Home Front and Muscles

[jeffg]

Judging from the dialog, these two won't be modeling their Munsingwear for much longer..

BTW if anyone has vintage ads along these same lines (ambiguously intentional homoerotica), please post them. You beautiful hunks of bunk!

 

[frigilux]

A year or so ago, I posted another Munsingwear ad from the same era which also had a significant homoerotic subtext. Wonder who was doing their ad work back then?

 

[jeffg]

Sorry I missed that post. Does AW's archive have a search function?

Some of the phrasing.. "brings up the rear", "The seat alone is worth the price of admission" etc. Wow.

 

[jeffg]

They keep coming back for more.

 

[danemodsandy]

Try This Wartime Ad for Cannon...

The picture says it all....

 

[joeekaitis]

Sometimes, a man-sized wine-sipping beaver . . .

. . . is just a man-sized wine-sipping beaver.

 

[jeffg]

Sandy, that's fantastic

Apparently there was a whole series of these Cannon "True Towel Tales" in Life Magazine, from 1943-1944. They targeted sex-starved American women whose husbands were serving in WWII.

Here are a few samples:

 

[jeffg]

One more (wider version of Sandy's)

 

[danemodsandy]

Jeff:

Thanks for finding the full version of that Cannon ad I posted- I have it around here on a CD backup of an old hard drive, but couldn't lay my hands on it quickly. There was a whole series of them.

What's mind-boggling is that no one seemed to think there was anything the least bit strange about them- these were the days when most media was heavily censored for sexual content, both overt and inferential.

Those ads would stir up quite a controversy today.

 

[tomturbomatic]

The lighting in the first picture is quite something. It would be hard to achieve in most rooms and why would two guys be doing mirror-image handstands in an almost dark room? In the second picture, what is Mr. Muscles leaning (or bending) over and what would be giving that kind of light beneath the window? The way Muscles keeps wearing his hat calls to mind costuming from male art videos.


In the "Let's get down to business" ad, that seam looks like it would be painful if the wearer had to sit on any part of it.

 

[jeffg]

I was hoping someone would notice the hat. Apparently it's more important to Muscles than keeping his pants on.

 

[gansky1]

"The seat alone is worth the price of admission..." Yup.

And exactly what is a "grizzled vet" anyway? Talk dirty to me, Muscles!

 

[jeffg]

Ok, I think I figured out the hat. Take it away and all we have left is two guys in a hotel room, about to share a twin bed. The hat suggests these are military heterosexual guys.

I think the helmets/guns/etc in the Cannon ads have the same function. Without them, a casual viewer wouldn't know if it's supposed to portray their soldier husbands or just a bunch of gay men at a pool party.

 

[brettsomers]

Let's Get Down to Business

Yes, lets!

I like that ad because the guy "on top" looks like delicious 1950's-60's actor John Gavin. Gavin and Robert Conrad were two vintage actors worth jumping into a time machine for!

The glorious attributes of that hunky top in the stretchy seat ad inspires me to do a Debbie Gibson song...

"I get lost, in your thighs..."

 

[tomturbomatic]

Was not John Gavin the love interest of both mother and daughter in Immitation of Life? Loved that last kitchen with the Frigidaire built-ins and all of the Sunbeam counter top appliances.

 

[toggleswitch2]

What's with the guy in the helmet and the fern leaves on the canoe?

Is (s)he singing show tunes or what?

 

[danemodsandy]

Guy With Fern Leaves

He's doing a take-off on what was called a "fan dance", a variation of strip-tease invented by dancer Sally Rand, and one of the hits of the 1933 Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago.

Basically, a fan dance had a nude (or semi-nude, depending on the legal jurisdiction) dancer who held two large ostrich-feather fans. As she danced, she moved the fans to both reveal her body and conceal it. The idea was to show everything the law allowed at the time (which wasn't much), but to make viewers think they were seeing a whole lot more.

Fan dances were well-known enough that magazine readers seeing this ad would have gotten the point. It was considered funny for a man to do take-offs on something feminine like this; the intent was strictly comedic at the time, not erotic. But as we all know, sometimes a joke can get at the truth much better than something done in all seriousness!

Here's a photo of Ol' Sally and her fans. Note that she's wearing a showgirl top and bottom for this publicity still; a more undressed photo would have been too risque for many publications to run.

 

[jeffg]

I was able to find parts of two others in this series, and also the Life Magazine publishing dates for all six:

#1 "Army Day - Crocodiles Keep Out!" - August 16, 1943
#2 "Alaskan Aquacade" - October 4, 1943 Art by Fred L.
#3 "What ... No Bath Salts?" - December 20, 1943 Art by Steven Dohanos
#4 "Tank Corps" - January 3, 1944
#5 "Hey, Turn Off The Water, Jumbo!" - March 20, 1944
#6 "Buna Bathtub" - June 26, 1944 Art by Bingham

If anyone out there has higher resolution/complete copies (especially #3 and #4), please please post them.

#3

 

[jeffg]

#4

 

[toggleswitch2]

Male bonding. Oh is THAT what you call it .

HOW FUNNY!

Anyone notice that the boys back in the canoe would appear to be carelessly nekkid in front of the male and female natives?

Exposed breasts? SCANDAL!

What I wanna know is which one of the guys earned the nickname Eureka Hoover.

BEST LINE EVER HEARD REGARING HOMOSEXUALITY:
a friends father upon his son's coming out:

I can certainly understand a good B J once in a while, but to make a life-style of it.................

 

[nmaineman36]

OMG Toggles you just aint right! Back in those days it musta seemed innocent to see these art ads for towels. I did hear that one of the guys goes by the nickname Regina Upright or maybe it was Electro Lux..certainly not Dyson. I woulda been known as Magda Miele..can suck the chrome off a car.....