What’s Really Driving the Tradwife Phenomenon?

 

Lex Anteinternet: How the Sexual Revolution Brought Us Tradwives | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

Lex Anteinternet: How the Sexual Revolution Brought Us Tradwives | I...:  

How the Sexual Revolution Brought Us Tradwives | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

 

Marilyn Monroe and the Wedding Industrial Complex

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, March 23, 1946. Marilyn Monroe and the ...: A really interesting Richard C. Miller photograph of Marilyn Monroe was taken, which we learned of due to Reddit's 80 Years Ago Sub, and...

Saturday, March 23, 1946. Marilyn Monroe and the Wedding Industrial Complex. Truman warns Stalin, and holds up testing the bomb. No public necking in Japan.

A really interesting Richard C. Miller photograph of Marilyn Monroe was taken, which we learned of due to Reddit's 80 Years Ago Sub, and which we repost here via fair use.

Miller had "discovered" Monroe, who was already modeling following her photo spread in World War Two's Yank.  Miller, typical for the era, photographed her in swimsuits, including bikinis (very modest ones by today's standards), but also  had a an entire series of other topics, including the subject shooting firearms.  Here he depicted her in a wedding dress.

The real life model had already been married and divorced by this time, having married at age 16 and then filing for divorce while her husband was deployed in the Navy during the Second World War.  This photograph is actually commonly claimed to be a wedding photo from her first marriage, which it is not, although the veil is remarkably similar to the one she actually wore in her wedding.

Actual photograph of Monroe at her first wedding, when she was 16 years old.

In the studio photograph she's holding some sort of book with a Christian cross on it, with that style of cross depiction very common for the era.  This is what causes us to note this photograph in a way, as it brings up the topic addressed here:

The Wedding Industrial Complex

Notes from the Spesia Underground

A really interesting episode.

This really fascinating look at modern weddings brings up a whole host of things we routinely discuss here, including agrarianism and subsidiarity.  The episode from Catholic Stuff You Should Know points out the extent that weddings were, at at the time the photo of Norma Jean was taken above still remained, community affairs and not big bride focused shows.

We've lost a lot here.

And we really need to recapture it.

While indelicate, this also shows the portrayal of a really beautiful woman before Playboy perverted all of that.

Monroe was, as is well known, Playboy's first, and unwilling, centerfold.  But what's interesting here is that prior to Playboy arriving on the scene, this was not an uncommon depiction of a really beautiful woman.  There were, of course, already some women who were focused on for being really busty, Jane Russell giving an example, but the theme did not absolutely dominate.  To look at the 19 year old Monroe here, you would not have thought of her in that fashion.  A decade later, you would, and even after Life intervened to push her nude photograph first as an art item.  We've dealt with that before here as well, although frankly we need to modify our entry.  That post is here:

Appearance. Shape and being in shape and women (men will come next).

Also posted via fair use, Colliers had an article on keeping everyone employed year around, showing how times were in fact changing.

We've looked at that here too.

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

Lex Anteinternet: Friday, June 26, 2015: Obergefell v. Hodges

Lex Anteinternet: Friday, June 26, 2015: Obergefell v. Hodges: 

Friday, June 26, 2015: Obergefell v. Hodges

June 26, 2015: Obergefell v. Hodges

Only a decade?  

It seems like a lot longer.

I felt at the time, and I still do, that the Obergefell decision was an absolute disaster.  It was legally deficient in its reasoning, which was pathetic.  Justice Kennedy's text failed to grasp the existential nature of marriage, but perhaps that was understandable as Kennedy, currently 88 years old, was in his 20s and 30s in the 1960s.  Indeed, he turned 30 in 1966, by which time Americans were well on their way to forgetting what the biological purpose of sex is, and what the nature of marriage is.

Kennedy's opinion embraced a sort of Age of Aquarius sense of "love" being the reason for marriage, at its core root.  Love is an aspect of marriage, hopefully, and there's a lot to that, but sex is as well and the type that leads to children, at least frequently.  Indeed, the entire institution and everything about it is oriented in that direction.

That has very little to do with homosexuality in that unions between the same gender don't result in children.  I know the arguments about adoption and the like, but that's fairly far from the point as well.  Indeed, in a way, that gets into the following topic about IVF that we covered recently.

IVF and a Half-Cath | June 11, 2025

Something that the generation that came of age after World War Two really brought into the culture is sort of the opposite of the Rolling Stone's skifflesque You Can't Always Get What You Want.  That generation pretty much got almost all of what they wanted, and still are.  That sense of entitlement resulted in cultural self centeredness in which you are entitled to be what you want to be and everyone else has to darned well accept it and the consequences.

The problem was and is, however, that Obergefell, as it strayed so far from the law, and so far from where  the culture then was (it's a horrible example of the old trying to get ahead of the culture) that it was bound to spark a massive reaction.  And it did.

The populist right rage that developed soon after was already burning, but Obergefell poured gasoline on the fire.  The culture had lost much of the conservative wisdom on the nature of sex and marriage already, and had gone through Chesterton's fence with a bulldozer in this regard.  A culture that had accepted, prior to the early 1950s that sex was properly in marriage, and properly between married men and women, had gone to pretty much accepting that sex was entertainment and marriage was a celebration of love rather than a loving (hopefully) childrearing, economic, natural unit.  People basically forgot what their natures produced and men in particular figures that they were entitled to play around with Fran Geraud, and women figured they had to endure it.  And that's where we remain today.  A culture that basically thinks the Hawk Tuah Girl is amusing rather than a tramp.

But once that moral decay had reached the point where people who could excuse their own conduct could imagine themselves to somehow still be good Christians suddenly were confronted with homosexuals making the same intellectual arguments, and that being adopted by the Supreme Court, it was just too much.

It was also clear, in spite of what Kennedy thought, that Obergefell was going to open the floodgates of radical sexual behavior.  Same sex sexual conduct, no matter what a person thinks of it, had been around for time immemorial, although it frankly even now is not really very well understood.  But transgenderism had not been, or at least not in the same fashion.  The groups backing the concept of transgenderism rushed into the field and gained ground enormously, which large numbers of people were not and are not willing to accept, including some homosexuals and included many feminists.  

That this was going to cause massive civil disintegration was obvious.  Disorganized groups on the right and middle that were already upset by the loss of industrial jobs and immigration now were faced with a massive social advance on the left which did not square with their basic understanding of themselves, and for good reason.  To add to it, it was forced upon them.

None of this was necessary.  Various states were moving towards various civil unions for homosexuals as it was.  The slow march of legislation would have brought about a change, whether it was a good one or not, at a pace that would have been accepted.  That's what happened to the disaster of no fault divorce.  Instead Kennedy's opinion forced it all, and more than he had anticipated, all at once.

It destroyed respect for the Court and gave traditionalists of all types massive pause.  It started the rush towards right wing populism which was already going on.

It lead directly to Donald Trump.

Related threads:

The Supreme Court tries a bit to mop up a dog's breakfast. Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

Labels: 2010s, 2015, 2018, Commentary, Court, law, Monday at the bar, Natural Law, Politics, The Law, The Old Law, trends

Why Americans, irrespective of position, ought to cringe over Obergefell

Labels: Commentary, law, Marriage, Monday at the bar, Politics, Sic transit Gloria Mundi, The Law, The Practice of Law, trends, You heard it here first

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 89th Edition. Sidewalks and Swastikas

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 89th Edition. Sidewa...: 

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 89th Edition. Sidewalks and flags.

An interesting episode in Evansville:

‘This is awesome’: Casper organizes to cover up swastika display in Evansville

And an episode all played out against the background of the state's GOP going increasingly to the very far right.

I'll note that this is "Pride Month".  As I've noted before, I don't really get pride month for a bunch of reasons, one simple one being I don't see how a person can be "proud" of their sexual drive.  That just seems odd to me.  My views on the topic are found in the related thread links below, and a person can read them if they're interested.

I'm also kind of in the camp of the months just being the months, although I do see why Black History Month and Women's History Month got started to focus attention.

Anyhow, over time, Prime Month, which originally was limited to homosexuality, expanded out to LGBTQ, and that's another topic.  L G & Q are related topics, but T is really a seperate one entirely, a fact that has caused some Ls to be upset by being included with Ts, and understandably so.

Anyhow, that's the topic of the post.

As noted, this is Pride Month and the Mayor of Evansville, on her own volition, put out small rainbow flags at the Evansville Town Hall.  She noted that it represented a municipal spirit of acceptedness, although it was not a municipal act. It was a private one.

This shows something really interesting in general.  For native Wyomingites, the view towards LGBTQ topics long was "I don't care what you do, just leave me alone".  That's the native Wyoming view on a lot of things.

For this reason, for decades, locals in this community would find themselves in the grocery store line with a man wearing a tutu (I'm sincere on this), and think, "um. . .whatever".  Or in my case, "um. . . poor taste in dresses".

The current right wing populist view, however, is very much "I care exactly what you are doing and I'm going to force you to stop doing it".

For locals, therefore, this entire topic has been a bit odd.  There's been the movement towards "you must accept", which is generally met with "What?  I wasn't bothering you" while also being met with "you must stop them", which has been met with "Why?  They weren't bothering me".

Anyhow, the mayor put out flags.

This was, in turn, met with the actions of one Evansville resident who went out and drew swastikas on the sidewalk in protest.  In addition, he threatened to purchase German swastika flags and put them out.

Why swastikas?

Well, nobody can really figure that one out.  Asked about it in a town work session, he replied:

Yeah, there’s a difference. I’m not that stupid, but what I’m doing here is to make a point.

And what is that point?

Hard to figure.

Anyhow, Evansville residents reacted by having a sidewalk chalk fest.  Seems about the best possible reaction, really.

A lesson here is that street level Wyoming isn't nearly as far right as GOP.  At some point, that probably begins to have an effect.

Another lesson may very well be that the center needle on this has moved on, giving us an example of Yeoman's Twenty First Law of Behavior for the second time in two days.  If that's the case, social conservatives will have a pretty hard time actually moving things back to where they want, as that requires a cultural change, and that change may have already taken place in the opposite direction.

Somewhat related, Wyoming's lone Congressman is backing a bill in Congress to change Pride Month (and I don't know how it ended up being called that) to "Family Month".  A Hageman Facebook post stated:

This June, I am proud to cosponsor Rep. Mary Miller's resolution to officially declare June as Family Month.

It is time to reject radical ideologies and honor traditional family values that have shaped our country for generations.

A press release said something similar. 

Some Facebook wag  posted in reply:

Where's your Hageman family picture?

Whoever posted that was probably well aware that Ms. Hageman goes by her maiden name, under which her legal career was established prior to her marriage, and not the last name of her husband.  More significantly, she has no children.

I've always wondered if somebody would start to take notice of this.  As a far right Republican, Hageman ran on family values but, with no children of her own, made reference to her nephews and nieces, which aren't ballpark close to you own children.

Now, women don't have children for a lot of reasons.  Some can't, for various biological reasons.  Sometimes their spouse is sterile, either due to biological reasons or surgical mutilation.  Lots of times, however, children were simply avoided, a species of tragedy, frankly, for those who have had children and grasp how they complete your lives, and make you into a real adult.

In polite society, you don't ask, however.

But American polite society is nearly a t hing of the past anymore, and here maybe there's a point to raising it.  Amongst the things the far right of the GOP has embraced is pronatalism.  

Pronatalism is a philosophy that is based on the concept that (married) couples ought to have a lot of children.  Frankly the general thesis of it is that "our" culture is dying and we need to combat it by having children.  The concept has actually been around for a very long time and is sometimes associated with the phrase "the battle of the cradle" and the concept of "race suicide".  No less of President than Theodore Roosevelt advocated the idea, stating that a man or woman who was childless by choice "merits contempt."

Which is I guess why the question is fair game in regard to the Congresswoman.  I'm not suggesting that she has avoided children by choice (I don't know), and even if she had, I wouldn't suggest that, therefore causes her to "merit contempt"  However, ff you raise the topic, well then. . . questions can logically follow.

The current GOP has become so focused on this that its floated the idea of a baby bonus, something that hasn't been paid in a Western nation for years and which has never been done in the U.S.  The proposal was to pay parents of newborns $1,000, which is just about the cost of one week of Huggies.  It's a stupid idea.

From the perspective of Catholics, however, this is a lot of fish on Fridays' during Lent.  You find people adopting something sort of generally associated with you, in this case children in marriage, but for oddball secular reasons, and as if the concept is brand new.  Catholics don't have children in marriage as a part of a race war.  Indeed, Catholics don't really recognize the validity of the concept of "race" at all, which is pretty plain if you go to a Mass in any metropolitan area of more than 10,000 people.  By the same token, we don't eat fish on Fridays during Lent (or in many cases, the rest of the year) as we've adopted the Mediterranean Diet or something.  

This does bring up this, however.  If you want a lot more children, you could take on the topic of pharmaceutical birth control.

Oh my.

Indeed, nothing would be more likely to rocket the population back to a more traditional set of relationships between men and women than that.

There's been some fears, I might note, that the current set of populists would do just that.  It's quite clear that some in the National Conservative/Christian Nationalist camp, would do that if they could.  

Anyhow, sidewalk chalk over the top of swastikas was a good end to an odd story.

Related threads:

On Pride Month, the nature of Pride, and compelling opinions.

Lex Anteinternet: Pride and Unintended Consequences and the really unknowable views of Donald Trump.

Pride and Unintended Consequences.

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 88th Edition. A predictive issue and other ramblings. Order coming on women in combat roles. Trump's bolt shot.

Labels: Christian Nationalism, Military, National Conservatism, Pete Hegseth, Predictions, The Madness of King Donald, The relationship between men and women, The roles of men and women, transgenderism, You heard it here first, Pete Hegseth,2026 Election, 2028 Election, Christianity, Education, Evolutionary Biology, Kent State Incident, Mormon, Populism, Protestant, religion, Synchronicity, trends, University of Wyoming, Yeoman's twenty-first law of behavior

Lex Anteinternet: Mother

Lex Anteinternet: Mother: 

Mother

Today is Mothers Day, as surely everyone in the US is aware.

I don't know if I've ever commented on Mother's Day before, but I'm going to for a couple of odd reasons.

The first is this comment by Robert Reich for the day:

Robert Reich@RBReich·14h

Your Mother’s Day weekend reminder that the so-called “party of family values” has historically blocked:

-Paid family & medical leave

-Universal childcare

-Universal pre-K

-Expanded Child Tax Credit

-Programs to support reproductive health

Doesn’t sound very pro-family to me.

First I'll note that I have sort of a love/hate relationship with Reich.  Reich is very far left, but his economic commentary, in my view, is generally pretty good.  And like him, I'm greatly distressed over what Donald Trump is doing to the country.

But like a far lefty, he's bought into the seas of blood position of the Democratic Party. "Programs to support reproductive health" is Orwellian speech for infanticide.

Reich is Jewish, which always makes me wonder how he can support a thesis that holds that infants in the womb, earlier than a certain number of weeks, aren't people.  It's the exact same argument that resulted in the Holocaust.  It's the exact same argument that expanded into eugenics based homicide in Nazi Germany, and which has advanced murder in the guise of "assisted suicide" in various Western Nations.

I'll be frank that I've never been a huge fan of Mothers Day or Father's Day which remind me, in some ways of the Alcohol and Old Lace episode of the Andy Griffith Show in which two elderly sisters were distilling moonshine for "holidays", of which there were an insane number of manufactured ones.  But I really shouldn't be that way for Mother's Day.  There are real reasons to honor motherhood and what it entails.  But murdering infants isn't a good way to do it.

And there's no reason to pretend, no matter how much the left would like to, that the "my body, my choice" argument is a good one, or even a valid one.  A fetus in the womb has a body and its choice i not likely to be murdered.  And that body, genetically, is made up of the DNA of two people, not one.  You don't get ot be a mother through a unilateral act of self will. Motherhood in some instances wasn't planned, of course, but then much of life is not and a massive murderous do over isn't every justified.

The other reason I chose to post is that somebody I know had been at a Vigil Mass in which the attending celebrant mentioned mothers, but largely, apparently, in the context how mother's support their men, which was pretty much apparently it.  The celebrant was Indian (from India).  I'm only noting this as its so easy to forgot for Americans, and probably Europeans, how we are actually a minority of the globes' population, and the culture view of other people may be very much not the one we hold.

That oddly enough occured on the same day, yesterday, in which I listed to a Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World episode on 1 Esdras, which is in some (all?) Orthodox Bibles, but not the Catholic Bible, which is itself larger than most Protestant Biles.  In it, there's a debate between three Guards about what is the most powerful thing in the world.  One Guard presents this, which references the prior two arguments that came before his.:

Then the third, who had spoken of women and truth (and this was Zerubbabel), began to speak: “Gentlemen, is not the king great, and are not men many, and is not wine strong? Who is it, then, who rules them or has the mastery over them? Is it not women? Women gave birth to the king and to every people that rules over sea and land. From women they came, and women brought up the very men who plant the vineyards from which comes wine. Women make men’s clothes; they bring men glory; men cannot exist without women. If men gather gold and silver or any other beautiful thing and then see a woman lovely in appearance and beauty, they let all those things go and gape at her and with open mouths stare at her, and all prefer her to gold or silver or any other beautiful thing. A man leaves his own father, who brought him up, and his own region and clings to his wife. With his wife he ends his days, with no thought of his father or his mother or his region. Therefore you must realize that women rule over you!

“Do you not labor and toil and bring everything and give it to women? A man takes his sword and goes out to travel and rob and steal and to sail the sea and rivers; he faces lions, and he walks in darkness, and when he steals and robs and plunders, he brings it back to the woman he loves. A man loves his wife more than his father or his mother. Many men have lost their minds because of women and have become slaves because of them. Many have perished or stumbled or sinned because of women. And now do you not believe me?

“Is not the king great in his authority? Do not all lands fear to touch him? Yet I have seen him with Apame, the king’s concubine, the daughter of the illustrious Bartacus; she would sit at the king’s right hand and take the crown from the king’s head and put it on her own and slap the king with her left hand. At this the king would gaze at her with mouth agape. If she smiles at him, he laughs; if she loses her temper with him, he flatters her, so that she may be reconciled to him. Gentlemen, why are not women strong, since they do such things?”

It is profound, and note how it came in an ear in which women, in most of the world, would have been regarded as second class citizens.  I should note, however, that he went on to then discuss Truth, with that being the most powerful thing in the World.

While it likely shouldn't, that reminded me of Kipling's great poem, The Ballad of the King's Jest, which has this line:

Four things greater than all things are,—

Women and Horses and Power and War.

We spake of them all, but the last the most,

For I sought a word of a Russian post,

Of a shifty promise, an unsheathed sword

And a gray-coat guard on the Helmund ford.

Then Mahbub Ali lowered his eyes

In the fashion of one who is weaving lies.

Quoth he: “Of the Russians who can say?

“When the night is gathering all is gray.

“But we look that the gloom of the night shall die

“In the morning flush of a blood-red sky.

“Friend of my heart, is it meet or wise

“To warn a King of his enemies?

“We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,

“But no man knoweth the mind of the King.

“That unsought counsel is cursed of God

“Attesteth the story of Wali Dad. 

It's interesting how Kipling put it, "Four things greater than all things are--Women and Horses and Power and War".

Well, have a Happy Mother's Day.   

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, February 23, 1925. Puyi moves.

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, February 23, 1925. Puyi moves.: 

Monday, February 23, 1925. Puyi moves.

Deposed Chinese Emperor Puyi accepted a Japanese offer of projection and moved to the  moved to the Japanese concession of Tianjin.

An item from Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today sub:

Truly awful.

It's really the early 1920s, not the 1970s, that gave rise to a really powerful "women's liberation" movement, although you can find it building in the decades prior to that.  The 20s, however, saw it really blossom in much the same way that it would later, with much of the same goals.  As with the movement in the 70s, it met with some pretty nasty counter reactions.

Coeds themselves, meaning women in college, was a fairly new thing in this form.  It wasn't really until the post war economic boom of the 1920s that a lot of women began to leave home to attend college for a secondary education.  

I'm not a feminist, of course, but part of the horror of the Trump years is watching these sorts of attitudes creep back in and begin to be expressed openly.

Last edition:

Saturday, February 21, 1925. A Republican President declares American Forest Week.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Art, Calvin Coolidge, Cartoons, Clothing, Conservation, Daily Living, Movies, Teenagers, United States Forest Service, Women

Lex Anteinternet: The life of Fran Gerard/Francis Anna Camuglia.

Lex Anteinternet: The life of Fran Gerard/Francis Anna Camuglia. Wa...: 

The life of Fran Gerard/Francis Anna Camuglia. Was Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

The top half of the March 1967 centerfold depicting the 19 year old "Fran Gerard".  This photo was taken from Cynthia Blanton's webpage, where it appears in this fashion (i.e., you can't see her nude) and is put up here under the fair use exception.  No doubt if the full centerfold was spread out, Camuglia's happy smile would not be what attention was drawn to.

Lex Anteinternet: Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.: I ran into this item in a really roundabout way, that being a random link to a 1967 newspaper article.  That isn't mentioned in either o...

Sort of going down the rabbit hole, I suppose, on this one, but the story is so illustrative of certain things, most of them pretty sad, so it's worth an additional, illustrative, look.

Cynthia Blanton replied to the post here, which was extremely nice of her to do, on her being a doppelganger for Francis Anna Camuglia, the March 1967 Playboy "Playmate", who appeared in that role as Fran Gerard.  It turns out that my comment that they were close in age was not only correct, but there's an added freakish element of. The two young women were just eight months apart in age and, while Blanton had not met Camuglia, they had even been schoolmates in the same California high school, Granada Hills High School, prior to Blanton's family moving only shortly before March 1967.  

Camuglia's obituary simply notes that she "attended" the school, which causes me to suspect, with nothing to back it up, that she might not have graduated.  Her life would likewise suggest she didn't graduate.

The high school still exists, but is a charter school now.  It was nearly new then, having opened in 1960.  It seems to have consistently been a well regarded high school.

Camuglia was just a teenager when she appeared in Playboy and only barely out of high school.  And not only was she only 19 when the photos ran, give the nature of production, she was 18 when they were taken.  

One year younger would have made this child pornography.

Not that this would prove to be a deterrent for Playboy.  At least two of the Playboy "Playmates" were 17 years old when their photographs were taken, and the magazine knew that at least one of the girls had that young age. They waited to run that girls' 17 year old nude photographs until she turned 18, which would not have made it legal, but rather likely to be undiscovered.  Another seems to have lied about her age, although seemingly this could have been checked up on.  One girl was specifically run as a recent high school grad who was the "youngest" playmate and getting her high school wish to be a centerfold, when in fact she was 17.

Early on, Playboy was under a serious European threat for advancing pedophilia, although oddly enough from its cartoons.  It turns out, however, that it did in fact go as low as it could go, age wise, for nudes, and even lower than legally allowed.

To add to the sadness of this, Camuglia's first husband had divorced her, or vice versa, just a month prior to these running.  When he married her he was 37 years old. She was 18.

I don't know the reasons for the divorce, or the marriage.  What did an 18 year old see in a 37 year old. I don't know what he saw in her, but her physical attributes were no doubt undeniable. The marriage lasted only seven months and he disappears from the record.  A person has to wonder if the Playboy spread brought about the divorce, although that's pure speculation.  The odds wouldn't have been good for its survival at any rate, given the odd age disparity.

Her next marriage was in 1970.  She would have been 22 years old at that time.  Her second husband doesn't seem to be mentioned on her headstone, however, which suggests that she was not married at the time of her death.

Her father died in 2010, and her mother in 2016.  Their devotion to each other, and their children, is noted on their headstones.

Undoubtedly another Playboy photograph, but as she more likely actually appeared.  Fran Camuglia didn't actually wear glasses.  This was taken from an entry on Find A Grave and is likewise put up under the fair use exception.

I don't know where this all goes, but its a sort of morality play on bad decisions, combined with a lack of societal safe guards, and declining public morality.  It's perfectly legal for a 37 year old to marry an 18 year old, but it's almost never a good idea.  I'd guess her parents opposed it, and we don't know the story behind it.   Really short marriages of much older men to teenagers have historically tended to be explained by pregnancy or mistaken belief in pregnancy, and the 18 year old Camuglia could fairly easily pass for an older young woman.  Male interest in her can easily be explained by her obvious, apparently, physical assets, something which has apparently caused her to retain a fan base forty years after her tragic death.

It's hard to believe that this story wouldn't have worked out better if Playboy hadn't been around to exploit young women.  I'll spare repeating all the details that were given in the documentary on the magazine, but they're horrific.  Suicide wasn't limited to Camuglia.  Murder was visited on at least one Playmate and visited upon a person by one.  According to the documentary one young woman associated with the magazine died at a party and her body simply disappeared.  One suicide scrawled her opinion on Hugh Hefner graphically on a wall in the apartment where she killed herself.  A host of "bunnies" was  used by men at an event physically in a way that traumatized them.

What, if anything, Camuglia endured we don't know.  Maybe only having her 18 year old body be the object of, well, for forty decades, which would be odd enough, and which would also contribute to psychic loss.

In 1967 when Camuglia appeared in the magazine, in middle class society the magazine was both accepted and regarded as dirty.  It claimed for itself that it managed to become the Stars and Stripes of the Vietnam War, and as grossly exaggerated in Apocalypse Now, it was so accepted by that time that Playmates appearing in the way that movie stars had in World War Two and Korea in the combat theater occurred.  Pinup girls didn't appear overseas in the earlier wars, even though they existed.

At the same time, however, the magazine remained a "dirty" magazine and there were legal efforts as late as the 1970s to try to address its obscenity, although they failed.  Being n the magazine branded those who did it in ways they could not escape.  Whatever happened to Camuglia, she apparently couldn't escape it.

Well, may God rest her soul and may the perpetual light shine upon her, and all who endured such tragedy..

Related thread:

Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

Labels: 1960s, 1967, 1970s, 1980s, 1985, Commentary, Growing up in the 1960s, Growing up in the 1970s, Playboy Philosophy, pornography, Teenagers, The relationship between men and women, Women

Lex Anteinternet: Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

Lex Anteinternet: Francis Ann Camugula and Cynthia Blanton.: 

Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

I ran into this item in a really roundabout way, that being a random link to a 1967 newspaper article.  That isn't mentioned in either of the two sources noted here, that being Ms. Blanton's blog (which is quite good, I might add) or Reddit.  I unfortunately can't find the link to the article.

Anyhow, let's start with an upload of the photograph on Ms. Blanton's blog:

Blanton with the top part of the "Miss March" centerfold. This is directly linked to her blog.  I'm using the fair use and commentary exception to copyright, but I don't own the rights to post this and will immediately take it down if asked.

Miss March holding her own centerfold?

No, Miss Blanton, then a high school student, holding the centerfold of "Fran" "Gerard", who was actually one Francis Anna Camuglia, who is apparently a legendary centerfold.

The story is related on the Blanton blog, and it is really amusing.  Her resemblance was immediately noted in March 1967 by the boys in her high school, which I don't doubt.  She's almost a dead ringer for Gerard, save that, if anything, she was actually prettier in this photograph.  Their nose structure and generally their facial features are amazingly similar.  Blanton relates that she used this to play a joke on her mother, holding the centerfold like depicted and briefly fooling her mother into thinking that she'd posed for Playboy.  Apparently Ms. Gerard was extremely top heavy, and when folded out it becomes apparent that Gerard and Blanton are not the same person.

So why am I posting this here?  Cute story?

I suppose it is a cute story, and Blanton really had a sense of humor and still does.  But we're posting this for other reasons.

Gerard is apparently a famous playboy centerfold, for the very reason noted.  The 1960s was before silicone and she was very top heavy, in an era when Playboy centerfolds were all pretty top heavy.  That she still has a following is remarkable, particularly since she died in 1985.

And that's the reason we're noting her.

She was born, as noted, Francis Camuglia, and as her find a grave entry shows, she was from a large, almost certainly Italian, and almost certainly Catholic, family.  By the time she was photographed in 1966 or 1967, she'd already been married and maybe divorced, and was off to a rocky start in life.  If she wasn't yet divorced, she soon would be.  She'd marry one more time, and go on to a life in California, working for an astrologer.

In 1985 she killed herself at age 37.

Blanton, in contrast, when on to high education, a successful life, and retired to Mexico.  She's travelled all over the world, as her blog demonstrates.

At the time of the photo, Blanton and Gerard really weren't very far apart in age.  Camuglia was born in May 1948, in which case she was a mere 19 years old when she appeared in Playboy, and only barely 19 years old at that.  Blanton was younger, but not by much, probably only one or two years at the very most.

Blanton went on to success.  Gerard was reduced in the public mind to her naked visage, a cute girl with (apparently) large assets.

The 1960s, while there was still open, and sometime legal, opposition to it, was right at the height of public acceptance of Playboy.  In the 1970s you'd still go into grocery stores and it was available the way other magazines are now, on your way to the checker.  It retained an image of "dirty" and glamourous all at the same time.

What the public didn't know was the long lasting effects pornography would have on the American public and psyche and how damaging it would be.  Nor did it know about the horrific abuse so many of these young women went through.  Not only did it basically brand them, to a degree, for life, making them something like harem slaves in a way of prior eras, valued for their physical assets and little else, they were often subject to horrific physical abuse.

I don't know about Gerard and I'm not going to look it up either.  Entering her name would no doubt provide piles of pornographic links.  That she was somebody who killed herself I already knew.  There's a really good documentary, Secrets of Playboy, that really dives into what happened to so many of these people.  Playboy left a pool of drugs and blood on the floor that we're still trying to mop up.

Her headstone is marked "Our Bubbie - Beloved Daughter and Sister".

Related threads:

Secrets of Playboy

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror and Commentary: QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024 and the destruction of reality.

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror and Commentary: QC: Human Sexuality |...: 

Blog Mirror and Commentary: QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024 and the destruction of reality.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Alexander Pope. An Essay on Criticism.

Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.

And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.

Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944.  This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions.  Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine.  The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture.  This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.

This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text.  And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.  

If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.

This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time.  Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.

This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.

At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.

That's a phenomenal observation.

And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it.  That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't.  It's been wholly destructive.

We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe.  Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.

Lauren Bacall, 1943.

The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did.  La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s.  But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.

Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s.  Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage.   Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm.  Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.

Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology.  That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.

Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell.  Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex.  It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was.  That really started to break down during the 1940s.  I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.

From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions.  This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is.   The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.

Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong.  Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it.  Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.

By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile.  There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.

Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution.  I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.

And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.

We've lost a lot here. A massive amount.  And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality.   And we're still slippping.

QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024.

Related threads:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

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