Part One: The Surprising Evil of 1950s Men's Adventure Magazines

the name of our Twitter account. And I think that's internationally how names get recognized.

that's that's you know, cash in the bank baby. So sorry, Pakistan, but the new India is here and it's uh, well, this week it's it's several hours of discussing Men's adventure magazines from the nineteen forties.

book you published this year, Escape from in Cell Island. Oh, Okay, good, Yeah, yeah, because your book, you know, is a is a fun fictional romp that also deals with, you know, some of the questions about like the toxicity of aspects of how men are cultured in our society, right, which is you know, one of the more interesting things about that book. So, Margaret,

here's the thing. I wanted to both provide a little bit of a free Christmas time, you know, advertisement for that book, and it felt like the best way to do that was to delve into the history of like masculinity and particularly like the weird media that formed a certain chunk of men's concepts of masculinity for an entire generation, specifically like two generations before we came onto the scene.

And that's why we're going to talk about men's adventure magazines. Now, most of you have seen or heard of these to some extent. They come up on social media every now and then different you know, when I worked at Cracked, we had some articles written by Sean Baby making fun

of them. They're these ridiculous magazines that would often have like these garish illustrations of like a muscly man fighting hundreds of crabs, or like, yeah, Nazis and pirates grabbing like women and ripping their bodices and stuff, and like it'll have these insane titles for like different articles about like lust, slaves of the Nazi Caribbean or some shit

like that, like wild stuff. But all of these kind of you know, there's a bunch of different publications that all sort of fall in under the broad category of men's adventure, and men's Adventure is sort of a genre name for a type of publication that started in the nineteen forties after World War Two, and had its heyday

in the late fifties and sixties. Most of these magazines had died off by the seventies, but while they were alive, they featured a mix of risque photos, some of which were just straight up softcore pornography, some of which were, you know, a bit shy of that, and illustrations, alongside thrilling articles and short stories about extreme sports, daredevil activities, various fictional pulp tales of two fisted detectives and cowboys and adventure and shit, a lot of which was like

framed as these are true stories, you know, but it's basically a fiction magazine. It's basically it's a short story magazine right, and in fact, a number of authors who were really influential by like the seventies and eighties got their start writing for these. I believe he's Mario Puto or something, the guy who wrote The Godfather the book

got his start writing story. He wrote, by his count probably published millions of words in these magazines under a bunch of pseudonyms over the Oh, yeah that is possible. We'll read something he wrote today.

published in these gotten decidedly lower as well. Is a great face right now, Yeah, Man's Story, Climax.

I was shocked to see this. I did not realize how far back my former career had its roots called ten faults that make You Repulsive to Women, which I think I've run across that exact title in modern articles before.

I find that really insightful and compelling. Yeah. Yeah, and you will find there's some like really direct quotes from some of these articles that makes it clear, like, oh, that is exactly who you're serving, Like, yeah, these guys who they you know, they had always wondered what would my life have been like if I'd had that sort of like searing baptism of fire, you know what. I'm

maybe all of the things. And I think there's a lot of men who like think that that, like, oh, if I just had some like searing combat experience, you know, I would I wouldn't have these hang ups, I wouldn't be scared in this way, i'd have the courage to do this or do that. You know, a lot of our media reinforces this attitude, which you know, let me tell you, folks, I don't think that's the most common

reaction to experience in combat. I think the most common reaction to experience in combat is being very very scared. Yeah yeah, and not liking it, wanting to avoid getting shot at again, wanting to avoid you know, getting shot again.

point here. So yeah, back to Yeah, I find that guy's description of like who these magazines were for compelling because it gets it an issue in a feeling that is still very much present today among a huge chunk of men in our country. This is why so much

of the A fifteen market. Literally this the next sentence, Margaret is, this is why so much of the equipment market into the gun industry is sold the way it is, right, That's why you get guys doing this fucking like Kyle Rittenhouse shit where they show up with guns at protests because they want a chance to do something, to like shoot somebody, to be to do something that feels like this thing that they have in their heads, like the

arkond of masculinity. But also they're scared of real combat, right, Yeah, so they much prefer this this sort of thing, like there's this necessary In Ukraine, Yeah, a lot of the you get a lot of the first wave of American volunteers who went into Ukraine were like back rankers, and a decent chunk of them were like, oh my God, I did not was not ready for this sort of thing. Now, obviously there were a lot lot of guys who went in there and you know, did and are continuing to

be in heavy combat. But like there's a there's a there's a desire among a lot of people for like I want, I want the thing that military action confers to me, but I don't want to like sign away years of my life to the military or anything like that. And I hope I found, you know, a way around that, right Like that that's I think, you know what a lot of this, I think that impulse is at the core of these magazines and at the core of a lot of things that are really ugly about our present society.

So much of the toxicity I think in the United States right now is centered around men who never saw combat or served, but also don't have a concept of masculinity that extends beyond the ability to do violence and the capacity to convince other people that you can do violence.

in our culture get darker and more extreme. To take from you know, gun culture again, there's a lot of media that shifted from like protecting your home and protecting yourself to like preparing to wage a war against woke groomers. This tonal drift was also present, and I find this fascinating, was also present in the men's adventure magazines of a bygone era. You can see a similar drift habin over the course of time that these magazines are being published.

And I'm going to quote from that Huffington Post article again. At a certain point in the nineteen sixties, men adventure polps took a darker turn. They went from innocent stories of men fighting nature's beasts in the woods to more twisted fare like warring gangs of Nazi biker rapists. As author Humphrey Knips said to me once in reference to the evolution of porn magazines, you can't have brinksmanship without a brink Men's pulps went the same way as the

porn magazine. They died because they had nowhere else to go, which you might think about in like the text of our culture too. But yeah, without further ado, Margaret, all right, let's let's slide off of that uncomfortable line of thinking, right and head into death crabs of our first episode. I don't think there's a Nazi in this first one, but don't worry, we'll get there. Okay. So here's our first issue, climax, exciting stories for men. Now we've got

some We've got some good titles in here. You've got a drawing of a pirate looks like he's about to cut a man's face off. There, buccaneer Burko and the slave Girls. And then you've got an article on a French tourist trap that I'm gonna tell you right now, just some soft core pornography.

these were geared towards. Uh huh. The ads in the first ad in this magazine is a full pager on how you too can make big money in this booming industry, And when you read it a little closer, it's an ad about how to start a business going door to door cleaning furniture and rugs and offering flameproofing up cells that are just spraying carcinogen cocktails on people's chellranger. Like that's what it is, is like give everybody fucking cancer.

This ad is mostly noteworthy because it features there's like this chunk of it where's like these men are building lifetime businesses and it's like a bunch of dudes heads with like descriptions of their success. And it's one of the most beautiful fifties guy montages I've ever seen in my life. Look at look at all these fifties guys. Like one of them's got the slicked backed, combed, fucking

dapper dan ass hair. One guy's got a baffling looks like his entire fit all of his teeth have been punched out of him, and he's got like a massive bald spot.

And right after the Anima ad, Margaret is an ad for the Rosicrucions.

two soldiers and flying aces. The most interesting one here is about Pete Townsend, England's warrior playboy is a legend musician. Not that Pete Townsend, Margaret, not that Pete Townsend, Okay, he was in fact.

So the fucking the The the introductory art is like a fifties car, you know, giant fucking steel vehicle with like a scared man and a woman, a horrified young woman with her hands on her fucking cheeks, and a greaser with like a big fucking elvis pompadour and a leather jacket holding his knife to like a cherubic child's neck. The kid looks like he looks like one of those like fucking ceramic children, and like a Christmas village that you buy.

a thick mug. Here in the cold and darkness, the kid had been watching and wanting. When he closed his eyes, he could almost taste the rich, hot coffee. He could even see rows and rows of juicy fat apple pies and dark brown chocolate frosted cakes, all the good sweet things of life waiting to be eaten. The angry eyes open and stared at the window again. If he went inside and asked for something to eat, the old man would laugh at him, push him, and tell him to

get out. In the big pocket of his torn dungarees, he felt the cold hardness of the bone handled knife. He pressed his thumb against the switchblade button, knowing the safety catch was on. I hate you, daddy, oh, he murmured softly. I don't have to beg nobody. I could just walk in there and take what I want, daddy O. And I ain't gonna walk no more on this dirty old road. I'm gonna get me some wheels, old daddy O. I'm gonna get me some nice shiny wheels.

to a stop in the gravel. A moment later, the car door slammed and a man stood silhouetted in the light of the diner window. The jacket didn't move until the man was inside, sitting at the counter, smoking a cigarette and looking at the menu. Then the black leather jacket walked slowly across the road, scuffing the paper, thin soles and worn heels over the tar. A high nasal voice, screeching a rock and roll song wailed through the diner as he swung the door open. How does Sonny, the

old man called from behind the counter. Pop grinned, showing twoless gums. Wary flashing eyes, skimmed over the old man and searched the room, sweeping past several wooden tables draped with red and white oilcloth, some straight back wooden chairs, a pinball machine, and the colored lights of the jukebox. There was a door in the back wall. The youth size fastened on the little man, who had turned from

the counter to look at him. The little man wore money clothes, a buttersoft dark sport coat, knit sports shirt, cream colored slacks, and shiny black tuled loafers. Come on, kid, sit down, the little man said, smiling. Pop toss a couple burgers for the kid. Two more pop specials coming up, the old I realize I'm now using the same voice for popping the old man. It's the gist of it is,

they're actually very nice and willing to give him free hamburgers. Yeah, but this the switchblade punk just is gets angrier and angrier, and in fact, he's just like continually filled with more rage as these men try to do nice things for him. And eventually, you know, the man who buys him the hamburgers explains that he's a traveling salesman and he's had

a tough life too. Write you know, he had a period of time when he was younger where where he was living a little bit rougher, and so he empathized correspondent a school to have corresponded school. It became a rich lawyer. Yeah, yeah, So the two of them like talk for a little while. And this guy Morell is like a long time ago. I was a wild, hungry punk like you. Maybe if someone would have staked me to a meal in a few bucks, it would have

changed a lot of things for me. Morel's voice became softer. I had a lot of dreams once, a lot of big dreams. Unexpectedly, he spun the spoon on the countertop. It fell to the floor with a shop clatter. But that's another story, Joe Morell. That's me, friend of stray dogs and cats and hungry kids. Morel took out his wallet, and the kid's eyes grew wide. He'd never seen so much money. Morell picked out two five dollars bills and cost him on the counter in front of Smitty. I

ain't begging, mister, Smitty said, between clinched teeth. No one said you were. Morrell replied stiffly, I'm trying to do something decent. Take it. Smitty ground the cigarette into the center of the top five dollars bill. I didn't ask for no favors. Morell jumped to his feet and grabbed Smitty's arm. Why you crazy kid. I had to put you across my knee and warm you're fanning. Fanny meant

a different thing back then. So at this point it becomes clear this kid is deranged, you know, just angrier and angrier that these people have tried to feed him, and like any person in this any kind of drifter in this situation, when you offer him food, he pulls out a switchblade and murders the old man and takes you hostage. Oh my god. Yeah that went further what he's gonna do right, Yeah, and that's how he kidnaps the little kid. They have to like guide the child

out over like the bleeding corpse of the old man. Yeah, he goes. It goes very fast from like nice man offering a drifter a sandwich to the drifter murdering everybody and kidnapping them. I like that.

maybe maybe we'll get back to it later. But I want to talk a little bit about why this story exists because I looked into this some because I was like, you know, I think for most people of like my age, I'm sure of your age too, the like the primary like touch point of a greaser is like the fawns, right, Like, that's like, that's the archetypal greaser. Maybe you think back to oh, what's that that musical? That's the just in the Travolta travolt No, the one that Travolta was in

the gangs fight. You're the one that I want Greece Greece grease, right, you know? Yeah, those those are kind and yeah, I think some you know, some some West Side stories a little bit of that. Sure, I sure don't so.

bit that I've read. But greaser's again in the kind of most common pictures of them are like, yeah, the fawns and stuff. But a lot of Greasers, like the first wave of these guys, were not white people, right.

They were black and Hispanic kids from economically depressed areas that did not benefit from the postwar boom that characterized so much of the American experience in this era, Greasers were also tied into the very new phenomenon of motorcycle gangs, which also scared the hell out of a lot of people, right, Now, the actual term greaser did not come into common usage until the act the subculture had pretty much died out.

We're talking like the end of the sixties, right. The book that kind of popularized the term greaser was Essie Hinton's The Outsiders, and you know, that book was really popular, and then it kind of that and some other books that sort of and then like TV shows and movies that had kind of dealt with greasers kind of lodged themselves in the imagination of a generation of filmmakers who

were little kids in the forties. Right in fifties, guys like George Lucas, right, you know, and then you know, guys like George Lucas made films that featured greasers and kind of cemented the cultural image of them as something that was was not evil, right, But if you're going back to like the forties and fifties, they were often seen as like these are dangerous, like often kind of

like foreign influences in our communities. They're violent, they've got these switchblades, which there was also kind of a moral panic about the danger of switchblades.

he's cool. He's he's like fifties cool. He's like no, they were definitely not seen as cool. They were seen as like, you know, a dangerous threat to public morals, which is cool. Like mainstream attitude was not that, right, Yeah, this, this, this story is what the mainstream attitude was, like, these are dangerous rift drifters and stuff, right, I do think that makes them cooler, But that's that is I didn't know that. I wasn't really aware of like the etymology

or the history of like the Greaser is a cultural figure. Yeah, so that's pretty sweet. So I should now let you know that. Immediately after this fascinating article follows follows the My Favorite Girl photo contest. This is uh, you're supposed to take a picture of your girlfriend, right or your wife and send it into this magazine to be published. They don't note a whole bunch of time, we will not publish this without a letter where the girl signs off on her photo being used.

nothing like particularly objectional about the photos themselves. We're gonna talk about All the Girls Loved Danny, which, as best as I can tell, is a fantasy story meant to titillate men with the free wheeling life of a sixty style bachelor with a little black book. But since the story again, these are kind of soft core porn mags

of their time. But also the time is the sixties, so like you have to be pretty soft with the soft core, right like this is this is not stuff that even even the the the most like upset about sex you know person today would not find most of this particularly risque in this magazine. There are some that are just like naked people right Yeah, But but Climax, oddly enough, is one of the tamer ones that I've

come across. Yeah, So I find this interesting because it's this like literal cultural insight into this like idealized, pseudo idealized figure of like the the Hugh Hefner kind of bachelor. Right, this is the period of time in which the concept of a bachelor of like you know, this kind of like man of leisure has started, because largely because of Hugh Hefner, has started to become a thing. And this dude is very much the dude in the story is

very much invented in that image. Because this is the time. It is the story can't endorse him sleeping around constantly, so it while it describes his like outrageously prolific sex life, he's like constantly exhausted by the sheer number of dames. He's got a ball every week. Right, He's just like unhappy about all of the ladies. He's got a fuck And that's why the story, by the way, yeah, like this is a story about him like falling in love

and like settling down with one woman. But you do get quote, and it's, by by the way, apparently by a woman. Now, the fact that it says it's by Dorothy Glazer doesn't mean it was written by that person. Because they would just kind of stick names on a lot of these. But uh, here's here's how this thing opens, because it gives some insight into a moment in culture. Danny yawned into the mouthpiece, listening to the buzz click buzz in his left ear as he glanced idly at

the pencil list in his hand. He knew the list well, he'd been working on it all evening. It was the plan for the week. Tuesday, Alice, Wednesday, eleanor Thursday, Turkish baths, Friday Flow, Saturday, question mark, Sunday poker.

on a piece of paper completely. It's like, you know what a Turkish bath like a a I mean a lot of times historically they are, but like a Turkish bath, it's kind of like if you've read about like Roman baths and stuff. Yeah, a success or to that. It's like a big public bait. They'll have hot poles and cool poles massages in them.

feel Saturday, I'm really in trouble. He recognized the eager voice that answered his call, and he sat up alertly, his voice a model of cheerful charm. Hi, Gloria, Baby, how's the girl? Why Danny? How lovely to hear from you after all this time? He ignored the little dig that's the best chet Yeah dancer in the world. Eh, feel like doing it again? Say Saturday night? Saturday. She managed to express doubt and interest in the one word, and he could tell she wanted to be coaxed a bit,

but Danny just yawned again and waited. After a brief silent Gloria went on brightly, Why I guess that would be all right. Saturday happens to be the one night I'm free this week, aren't you lucky? Danny smiled smugly at the receiver. Pick you up at six, baby, we'll have dinner and make a real night of it. So this is uh, yeah, it's good. We get into you know, he says, like, yes, she knew what She knew exactly what he meant. All the girls on the list were

available to make a real night of it. Wonderful darling, she said, I've missed you terribly. Same here, he lied, I have to rush now, sweets see a Saturday. Danny sighed deeply, replacing the phone in its cradle. He was safe for a while anyway, and he knew he ought to be damn glad of it, but he felt sunk, miserable. He wanted a net with an ache that was frightening and its force and persistence filling in Gloria's name next

to Saturday night. He thought about the past three weeks the same routine as this, the only thing different being the girls, blondes brunette's redheads, tall, short, slim, plump. Yet they all reacted the same way, willing easy, just like the girls who had satisfied him for ten of his twenty six years. Again, a lot of sixteen year olds having saxony stories. But now as long as everyone involved as sixteen, I let's not assume that.

used to. Smoking in bed and staring at the ceiling, Danny relived what had been one of the most important hours of his youth. Of course, his twenty first birthday had been notable as a present, his father had given him an interest in his enormously successful manufacturing business just three years before he had died. But most memorable was Danny's sixteenth birthday, when his father had taken him out

for a walk and manda man talk Danny. Mister Taylor had said, you're dating girls now, and you're beginning to get ideas like a man. Now. I'm not asking you, I know. Danny had shuffled along beside his father, his face flaming. Suddenly, he had shoved his hands in his pockets and couldn't say a word. And I won't tell you not to get involved. His father had gone on, I know damn well, you will anyway, so I say, go ahead. It's perfectly normal and natural. But let me

give you some advice. First of all, there's safety in numbers. Go with a lot of girls, not just one. And most important of all, don't mess around with nice girls. There are always plenty who are even more willing than you. If a girl says no, drop her, forget her, she doesn't even exist. There will always be another one who knows the score, even at your age. Daddy, I guess I'm glad that he said drop them.

let you go. She'll convince herself that it's love, and she'll hang on to you till she gets you to marry her. Be careful of that trap.

this is the porn part of it. Uh. Then we get to a story called The Hunter Who Died Twice, which is a story about cannibalism and I believe a zombie white hunter in the bush of Africa. It's not very good, but it's followed by another World War two story and then Buccaneer Burko and the Slave Girls, which is quite fun. I say fun, quite racist. So the story opens with the requisite boarding action by a group of pirates led by the notorious Burco, an Irish stereotype

so offensive. It's almost as bad as the racist caricature of an Asian man on the cover art, like it is he is. There's like so many lines about like yeah, I'm yeah, yeah, fascinating. Yeah. So, after they defeat a

merchant vessel's crew at all, discover a group of slave women. Now, this is largely a wish fulfillment story, featuring a fetishized irishman as captain who notably refuses to molest any of the captured women, although the rest of his crew is allowed to yeah, and winds up yeah, falling for this redheaded slave woman who looks like the girls back home and Tipperary. Yeah, it's a there's some like fun racial descriptions of enslave women in this that I will not

be reading because they're not actually fun. Yeah that makes sense. Yeah, so it's not as interesting as the title would suggest. So instead, Margaret, I'm going to say we should move on to a new magazine, Courage from nineteen fifty seven, and this one's got a real banger of a cover art.

Here there's a fucking sled dog ripping out a man's throat, and then we've got yeah, inside a Desert Harem, Trail of the Death Dog, Confessions of a Jigglow, The Six Scanty Costumes of Diane and I Was Trapped in Terror Shrench. What an incredible list of stories. What they deserved all that that dollar award or whatever they got.

Desert harem story. But what drew my interest once it was open were the ads, which are again as perfect to dive into the male id as you're likely to see on page one week it and I want Sophie to show this to you important medical facts for every man who was past his fortieth birthday. Men too go through change of life. Doctors call it male climacteric and

it's talking about like men, male menopause. It's first off, I'll be honest, I was a little impressed that that was a concept people were talking about in nineteen fifty seven. But they were talking about it purely to sell vitamin and supplements.

so yeah, it's important. Of course, when you get to the actual ingredient list of the vitamin pills they're trying to sell this guy, it's basically red bull, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin B one, vitamin B twelve, vitamin B two, vitamin D, nyasin, vitamin B six, calcium creatine, iodine, and some wheat germ. Defat it.

like a craggy man's face underneath the text. This man is wanted by you. This man is wanted by you. He has left a path of violence, lust, greed. He is a two time loser. Every minute he is at large, death walks the streets. You are a trained investigator. Bits of evidence, each insignificant alone, fit together like a crazy jigsaw puzzle. They paint the way that leads to the man who is wanted by you. I mean, like we sell ads like this, I hope. So Margaret for the.

the Chinese army rather than using guns. After that is Trail of the Death Dog, which features the poll quote the husky was strong, smart, vicious, and hated men. His muscle knew the taste of human blood and liked it.

an adventure magazine. The most interesting piece in this issue is a hinge between the sad middle aged guy, wish fulfillment stuff, racism, and straight up pornography. It's a little article titled inside a Desert Harem, and unlike everything else in this series, had actually taught me some really interesting facts about history. Okay, I was surprised by that, don't get me wrong. Here's how the article opens, just as William O. Douglas of the US Supreme Court once asked

a merchant why the Sudan exported so few crops. You're wrong, Afendi, smiled the merchant. We do export a huge crop, not cotton or wheat perhaps, but something far more valuable. We export slaves. Pharaoh was a girl of twelve when she was stolen from her family. For two years, she was kept with the tribe which stole her, Then she was sold to a slave trader. For another six months, she traveled the desert as the trader added more slaves to

his caravan. Finally, she was sold to an Arab harem at the slave gate in Mecca, the traffic and girls is both open and brisk. Now, I was ready for that all to be bullshit. And this article is not specifically a true story. But all of that stuff is stuff that happened, actually, and I was kind of unaware of a lot of the dimensions of this. But after World War One, the area that we know today as Saudi Arabia became an independent kingdom called the Kingdom of

Hejas I think is the first name. And slave trading had been illegal in the Ottoman Empire during its later period, but in Hejas it was allowed to continue once again, and a brisk slave trade opened up between Sudan, Ethiopia and the Kingdom. Right, this is a modern slave trade. As such, victims were often convinced, or rather their parents were convinced, to sell their children. This was often framed as giving them a better life in Arabia during parts

of the journey where slavery was illegal. Because some of this route often included going through countries where the slave trade was not allowed, traders and their victims often disguised themselves as pilgrim on the road to Mecca. It was also not uncommon for travelers who did the hajaj, who went to Mecca to sell their servants or their poor friends who they had gone on the hajaj with in order to afford a return journey home. That is the

thing that happened too. By nineteen thirty, about ten percent of the people living in Mecca were estimated to be enslaved. Many were domestic servants or Hara members, but many of them were also used as laborers like the men generally were particularly used as like agricultural laborers and the like. Today, the UAE and Saudi Arabia engage in a system of guest worker visas that have somewhat similar dimensions. I don't think it's quite as abusive, but it's pretty fucking bad.

A lot of people are aware of this, but back in the day it was just straight up slavery. And when I found this article, I was kind of immediately taken by the fact that the woman in the artwork is depicted as white, and it's a pretty like, not great piece of art. I wouldn't say, if you're trying to talk about a very serious story about a social issue, it's pretty offensive. In a number of ways. All of this caused regular international condemnation. In nineteen forty eight, the

UN declared slavery a crime against humanity. In nineteen fifty one, the British informed the US State Department that there were at least fifty thousand slaves in Saudi Arabia and they were increasingly being used by the oil industry, the red sea trade. Obviously, because they're being used by the oil industry, like, that's part of why we don't do any fucking thing. For a while, the red sea trade continued through the

nineteen fifties. By the nineteen sixties, there had been enough international outcry that it had become an embarrassment to the king, who issued a decree forbidding the sale of slaves, not the possession of slaves, early in nineteen sixty two. Slavery itself continued to be legal for several more months until it was officially abolished that novemberses. So I was unaware of that. That's interesting. So I got to give the story credit. Yeah, it informed me about a piece of

history that I was not aware of. So that part's good. What's not good is the article itself outside of it, because all everything I learned was like that first paragraph I was like, the fuck were they selling slaves in Mecca ninety five? I was like, oh, yeah, this was

a thing, this is a problem, was a problem. Okay, interesting the story, the actual history is of course interesting and important, but it is just window dressing for the story, which is soft core pornography that features a young Circassian girl who is described to us as not quite fifteen. When it was her turn, she was led forward while the slave trader extolled her beauty in her skills, sexual

and otherwise. Unlike the girls who had gone before, Farah did not remove her robe to get the bidding started. She didn't have to. The men standing around the edge of the raised platform of the slave block could see her face, and the spiel by the slave trader was enough to get things going. The bidding reached one hundred dollars before it began to slacken. And then it describes her taking off her clothes, which we're not going to go through. Yeah, it's I don't know, it's pretty gross,

Margaret gross. Yeah, so I don't think I'm going to read the rest of that to you.

of historic information I was unaware of. We should probably talk more about the slave trade of like Circassian and Georgian and our Menian and Ethiopian and Sudanese girls down to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, that that maybe should be a topic of more discussion than it is, I.

sex work. Right, And it's like so hard because like the criminalization of sex work makes it so hard for us to talk about the actual bad things that are happening, right, absolutely, yeah, no, I I And then also, of course anything that's like Islamophobia is like a really major problem, and so it makes people afraid to touch what we should be talking about.

And actually, that's something I actually really appreciate about your show, is that you are willing to I mean, not like specifically look for people to condemn who are outside of certain circles, but not be afraid to say, like, hey, it's like bad when slavery happens, right, that's like I.

that show. Yeah, And it's also worth because this is a big a chunk of this and the reason why this article exists is that part of this slave trade was like white slave trade, right, So that is super that is why I writ and exciting to like the fifties mind, but like a lot of the girls that are being trafficked and boys that are being trafficked for that matter, are from like Ethiopia and the Soudan and are much more often a much larger chunk of the

total number of people being enslaved by the Kingdom, but they are being forced to work as laborers in the oil industry, they're being forced to work as domestic servants more often, and so there's simply not any kind of real care about that by the guys writing this magazine. Right, they want to tell a porn story, right, you know really Yeah, anyway, Margaret, how you feeling two magazines into our exploration of a masculine fiction.

I'm so sad. It's like one of my favorite genres of movie is like the trashy road trip movie, where like they're going to or the kids want to throw the biggest party in the world.

I do think there has to be a degree of grossness to poulp right, not every story, but like Polpe needs to be grimy a little, you know, otherwise it's not really Again, grimey does not mean talking about marrying off sixteen year olds, but like you got to have some like the the Grease Are with a Switchblade story, I think is perfect, right, fair enough, Like that's that's that's that's fine to me. You know, it's both like

intellectually interesting. It shows you this like fascinating glimpse into like the kind of cultural fear that existed during this like very much lost moment in time, in at least our pop culture memory. And it's also very funny. No totally, I mean, don't get me wrong.

them all in full glorious color. There's a shitload of them on here sixty five, So yeah, you know, significant amount of reading if you're in the mood for some of these some of these stories. And we will continue with some more of these in Part DEU. But first, Margaret, you got any pluggles to plug.

with a shotgun and good old fun times. I think you might enjoy it. There is a there's actually not an audiobook version of it yet. There will be, but there's a print version and an ebook version, and you can read it and you can read it in afternoon. That's the great thing about I have a short attention span. You have a short attention span. I write for short attention spans. That's what I got.