Hot stuff. Anatomy of the sex market at the dawn of the twentieth century

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-234
Author(s):  
Pauline Mortas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Commercial Exchange ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
Sex Toys ◽  
Sex Market

Abstract Drawing on a rich legal dossier on a violation of obscenity laws (the Trafford affair), this article studies the formation of a sex market in early twentieth-century Paris. Books and erotic photographs, contraceptives, sex toys and remedies for increasing sexual potency: the diversity of these products relating to sexual practices is clearly revealed by the case. The dossier demonstrates how this commercial enterprise drew on the benefits of industrialization, mass media and globalization for building its client-base and developing a transnational dimension. It also allows us to understand the strategies deployed to keep the sale of these objects clandestine, in a context where they were increasingly overseen by the authorities, revealing innovative forms of commercial exchange, based on an epistolary transvestism.

Introduction: why sport?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Vere
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Elite Sport ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The Introduction looks at the rise of sport as an organised activity across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It sets this in the context of the development of urban modernity, with elite sport becoming a focus for the emergent mass media and a concomitant rise in spectatorship. Sport can claim to be the most pervasive cultural form of the early twentieth century. As such it is surprising that the influence it had on modern art and artists has been largely overlooked.

The Implied Masturbator Speaks

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-122
Author(s):  
Y. Yvon Wang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Open Discussion ◽  
Cultural World ◽  
Ideological Change ◽  
Better Than ◽  
Print Market

This chapter builds on the material and technological transformations described in the previous chapter to discuss changing ideas about sexual representations. The chapter begins to directly talk about the desires of the implied masturbator. From the late Qing into the early twentieth century, mass media conquered the Chinese cultural world. Ambitious intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century increasingly put their ideas onto a print market that was more open than ever before. The chapter analyses how literary professionalization remained a deviation from the orthodox path of officialdom. It also elaborates the five aspects of ideological change around sex and sexual representations at the turn of the twentieth century. Many of these ideological transformations were led by political and cultural reformers, including proponents of a “New Culture.” These self-declared iconoclasts argued for revising the boundaries of legitimacy around desire itself. Ultimately, the chapter introduces the downfall of Zhang Jingsheng, a leading member of the New Culture group. The chapter addresses how Zhang's open discussion of his personal desires made him vulnerable to becoming seen as no better than an implied masturbator.

scholarly journals Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
HALLIE LIEBERMAN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Household Appliance ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sex Toys

The electromechanical vibrator originated in the late nineteenth century as a device for medical therapy. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, however, marketing of vibrators as consumer appliances became pervasive. Ads appeared in the pages ofThe New York TimesandScientific Americanand plastered street cars. Companies marketed vibrators to grandparents, mothers, infants, and young adults. Vibrators are widely sold today, however, as instruments for masturbation, a use that was rarely mentioned but well known before World War II. How was vibrator advertising able to become so ubiquitous during the early twentieth century, despite draconian antiobscenity laws and antimasturbation rhetoric? This article argues that companies achieved this result by shaping the meaning of vibrators through strategic marketing. This marketing overtly portrayed vibrators as nonsexual while covertly conveying their sexual uses through imagery and the sale of phallic, dildo-like attachments.Companies positioned vibrators within two major consumer product categories in the early 1900s: labor-saving household appliances and electrotherapeutic devices. By advertising the vibrator as both a labor-saving household appliance and a sexualized health panacea, companies could slip vibrator ads past the censors, while supplying user manuals that clued consumers into specific sexual uses. In household appliance ads, companies drew on traditional gender roles to present vibrators as emblems of domesticity and motherhood, whereas in electrotherapeutic ads they presented vibrators as symbols of progressive gender roles, the sexualized new woman and the body-conscious “self-made man.”

Media, Messages, and Emotions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenton J. Malin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
First Century ◽  
Media Criticism ◽  
Media Messages ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
American Media ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter considers links between media and emotion in a modern American context. It traces certain understandings of emotion in order to tell a story about how American media critics have wrestled with questions of the affective life. The chapter shows some thinking about emotion and media that preceded the explosion of mass media and mass media criticism in the early twentieth century, before laying out some key popular and academic understandings of media from the early twentieth century. From here, the chapter turns to late-twentieth-century modifications and extensions of these ideas and then discusses their continued relevance at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Marketing Circus through Personalization: Class and the Celebrity Images of John Ringling and Bertram Mills

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
Kate Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Marketing Strategies ◽  
Previous Experience ◽  
Financial Success ◽  
Public Identity ◽  
Emotional Connection ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
The University

Marketing strategies today often rely on creating an emotional connection to the brand through personalizing or humanizing the business. This article explores how both the American Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey and the British Bertram Mills Circus used this strategy in the early twentieth century to encourage audiences to attend their circus rather than any other. John Ringling and Bertram Mills may best be remembered for totemic images but their celebrity was constructed through a reiterative performance process. In this article Kate Holmes examines the shifts in their representation performed in press, publicity, and anecdote to explore how each iteration of their public identity functioned to publicize their respective circuses at significant points. She also explores how these circus celebrity identities, focused on achieving financial success for a commercial enterprise, activated and perpetuated national self-identities linked to class. Kate Holmes, who has previous experience as a qualified marketer, recently completed a PhD in Drama at the University of Exeter. Her research on circus performance has been published in Early Popular Visual Culture and is forthcoming in Stage Women, a collection of essays on early twentieth-century female performers.

scholarly journals Dying against Democracy: Suicide Protest and the 1905 Anti-American Boycott

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Keren He
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Modes Of Action ◽  
Social Negotiation ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Popular Movements ◽  
Chinese Political Culture

The joint rise of popular movements and mass media in early twentieth-century China gave birth to a democratic imagination, which culminated in the anti-American boycott of 1905. The transnational campaign nonetheless disintegrated as a result of partisan division—an ingrained predicament of democratic agonism that is best illustrated by the story of Feng Xiawei, a grassroots activist whose suicide in Shanghai constituted a key moment in the boycott. Juxtaposing a variety of accounts about Feng's death in journalism, political fiction, reformed opera, and advertisements, this article examines how, together, these texts construct democratic agonism and suicide protest as revealing two opposing political sensibilities as well as modes of action. Instead of expressing only nationalist passion, Feng's suicide reveals a deep anxiety of his time to locate a spiritual source of authority in the face of its glaring absence in social negotiation. This fraught dynamic between the democratic and the transcendent continues to characterize modern Chinese political culture to the present.

Pentecostalism and Popular Culture in Britain and America from the Early Twentieth Century to the 1970s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Global Christianity ◽  
Mass Entertainment

Pentecostalism is now the second largest subgrouping of global Christianity. It’s charted tremendous growth, even in deeply post-Christian countries like Sweden. This chapter compares British and American pentecostalism and looks at how disciples related to or rejected pop culture. Believers had an interesting, hot and cold, relationship with mass entertainment, music, and mass media. They were eager to borrow much for evangelistic purposes, and quick to shun all that they thought to be sinful. British pentecostalism never grew at the pace and never achieved the astounding success of their co-religionists across the Atlantic. Some of this had directly to do with access to mass culture and a willingness or ability to adjust the faith to pop culture. This chapter ends by detailing and analysing the major differences and similarities of the faith as it developed in both regions.

Some Polish Composers of To-Day

Tempo ◽  
1948 ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Andrzej Panufnik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fertile Soil ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Group ◽  
Karol Szymanowski

It is ten years since KAROL SZYMANOWSKI died at fifty-four. He was the most prominent representative of the “radical progressive” group of early twentieth century composers, which we call “Young Poland.” In their manysided and pioneering efforts they prepared the fertile soil on which Poland's present day's music thrives.

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