. If the photo had a caption it might be, “For the last time my name's not honey, cutie, baby, or sweetie!” We wouldn't even think of defending men's magazines from accusations of sexism—it's their overriding characteristic. But we will say that they're gold mines for Hollywood anecdotes that have been long forgotten and obscure celeb photos previously unseen online. Since many of our visitors are by now under some sort of quarantine or other, we recommend killing time with a digital stroll through our website, where you'll find many other men's magazine. We'll start you off with this one, this one, and this large group, plus, of course, the forty scans below.                                         
 Wait! You misunderstood! What I said was why don’t you give a girl a break! 
Sometimes when we stumble across vintage magazines they’re in bad condition. Such is the case with this July 1964 issue of Man To Man, which has had all the pictorials were scissored from it and is so brittle it fell apart as we scanned it. But it is readable, and read it we did. We were titillated by C. H. Cash’s “Nude Crossing of East Germany’s Death Strip,” and fascinated by Bill Austeen’s “Sex on the Straw Hat Circuit,” but the prize winner here is “I Suffered the Electric Snake Torture” by Connie Edison. The title character is a woman framed by a British drug dealer named Harry Lasker and tortured at the hands of Chinese secret police. Not satisfied with a simple cattle prod, the cops attach a snake to the end of it, so that each jolt of current causes the snake to strike. We’d think that would simply kill a snake, but maybe they adjusted the voltage to just the right level to cause the snake to, er, well anyway, we really enjoyed the villain’s explanation for using this baroque device: “We do not like to borrow from the capitalists, but sometimes it is to our advantage.” He goes on to explain that, while various capitalist dictatorships in Latin America used the cattle prod alone, he and his cohorts added a snake because, “being Chinese, we are naturally more creative.” In the end she’s tortured and vows revenge against the man who set her up. With all the electricity flying around, the humor in the pseudonym Connie Edison becomes clear. This was our first Man To Man, but we liked it. And yes, we’re aware of how that sounds—nearly all the names of these vintage hero magazines sound sexual today, although this one perhaps more so than most. In any case, we’ll keep our eyes out, and hopefully the next issue of this we locate will be intact.        
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1973—Peter Dinsdale Commits First Arson
A fire at a house in Hull, England, kills a six year old boy and is believed to be an accident until it later is discovered to be a case of arson. It is the first of twenty-six deaths by fire caused over the next seven years by serial-arsonist Peter Dinsdale. Dinsdale is finally captured in 1981, pleads guilty to multiple manslaughter, and is detained indefinitely under Britain's Mental Health Act as a dangerous psychotic. 1944—G.I. Bill Goes into Effect
U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Servicemen's Readjustment Act into law. Commonly known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, or simply G.I. Bill, the grants toward college and vocational education, generous unemployment benefits, and low interest home and business loans the Bill provided to nearly ten million military veterans was one of the largest factors involved in building the vast American middle class of the 1950s and 1960s. 1940—Smedley Butler Dies
American general Smedley Butler dies. Butler had served in the Philippines, China, Central America, the Caribbean and France, and earned sixteen medals, five of which were for heroism. In 1934 he was approached by a group of wealthy industrialists wanting his help with a coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in 1935 he wrote the book War Is a Racket, explaining that, based upon his many firsthand observations, warfare is always wholly about greed and profit, and all other ascribed motives are simply fiction designed to deceive the public.
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