April 22nd

On this day in 1886 the state of Ohio passed a statute that made seduction unlawful. It was aimed at all men over the age of 18 who were teachers or instructors of women and girls. It didn’t matter if the sex was consensual, they could still be charged and face between two and ten years in prison.

C'mon love, you know you're gagging for it

Ohio wasn’t the only place to have laws against seduction; they existed in other states and in England, where it was a common law or civil wrong. Of course, as with most laws governing issues of sex, it was less about the woman who may have been seduced and more about her status as property.  The seduced woman was nearly always unmarried and she herself could not press suit against her seducer; this role fell to her father. However, if the woman in question was a servant and she had been seduced by her master, her father could not bring suit against him, which only goes to underline that it was all about a woman as chattel and not as a person with rights and feelings of her own.

Various states had differently worded laws against seduction. In Virginia it was illegal for a man to have “an illicit connexion with any unmarried female of previous chaste character”, if he finagled this by promising to marry her. Similarly in New York it was illegal to “under promises of marriage seduce any unmarried female of previous chaste character.” Georgia was more descriptive in its statute which stated that it was unlawful for a man to “seduce a virtuous unmarried female and induce her to yield to his lustful embraces and allow him to have carnal knowledge of her.” Saucy.

There is very little information about these laws, because on the whole they weren’t enforced and when they did come to court judges were loath to convict. In Michigan a man was convicted, probably because there were three counts of seduction against him – the slag – but the appeal court tried very hard to have all the charges thrown out. Two charges were thrown out because the defence argued that the woman in question was no longer virtuous after her first encounter with the man. The other charge was thrown out on the grounds that the woman’s testimony – that they’d gone at it in a buggy – was medically impossible. I’ve never attempted relations in a buggy myself, but I have a feeling it would be more than possible. Clearly the appeal court of Michigan was lacking in imagination.

It does appear that in the US, unlike in the UK, women could bring charges themselves. Some did so in order to coerce their seducer into marriage. On the one hand this is hardly laudable, but on the other, given that they were living in a time when virginity (or at least the appearance of it) was vitally important, if everyone knew a certain gent had had access to your glittering prize, you couldn’t blame a woman for pushing for marriage. A trial in New York turned into a wedding ceremony when the accused proposed to his accuser.

Most of these laws are now – thankfully – defunct, but there was a case brought in 1938 in New Jersey. The accused in this instance

Mug shots of Ole Blue Eyes from the "seduction" arrest

was Frank Sinatra, who was charged with having enticed a woman of good-repute to have sexual intercourse with him by using false promises of marriage. Unfortunately for the woman involved, the case was dropped when it was discovered that she was already married.

In the course of rooting around in this subject, I’ve noted a cultural and historical change in our perceptions of seduction. Whereas in the past the act of seduction has been seen as a male preserve, with the man has seducer and the woman as innocent victim, these days seduction seems to be all about women. Look for images of seduction and you will see semi-clad women, adverts for all sorts of products are often sold to us as something that will seduce our partners or any passing man who takes our fancy. Men are now the objects of seductresses, but they’re not portrayed as innocent, more as waiting for us to get the right seduction recipe brewed up to stir their eager loins. The subjects and objects have changed places, the idea of chattel has all but disappeared, but deep down, it’s still about money: seduce him and he’ll buy you more pretty things to seduce him with. Or something.

Of course we can forget the outdated notions of the old laws and ignore the messages of some of the advertising and, as consenting adults, just have an awful lot of fun with seducing each other, because without all the lies and broken promises it is a rather jolly thing  to do!

Today was the birthday of a woman who could certainly be called a seductress, Bettie Page.

Lovely bum

Page started modelling in about 1950 when she was in her late twenties. Before that she had wanted to be a teacher and then an actress. She had been a good student, graduated high school as her class salutatorian, married, divorced and moved to New York where she met a police officer called Jerry Tibbs who was interested in photography. She modelled for him and her career began.

Bettie quickly became famous, appearing in magazines like Wink, Titter, Eyeful and Beauty Parade. She was uninhibited and was happy to do most anything in her photos. She is famous these days for the many bondage shoots she did; she also starred in some silent stag shorts, either as the dominatrix or the bound slave. These were all female films and there was very little actual nudity and no sex.  In 1955 she was a Playboy centrefold and was voted Miss Pin-up Girl of the World. In short during this period, Bettie was at te top of her career, was well-loved and very successful.

In 1959, much to the chagrin of all who had liked looking at her in the nuddy, Bettie found God in Key West and from that day onwards she never got her kit off for the camera again.  She spent much of the sixties working for Billy Grahamand being all evangelical. In the seventies she was diagnosed with schizophrenia after violent attacks on her landlord. She only became aware of renewed interest in her pin-up career in the late nineties and was still trying to get some recompense for the use of her image in 2008 when she died.

Jungle Bettie

Bettie was interesting. She appealed to both men and women, but she was a silent image that anyone could impose their own fantasies upon. For men she was the smiling kinkstress always ready to try whatever they wanted. For women, I think, she is seen as a strong woman, not afraid to be out and proud about her own sexuality. I don’t think any of us have it quite right. For all the images of Bettie Page that exist, we know so very little about who she really was.

So, happy birthday, nudie laydee evangelist. You’re everywhere and nowhere,baby.

March 29th

On this day in 1886 morphine addicted, Civil War veteran John Pemberton brewed his first batch of Coca-Cola. The rest, as they say, is history, so I guess we should look at a little bit of that, being all about the history, but before we go into the future, a little of Mr Pemberton’s past.

 

Evolution of the Coca Cola bottle

John Pemberton was a Confederate veteran, which makes sense as he lived in Atlanta, Georgia. He was injured at the Battle of Columbus in 1865 and like many of his contemporaries he became addicted to the morphine that was prescribed for his pain. He was a bit worried about being a smackhead, so sought for ways in which to rid himself from the grip of it. At that time there was a drink around called Vin Mariani. It had been created in France and was a mixture of wine and coca leaves. It was very popular and Pemberton must have come across it because he produced his own version called Pemberton’s French Wine Coca. He marketed it as a medicinal tonic which could help cure morphine addiction, headaches, depression and alcoholism. It was also marketed to Southern Belles who were a bit highly strung with the blurb: “ladies, and all those whose sedentary employment causes nervous prostration, irregularities of the stomach, bowels and kidneys, who require a nerve tonic and a pure, delightful diffusable stimulant.”

 

It proved a big hit and why wouldn’t it. Part wine, part cocaine, who needed morphine? And of course it “cured” alcoholism, unless one counted the wine in it as alcohol, which clearly people didn’t. It’s a little like saying you can cure a broken leg by breaking it, but such quibbles did not prevent big sales of Pemberton’s wonder tonic. What did prevent further sales of it was a temperance law that came into effect in Atlanta and Fulton County in 1886. French Wine Cola became verboten.

Not wanting to kill his golden goose while it still had many eggs to lay, Pemberton worked on finding a way of producing his tonic without the need for wine. He turned to a pharmacist called Willis Venables, who helped him to perfect and test a new recipe. Eventually they came up with their cola syrup which would be diluted in carbonated water, gave it the alliterative name, Coca Cola and thus it was that because of temperance we all got ourselves a soft drink that still sells like a bastard today.

Pemberton’s involvement in his creation did not last for long, but the Coke we know today was due to him, Venables and Frank Mason Robinson. The latter came up with the name and wrote out the first labels and adverts, in the Spencerian Script that still adorns them today. The following year the business was bought by Asa Candler who started to create the multinational corporation that Coca Cola is today. Although he bought the rights, there were some shenanigans at first. Pemberton sold to him and a couple of others, including Charles Ney Pemberton, his own alcoholic son (one gets the idea that the family was a little dysfunctional given its reliance on drugs and alcohol), but this was eventually all sorted out in Candler’s favour, probably with a bit of forgery and skullduggery on Candler’s part.

The cocaine thing? When it was first produced the recipe – the part we’re allowed to know anyway, minus Merchandise 7X (the secret

Cures everything but cocaine addiction. An early advert.

ingredient) – called for three parts coca leaves to one part cola nut. Coca leaves are where we get cocaine from. The amount that was in it was called negligible in later years, but it was probably a little more than that. Cocaine was popular at the time in a variety of medicinal beverages and thought of as pretty harmless and a good substitute or beer. Unfortunately in the 1890s feelings toward cocaine took a bit of a downward turn and in 1903 there was an article in the New York Tribune linking cocaine with “black crime” and calling for legal action against Coca Cola. This led to a slight change in the recipe and a major change in the marketing. From then on the leaves used in the recipe were spent coca leaves, i.e. after the cocaine has been extracted from them, rather than fresh ones and Coca Cola was no longer advertised as a medicinal tonic, but purely as a refreshing beverage.

 

Pemberton was long dead by this time. He died in 1888, two years after he’d created one of the most popular non-alcoholic drinks the world has ever known and one year after selling it all for a mess of pottage, relatively speaking. Coke has gone on to conquer the world, there’s even a word – Coca Colanization – which describes how it has been an instrument of US colonisation without the need for arms or force. It’s also been involved in a lot of anti-union disputes, bad working practice reports and possibly the death of union activists in countries outside of the US. This all sits very badly with me, because anyone who knows me, knows what a Coke fiend I am. I hate to support a corporation that is, whatever way you want to cut it, pretty bloody cuntish, but what can I do? Truth is it might not contain cocaine any longer, but those bastards have still found a way to make it addictive. Maybe one day I’ll do the whole twelve steps things and rid me of its syrupy evil. Until then, my name is Almaniacal and I am a Coca Cola-holic.

 

Today is the birthday of myopic hotty, Christophe Lambert, better known as Lord Greystoke or Connor MacLeod.

 

Oh. My.

Lambert (please pronounce it in the French way, to show that you have some culture, darlings) first came to the attention of the English-speaking public when he appeared in Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan. He was an instant hit and why wouldn’t he be. He spent much of the film half-naked and when he wasn’t, he was all poshed up and cuter than a very cute thing from the capital of cute. He then went on to make Subway with Jean Luc Besson, which was a pretty good film. To be fair to Greystoke, I loved it, but you could hardly call it quality. I can’t say much more about it, because that would involve me getting in to the bit near the end where his “father” dies and that’s too unbearably sad and I cannot type through tears, dammit!

 

Christophe’s biggest success came in Highlander, where he played the legendary Connor MacLeod. The best thing about that film was that he played a Scot with a French accent and Sean Connery played a Spaniard with a Scottish accent. That and the Queen soundtrack which was aces. It was both a very silly film and bloody marvellous and Lambert proved that he looked just as good in a kilt as he did in a loincloth, i.e. very good indeed. Since the heady days of the mid-eighties, it’s fair to say that his light has dimmed a little. He’s made a lot of very bad films, a handful of critically well-received but commercially unsuccessful ones and sort of disappeared from view. Mostly.

These days he still acts, also produces and like many a fine Frenchman before him, he owns a vineyard as well as a mineral water company and a food processing company. He’s not doing bad for himself all things considered. Bless him.

Other facts about this utterly gorgeous man: he is gorgeous; his myopia is severe, he can’t wear contacts, so when he does act on film,

Blond for Subway. I may have to lie down for a while now

he’s pretty much blind, which lends him that odd gaze which many think has made him so attractive to women. I can’t contest that as the first time I saw him looking all bog-eyed in Tarzan I was a total goner for him. I used to have the film poster up in my flat. Readers, I loved him.

 

So, Christophe, I know you’re all loved up with Sophie Marceau and that and you’re not in the first flush of that stunning youth any longer, but I still would so … Happy birthday, you gorgeous man. You can monkey around with me (yes, I’m groaning too) any time!