1930's film nakedness

I'll tell you one thing I noticed in junior high school. This was in the mid-1970's. We didn't have internet pornography in those days. We didn't have pornography of any kind that any of us got to see. I walked past an adult bookstore one day. I pictured it as being full of long literary novels that only an adult could manage to read.

But in junior high school, I noticed that Time magazine had exactly one nude photo in every issue. It had to have been a matter of policy. One had a woman getting a breast exam, some had naked hippies, some used stills from nude scenes in movies to illustrate their movie reviews.

I guess I was a pretty cool customer because I would look at the nude photo then say "Look at this" and casually hand it to some other kid and you'd be amazed at how excited they'd get. Even sophisticated theater types would go berserk.

Years later, I was hanging around in the university library looking through old bound copies of Life magazine, and it was the same thing. Even back in the '30's, each issue contained a single nude photo. I found some very weird and disturbing, like photographers back then could apparently walk into locker rooms and take pictures of the kids changing or showering. I guess people didn't object. There was a picture of high school boys in a shower and this was somehow supposed to make a point about democracy.

You get a distorted picture of the past when all you do is watch old movies and TV shows.

When you watch an old exploitation film from the '30's or '40's and you're startled by a nude scene, you wonder how audiences must have reacted back then. I always imagined them reacting like those kids in school, thrashing around in a nudity-induced frenzy.