This tasteful, anonymous photograph of a young lady holding an ornate vase had enormous consequences for the men's magazine market into the nineteen sixties. It appeared in the January 1934 issue of the pulp magazine Pep Stories which was published, like many other pulp magazines of the time, by Romanian born Harry Donenfeld. A number of his magazines included topless, artistic nudes among the stories but this one went further, as the model's pubic hair was visible. As a result, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice charged Donenfeld with producing obscene periodicals.
Donenfeld narrowly avoided jail but only because one of his Romanian employees took the rap and said that his boss didn't know that he had inserted the picture into the magazine. He was jailed instead of Donenfeld. A grateful Donenfeld gave the man a job for life with no requirement to actually do anything, when he emerged from prison.
It was this case that so terrified the lawyers at Playboy and Penthouse in the nineteen sixties, who didn't want to see their publishers being jailed for showing fur flashing photos.
I don't understand how someone could be offend by pubic hair as it covers a woman's nudity
ReplyDeleteand the truly sexy part of a woman is her ovaries and I have only seen those in drawings