October 16, 2006
When Culture Imitates Life, and Life Imitates Culture Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:30 PM EST My lead piece for today’s edition of AmericanHeritage.com concerns Margaret Sanger, the famous birth control advocate who opened America’s first birth control clinic in 1916.
Sanger’s actions preceded by just a few years the “roaring twenties,” the decade when America’s popular and leisure culture caught up with subtle social trends, especially the rise of extramarital sex and the transition from courtship to dating, that had been on the build for several decades.
Magazine aficionados in the 1920s consumed real-life glossies like True Confessions, Telling Tales, True Story, and Flapper Experiences, which ran stories with such lurid headlines as “Indolent Kisses” and “The Primitive Lover” (“She wanted a caveman husband”). Dish detergent advertisements featuring scantily dressed Egyptian women guaranteed the “beauty secret of Cleopatra hidden in every cake” of Palmolive. Popular songs of the era included “Hot Lips,” “I Need Lovin’” and “Nursing Kisses.” Movie posters for films like The Cowboy and the Flapper—”See What Happens When the Cowboy and the Flapper Meet. William Fairbanks and Dorothy Revier do their stuff in a way that raises this picture into the ranks of really dramatic production”—testified to the new level of sexual candor that permeated mass culture.
Importantly, while popular culture initially lagged behind behavioral patterns (as my piece explains, the sexual habits of American women—and, by extension, American men—had been changing over the course of several decades), by the mid-1920s it caught up and began to act as an agent of change.
Jazz Age youth who spent their adolescence in up in pre-code movie theaters learned to imitate what they witnessed on-screen. An undergraduate at the University of Chicago admitted that by watching romance films, he was able to give considerable “attention” to the “technique of making love to a girl. . . . I learned to kiss a girl on her ears, neck and cheeks, as well as on the mouth, in a close huddle.”
It wasn’t just the young men who found their passions roused and techniques improved by the motion-picture shows. Young women claimed to learn from their favorite on-screen starlets when to close their eyes during a kiss. “After I see a love picture,” a 16-year-old high school junior confessed, “it just leaves me rather dopey. I always try to imagine myself in a like situation. Instead of making me feel like going out on a party with some men, I generally feel more ready to be loved. . . . The only benefit I ever got from the movies was in learning to love and the knowledge of sex.” And a study of delinquent girls in the late 1920s revealed that three-quarters of them tried to boost their sex appeal by mimicking the way on-screen stars dressed, applied makeup, and fixed their hair.
“No wonder the girls of older days before the movies were so modest and bashful,” concluded a young co-ed. “They never saw Clara Bow or William Haines. They didn’t know anything else but being modest and sweet. I think the movies have a great deal to do with the present day so-called ‘wildness.’ If we didn’t see such examples in the movies where would we get the idea of being ‘hot?’ We wouldn’t.”
In many ways, the 1920s were the decade when America truly entered the media age. Magazine and newspaper circulations hit new highs; radio and film came into maturity; and a new cult of celebrity assumed primacy. In this sense, it was only fitting that the twenties gave rise to that curious, nonstop cycle by which culture imitates life and life imitates culture.
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