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Pornography: Kosher to the Bone
I discovered this article while searching for info about Bettie Page. A friend told me the 1950s "Queen of Bondage," was catapulted to by a Jewish couple, Irving and Paula Klaw of "Movie Star News." The author of this article, Jay Gertzman, is also Jewish, and he's written a book about the American smut industry wherein he notes its essentially Jewish character. His perspective in that book, of course, is that the smut trade is part of a sexual liberation. Street-Level Smut. The book shops of Times Square by Jay Gertzman, The Position, October 21, 2002 "By the end of World War II, Times Square was a general entertainment area in which tourists, young people on dates, gamblers, con men, street preachers, taxi dancers, frequenters of bars, prostitutes, panhandlers, readers of smut and fans of movie sex and violence all mingled ... In the late 40s, Allan Wilson and his partner, Aaron Moses ("Mo") Shapiro, founded the Jack Woodford Press, as an imprint of the Citadel Press, which featured socialist analysis of American politics. A prolific writer of soft-core erotica with a deft sense of plot construction and scene setting, Woodford wrote of free-spirited and well travelled young men, with jobs and ambitions similar to the heros of popular films, who bedded adventurous and spirited women. Both parties were raring to go on page one. Shapiro and Wilson's books, many by Woodford himself and others by Clement Wood, his wife Gloria Goddard, the glamorous Fan Nichols or 'Gorilla' Joe Weiss, sold especially well in drug stores and near army bases, as well as in general shops in Times Square and other cities .... The largest orders in New York for Jack Woodford Press titles came from [Louis] Finkelstein [at Time Square Book Bazaar], whom other booksellers regarded as a pioneer exploiter of the smut-hungry reader when he opened in 1940 as the first Times Square location which focused on erotica, mostly the varied girlie and nudist magazines of the era ... During the 1950s and early 60s, the most notorious pornographer on the Deuce was Eddie Mishkin. He owned several stores: Harmony, Midget, the Little Book Exchange, Kingsley Book Shop, Esther, and Main Stem ... Sadomasochistic and fetish books, photos and magazines were a facet of erotica which Times Square democratized. Before World War II, the material was available in booksellers' back rooms, and of course to the wealthy, trusted customers of Manhattan's high hat dealers. The Mishkins, the Browns, the Shapiros and the Finkelsteinsmade it available to the hoi polloi' ... The Kefauver subcommittee investigating the effects of obscenity on juvenile delinquency subpoenaed Mishkin in 1955, as they did Irving Klaw, whose fetish photos included many of those of the era's supermodel, Bettie Page. Both men's photo sets and booklet-sized illustrated stories, with their themes of flagellation, bondage, transvestism, and passive men forced into women's clothing, were thought to 'get into the hands of small limited minds, and they . . . [get] worked up to a fever pitch, and some poor soul is the victim ... Al Goldstein readily admitted that the mob distributed Screw Magazine; he could get no one else to dare do so nationally, or even in New York City itself .... A final example of organized crime involvement in Times Square by the late 60s is the smuggling conviction of Lenny Burtman, an important publisher of sadomasochistic books and magazines with offices on W. 46th Street. Times Square bookstores carried his fetish booklets and magazines extensively, and his distribution system was more far- reaching than those of Mishkin, Klaw, or Brown." Mo' Better Exhibitions at MoSex http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,55562,00.html NEW YORK -- The director of the newest museum in this culture-packed city is surveying the prizes of his permanent collection: leather straps, condom boxes, video porn playing on large screens. He stops and points at a 1940s Wonder Woman comic book cover. "Just look at her," Daniel Gluck says. "The cinched waist, the high heels, the rope ... She's always tying people up." Wonder Woman is among the tamer attractions at the Museum of Sex, which opens this weekend in Manhattan and aims to catalog American sexuality, from 19th-century brothels to turn-of-the-millennium sex parties. In a city that has affectionately shortened the names of its culture hubs --MoMA, the Met -- the new museum has already been dubbed MoSex. And it has stirred opposition from those who say it is merely a celebration of smut. The state rejected an early attempt by Gluck to create a tax-sheltered foundation to support the museum. And William Donohue, head of the 350,000-member Catholic League, attacked the museum weeks before its opening, suggesting it should include a death chamber to mark the "wretched diseases" caused by promiscuity. "They can talk all they want about the scholarly veneer on this," said Louis Giovino, a Catholic League spokesman. "So it's historical. That makes it quaint? It's porn." To museum officials, though, the collection tells a fascinating story of evolving sexual subcultures and their unending war with each generation's vice patrols. They contend the museum is a venture of history, even art. Patrons, who must be 18, can walk through a sexual timeline of sorts covering nearly 200 years. There is a touch-screen guide to the sex parlors that sprouted downtown in the early 1800s. Eugen Sandow, a muscle-bound curiosity of the 1890s who charged women $100 to feel his biceps, flexes on a black-and-white video. In the 20th-century galleries, pornography flourishes on the museum's walls, from a Charlie Chaplin-style silent film to 1950s lesbian pulp fiction to porn idols of the 1980s and 1990s. One picture from the 1960s advertises a self-whipping machine for women. The museum pays considerable attention to police activities, such as raids on gay bathhouses and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's push to rid Times Square of triple-X adult shops. "The vice squads here were very effective," said Grady T. Turner, who left the New York Historical Society to become executive curator. "That has always created a very interesting dynamic between mainstream culture and subculture." All this is housed on the corner of 27th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, next to a row of banks and across the street from a dinnerware store. The museum's windows are painted solid white, and Gluck said he plans to keep them that way. Museum officials said they give fair treatment to all aspects of sex, presenting facts and not taking sides on sexual debates. One display recounts the explosion of AIDS in the 1980s, and another shows crude, early abortion tools. Gluck, 34, had the idea for the museum four years ago. He decided later to make it a purely private venture, worried that any help from public money would bring protest with each new exhibit. The museum's first exhibition, debuting Saturday, is an examination of how New York City changed sex in America. It includes maps of "sexually significant" Manhattan sites, such as the location of the country's first condom store and locales where couples have had public sex, and invites visitors to share their stories. Gluck said he has ideas for other exhibits, some hardly risqué at all. One, he said, may take a closer look at Chinese erotic foot binding. Visitors to the Museum of Sex will be charged $17, a bit steep even by New York museum standards. Discount plans for frequent patrons will be offered. And Gluck promises a gift shop -- nothing too racy, mostly books and T-shirts. Whether all that will be enough to keep MoSex afloat remains to be seen. Noting the peep shows still in Times Square, the Catholic League's Giovino said: "It'll be interesting to find out if anyone wants to pay $17 when they can get the same thing for a quarter on Eighth Avenue." Source/Publisher: |