11/15/10

Doubleday Book Club - Any 3 Smuts for $1.

So, you're probably sitting there thinking "Dirty thoughts have always been part of the male mind, and women only started thinking dirty in the last thirty years or so." No WAY hose A!
The ladies love the smut*. This 1951 ad from McCall's wants you to join the Doubleday book club and get one of a bunch of smutty books every month for a dollar or something. Maybe the sex scenes are tame by today standards? "Her mouth was on fire for him, and she could feel his need for her, in his fragrant, well-groomed beard. Oh, such Vitalis!" I dunno, but "Shireen...whose ways with men would make even Amber blush!" leaves only a teensy bit to the imagination.

Sure, the titles and language are more veiled than your average porn movie, but that's not saying much. Men's smut is intentionally overt and blatant. Women's smut is more subtle, spelling out almost everything you need to know, and then letting the imagination fill in the one tiny last detail, so you don't feel as naughty, apparently.

Rid shampoo now cures disembodied
floating head infestations as well as lice!
Anyway, there's an interesting little art thing in this ad. Look at the space created inside the luxuriating woman's arm and head. She's the one over the book "Infinite(ly odd) Woman". The line along the side of her face is strangely geometric. It doesn't look right. If this were the era of Photoshop, I'd think the artist did a bad job cutting her out of a background. Click picture for biggerness.
Here's a little secret. Realistic paintings of people are nearly always always HEAVILY photo-referenced. This means that they take pictures of people in the pose they want, and then paint the picture of that exact photo, embellishing details and adjusting the pose while they do so. Nobody paints realistic people purely from imagination. Even if you can pull it off, it takes a long time and you probably have a deadline anyway. So, the line of that lady's head must have been that way in the photo reference. Still, I think she'd look more natural if there were some variation, like with the contour of her hair. And if she had an ear. Just my two cents.

*Just to be clear. There's nothing wrong with smut.

2 comments:

Sue said...

Need a sidebar. Not a post.

PhilAreGo@gmail.com said...

Hmm. You may be right. Thanks for (hopefully) continued reading!

Post a Comment