As an illustrator of teenage magazine love stories, a commission to draw a girl in a shower was promptly returned after it appeared the girl might be showering without a bra, and I was warned not to draw boys with bare chests! I’m dipping into history to find out what was going on…

Garry Cobb

It starts with sex. It always does. And the consequences of sex in Victorian and Edwardian Britain was the spread of sexual diseases and unwanted pregnancies. In turn, these sparked a wave of Christian zeal and the foundation of such organisations as the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, the National Purity League, the Public Morality Council and the National Vigilance Association. William Coote, the founder of the NVA believed his organisation to be in an “energetic legal crusade against vice in its hydra-headed form,” declaring in his book ‘A Romance in Philanthropy,’ published in 1916, that it was a “hand-to-hand fight with the world, flesh, and the devil.” 

People were terrified of sexual diseases like gonorrhoea and syphilis. And for good reason: There was no cure. It was one reason so many men conformed to Christian edicts and refrained from sex until after marriage while some would deliberately seek sex with virgins or even children.

Prostitution and abuse of young girls in and out of brothels was rife in Victorian Britain. More wealthy Victorian men boasted their own magazines: ‘Sporting’ guides which were little more than shopping catalogues of available females. These detailed sex workers’ ages, physical descriptions, personality type, and their cost, usually £2–£3 or £5 for a virgin. It has been estimated that there were more brothels than schools with an estimated 80,000 sex workers in London.

‘Swell’s Night Guide,’ offered “a peep through the great metropolis… with numerous spicy engravings.” The book rated individual women, describing one, Miss Allen, as a “perfect English beauty” and another, Mrs. Smith as a “very agreeable woman” with “pouting lips.”

Christians attempted to rehabilitate ‘fallen women’ with the establishment of reformatories. But living in a reformatory was worse than jail. Christians often considered women were pursuing sex work because of their own selfish desires rather than admitting it was the highest paid work women could do. Women were forced to stay in the reformatory for a minimum of two years until they were ‘cured.’ During that time, they needed to seek forgiveness from God for their sins of the flesh and repent to qualify for a roof over their head. They were woken at 5am, made to pray four times a day, attend regular Christian services, perform hard labour and be locked in their rooms by 8pm.

Christian groups like the NVA and feminists – who were normally Christian in Victorian times – found a common goal in fighting prostitution. Not until 1876 did the Freethought Publishing Company produce a pamphlet on contraception, but they were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. Secularist Annie Besant, who bravely represented herself in court became the first woman to publicly endorse the use of birth control, arguing for its potential to alleviate poverty.

In his sensational exposure in ‘Pall Mall’ magazine, Journalist, W.T. Stead published ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,’ proving how easy it was to purchase the virginity of a 13-year-old girl. For a mere £5, Stead purchased someone’s daughter, whom he called ‘Lily.’ This covered the cost of a medical examination to ensure that she was a virgin, and a cut to the brothel owner. The money the girl earned was taken by Lily’s parents who were alcoholics. After confirming that Lily was a virgin, the medical examiner recommended that Stead drug the child with chloroform so she would be unconscious and not put up a struggle while he raped her. The public was so horrified when they read Stead’s articles that it led to the raising of the age of consent from 13-years-old to 16 with the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 to protect women and girls. It was introduced into Parliament by MP Henry Labouchere who, at the last minute also lodged an amendment to protect young boys from the act of ‘gross indecency,’ but because there was no age of consent for homosexuals, for the following century, men of all ages would be prosecuted for consensual sex in private, providing new grist for the Christian mills.

W.T. Stead was seen as a hero for fighting for the rights of women and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. He died on the Titanic in 1912 aged 63. Today, the Stead Memorial Fund continues to fight against sex trafficking.

Efforts to legislate and control women’s sexual passions were often clumsily administered by an elderly and inexperienced judiciary or religious leaders. But generations of young people would remain determined to define their sexual behaviour outside of politics, courts and religious institutions.  

Policing sexuality was not always considered entirely appropriate for an all-male police force, so, during the First World War, Women’s Patrols were paid by the police authorities to shine their torches into the faces of soldiers and police the “foolish, giddy and irresponsible conduct” of girls. Patrolling the streets, parks and open spaces, they ‘saved’ drunken soldiers from “women of evil reputation” by administering black coffee laced with bicarbonate of soda, which usually made them violently sick.

One patrol was so outraged by the sight of a “heaped mass of arms and legs and much stocking” on one of the benches along a towpath, she had the seats boarded up!

Girls’ magazines and comics carried the moral tone of the times and countries they were published in. The first magazines for girls were published by the Girl Scouts of America. Launched as ‘The Rally’ in 1917, it became ‘The American Girl’ in 1920.

GERMANY

In Germany’s Weimar Republic, before the Nazis seized power, anything courts deemed obscene could be prohibited. But in 1926 a new law was introduced to protect young people from ‘schmutz und schund’ (filth and trash). Books and magazines that youth welfare offices reported could be blacklisted making it illegal to for them to be advertised, put on display or sold to under 18s. The law was repealed by the Nazis in 1935 who went on to ban ‘harmful and undesirable’ literature.

‘Das Deutsche Mädel’ was published for the “League of German Girls in the Hitler Youth.” Much like the American Girl Scout magazines, it was particularly interested in shaping girls’ morals and preparing them for motherhood. It was printed by the Office for Press and Propaganda of the Reich Youth Leadership.

In 1953 the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) brought in a law against ‘smutty’ literature whilst the German Democratic Republic under Soviet rule censored on a more informal basis. In East Germany, girl’s magazine, ‘Neues Leben’ which ran from 1953 – 1992, modelled itself on West Germany’s glossy ‘Bravo’ magazine which launched in 1956 and was selling over a million copies a week by the mid-seventies. While ‘Neues Leben’ instructed teens on how to make the communist state’s youth projects more appealing, ‘Bravo’ magazine’s agony column, ‘Dr Sommer’s, That’s Me!’ often featured sex interviews and full-frontal nude photos of teen models aged between 16 and 20. Challenged by international child pornography laws, ‘Bravo’ tried to work around laws by having the models hold the camera’s shutter button themselves, thereby showing explicit consent. ‘Bravo’ was banned in East Germany.

FRANCE

France took censorship to another level during World War II, when, on 30 September 1944, the government of France banned every periodical and newspaper across France. Thousands of offices were closed although some, like the newspaper ‘Le Figaro,’ fled Paris for Vichy France in the south to continue publishing.

There was no opening of the floodgates after the Second World War in France either. In 1949, a law was introduced responding to a manufactured paranoia over teenage delinquency aimed at publications destined for youth. It was regulated by a group known as The Committee to Survey and Control Published Works Destined for Children and Adolescents, ‘La Commission du Livre,’ or the notorious Book Board. The committee comprised of a cross-party group of clerics, communists and government officials headed by Father Jean Pihan who had his eye on anything deemed contrary to bonnes moeurs (good morals), licentious, or against public order (déréglé).

After the war, a younger generation of French teenagers eagerly embraced the otherwise restricted or censored import of American popular music and films, battling with a government that felt it had a language and culture to protect. And, of course, the morality of its young people.

With the American importation of a muscular, naked, bestial and poorly educated boy from the jungle, Tarzan was soon a victim and his comics either banned or re-illustrated with him appropriately dressed.

While Tarzan and Flash Gordon perished in the cartoon cull, Tintin, Lucky Luke and Les Stroumpfs (The Smurfs) triumphed over the censors. The Board went on to put pressure on comic publishers to paint out the busts of shapely females and cover any scantily clothed seductresses in garments more suited to their opinion on what constituted bonnes moeurs.

Jean Vaillant, better known as Abbé Pihan, published his own Catholic comic book for boys, ‘Coeurs Vaillants’ (Brave Hearts), featuring Hergé’s ‘Adventures of Tintin.’

Pihan scorned the transgressive behaviour of female gender roles in other comics, such as Superwoman featuring a woman who had the audacity to fight men. He deplored the absence of mothers and wives in comics which he regarded as particularly grave for girls so also published a comic heavily imbibed with Catholic morality for girls: ‘Âmes Vaillantes’ (Valiant Souls).

By the sixties, traditional French chansons battled with Anglo-American music. The Americans introduced electric guitars and leather jackets. French pop singer Johnny Hallyday was one of the first to unnerve the establishment by adopting this style.

The 1955 film ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ starring James Dean and Natalie Wood was just the sort of story of teenage delinquents that French censors feared the most. The French national control commission (Commission de Classification CNC) permitted the film to be shown only to anyone over 16 after Warners agreed to remove some minor scenes. Not until 1973 was it released to a general audience. It was at first censored in Britain by the British Board of Film Censors who gave it an ‘X’ rating after scenes were cut. The film received similar treatment in Spain, and in New Zealand the Chief Censor feared it would incite “teenage delinquency.”

Fresh on the heels of James Dean’s delinquency in 1955, 16-year-old Éric Jourdan penned his own romantic novel, ‘Les Mauvais Anges’ (Wicked Angels), a passionate story involving two Parisian cousins, 16 and 17-year-old Gerard and Pierre who spent a romantic yet tragic summer together in Amboise on the banks of the Loire. It arced with the static of teenage rebellion and fell into the hands of the Book Board. They thought it so dangerous; it would be banned for thirty years.

The head of the 28-member French Book Board, Abbé Pihan wasn’t satisfied with just banning the book; he wanted young Éric sentenced for “offending public decency.” He was narrowly spared a trial thanks to Jean Genet’s lawyer, Pierre Descaves and Paul Boncour from the United Nations. 

In ‘Les Mauvais Anges’s first edition, two authors defended Jourdan’s book on its artistic qualities. Not that that was ever going to melt the frosty priest who feared Jourdan’s artistry was precisely what he was using to detract from what Pihan would have regarded as the deviant and impious nature of the boy’s amorous attractions. Abbé Pihan (we must suppose) never had sex: he only read about it, and in his opinion, Gerard and Pierre’s love was a sin.

You could imagine Abbé Pihan bristling at every passage of ‘Les Mauvais Anges’; revolutionary for its time yet revolting in his eyes. The book railed against everything Pihan and the Catholic Church stood for: respect for sexual norms, the family, middle-class etiquette, discipline and religious reverence. The story was brutal, contained scenes of torture, rape, juvenile delinquency and included a suicide, a crime in France at the time. The boys flaunt their good looks, celebrate their delinquency and cock-a-snoot at social norms.

“Screw homework,” declares Pierre. “I’m against what they’re trying to make me learn, anyway. Youth should mean freedom. They’re trying to get us to live our whole lives in captivity, until our skin becomes the colour of the paper of our books. I won’t do it! I won’t!”

In 1952, Jean Genet also felt the theocratic stick of the Book Board when he received an eight-month custodial sentence for the publication of his novel, ‘Querelle de Brest.’ The works of the Marquis de Sade miraculously escaped censorship only after the publishers convinced the Board they would not fall into the hands of ordinary people and would be read only by scholars.

In the late fifties, the Book Board lobbied government to extend its powers to cover the romantic novels of the presse du coeur industry. They felt teenage girls were being ‘duped’ by seemingly inoffensive stories leading them into desiring fabulous and luxurious lives well above their social station. The Board thought such romantic novels created “troubled feelings” and “tortuous envy” in young ladies, leading them to be “emotionally confused.” Worse, they fretted they might excite sexual desires and amorous longings at an age when there should be none!

But, as Bob Dylan wrote in 1964, ‘the times, they were a changin…’

In 2015 there was an attack at the offices of satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’ which saw 12 staff, including the editor Stéphane Charbonnier massacred by two gun-toting Islamists screaming “Allahu akbar” and “the Prophet is avenged” which led to the new editor promising he would no longer publish cartoons of Mohammad. 

Despite safety concerns, the Paris Olympics in 2024 passed without incidence. But the same couldn’t be said for the ire of social conservatives. It began with the opening ceremony’s rendition of a feast of Dionysus – the Greek god of wine and ecstasy – by a group of drag artists. The representation was confused with Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper,’ triggering a furore among socially conservative groups worldwide. Various Christian groups piled in, including the pope. Explanations from the artistic director, Thomas Jolly, backed by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, came to nothing. Jolly even received online death threats. A somewhat presumptive Donald Trump called the ceremony a disgrace, saying that no such thing would happen when the next Summer Olympics convened in Los Angeles.

BRITAIN

In post-war Britain, in their books and magazines, long-suffering girls who remained righteous in the face of adversity would always win over villainous classmates or bullying siblings who lied and cheated. The UK magazine ‘Girl’ (1951 – 1964), the sister magazine to boy’s magazine ‘Eagle,’ was founded by the Reverend Marcus Morris and fellow clergyman Chad Varah so no surprise it appeared as an educational magazine whose heroines, including those who got into scrapes, became involved in tales that had a moral substance. A considerable number of pages were also dedicated to real-life tales of heroic women in various fields. (‘Girl’ had a later incarnation between 1981 – 1991 with IPC magazines before it was merged with ‘My Guy’).

There were several Christians keeping a wary eye on the developing market of teen magazines in the seventies and eighties, not least amongst them, Mrs. Mary Whitehouse from her campaign group the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, (NVLA), formerly known as the ‘Clean-Up TV’ campaign which was founded in 1965 by the pious Whitehouse, her husband Ernest and the Reverend Basil Buckland and his wife Norah. To get an idea of where they were coming from, the ‘Clean-Up TV’ campaign declared that the BBC should “encourage and sustain faith in God and bring Him back to the hearts of our family and national life.” Mrs Whitehouse was unsuccessful in getting Chuck Berry’s ‘My Ding-a-Ling’ banned from BBC’s Radio One but chalked-up a victory preventing Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’ appearing on BBC TV’s ‘Top of the Pops.’

After having their offices raided on several occasions, and worried they were losing young readers, ‘underground’ magazine ‘Oz’ invited kids to edit an issue. 15-year-old schoolboy Vivian Berger’s submission posted Rupert Bear’s head on a Robert Crumb cartoon. This highly sexual Rupert Bear parody caught the unwelcome attention of the Obscene Publications Squad in 1971 and set the scene for the longest obscenity trial in British history. The editorial staff were charged with “conspiracy to corrupt public morals” which carried the possibility of a life sentence. The charges read out in the criminal court stated the defendants, (with the help of Rupert Bear), had conspired with other young persons to produce a magazine “containing obscene, lewd, indecent and sexually perverted articles, cartoons and drawings with intent to debauch and corrupt the morals of children and other young persons and to arouse and implant in their minds lustful and perverted ideas.”

The judge discounted the testimony of jazz musician George Melly because he heard he had sworn in front of his children and had used the word ‘cunnilingus’ in court.

The ‘Oz Three,’ Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson were found ‘not guilty’ on the conspiracy charge but convicted and imprisoned on two lesser offences. At the committal hearing the defendants all wore rented schoolgirl outfits and at the appeal trial, long wigs. Although the convictions were overturned, after the verdict they were taken to prison and had their hair forcibly cut. Felix Dennis received a lesser sentence after the judge deemed him “very much less intelligent” than the others. He went on to become one of Britain’s wealthiest publishers. When Judge Argyle repeated his allegations about Dennis in ‘The Spectator,’ which was outside court privileges, Dennis sued the magazine and won. Asked why he didn’t sue Judge Argyle, he said: “Oh, I don’t want to make him a martyr of the Right: there’s no glory to be had in suing an 80-year-old man and taking his house away from him.”

Further efforts to confine and control sexual expression in the UK were manifest in such laws as the Indecent Displays Act, 1981 which required most adult stores to ensure their windows were blacked out, that none of their goods were seen if the door was open and warning signs were erected over the entrance. Later, it was not just illegal to publish “extreme pornographic material” but also a crime to possess it following the introduction of Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, 2008.

I was familiar with drawing the naked human form at Falmouth School of Art but in the early eighties I was warned by IPC magazines that illustrations of young men with bare chests would no longer be welcome. I was told that the teen magazine group which included ‘Oh Boy!’ ‘My Guy’ and ‘Mates’ were under pressure from Mary Whitehouse’s campaign group the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association.

AMERICA

In the USA in the late 1920s, ‘Ladies’ Home Journal’ introduced a page for girls and called it ‘The Sub-Deb’ with beauty and domestic advice.

In 1926, the USA saw the roll-out of ‘Parents’ Magazine.’ By 1938, teen slang was beginning to be shared amongst youngsters. In 1941 ‘Parents’ Magazine’ was running a column on high school fashion trends called ‘Tricks for Teens’ which became popular with girls. So popular in fact that it inspired the first dedicated magazine for adolescent girls, ‘Calling All Girls’ with comics, stories, recipes, patterns and advice.

The teenager was becoming a distinct demographic. In 1944 King Features Syndicate sold the comic strip ‘Teena,’ created by cartoonist Hilda Terry, to newspapers,. The character was popular through the Second World War and right up until 1963.

In 1944, the magazine ‘Seventeen’ launched with the aim of encouraging girls to become model workers and citizens. As a mark of its success, by 2017 the magazine had editions in Mexico, India, South Africa, Malaysia, Japan and more with a combined circulation of over 2 million. 

In the 1950s, while ‘Seventeen’ emphasized fashion, dating, and early marriage, new gossip magazines, such as ‘Teen Parade’ and ‘Hep Cats,’ reached out for new markets. Although teen magazines proliferated in the seventies and eighties, the magazines still clung to conservative societal norms. A star’s bad behaviour wasn’t discussed, long-term relationships were rarely mentioned, LGBT+ and people of colour were sidelined, (the first black model appeared on the cover of ‘Seventeen’ magazine in 1971), and bare chests appeared far less frequently than in many European countries. Bob Schartoff, ‘Super Teen’s’ creative director told the ‘New York Daily News’ in 1982, “if they have hairy chests, you’ll see them with their shirts buttoned up.” He added stars with beards would also be excluded.

In 1988, the more feminist ‘Sassy’ magazine was launched by Australian feminist and CEO of Matilda Publications, Sandra Yates. Its sexual content soon caught the unwanted attention of Christian fundamentalist group Women Aglow who tried to boycott the magazine.

‘Sassy’ was based on Australia’s ‘Dolly’ magazine which rose to a form of notoriety in 2007 when a catwalk model’s genitalia appeared in print. With an arrow guiding the reader, the caption read: “Look closer. Eww! Not that close!” And another caption which read: “Umm, we think you forgot something!” Editor Bronwyn McCahon advised: “We did cover the area originally, and the little spot we used somehow fell off the page just before printing and we didn’t notice.”

The benefit of young people receiving a comprehensive sex and relationships education is compelling and backed by research. Studies have even pointed to a reduction in unwanted pregnancies and of girls starting sex later. But a lot of evangelical, or Orthodox Christians and some Muslim groups have their own ideas on how to reach teenagers and ‘protect’ them.

Launched in 2012 in the U.S.A., ‘Conservative Teen’s appearance was mercifully brief. Its contents reflected the concerns of evangelical churchgoing parents rather than their children who were assailed by such articles as: “Why the unborn need our protection!” “Hot air and cold facts of liberal media bias,” “Why abstinence works,” and an in-depth look at why popular TV series, ‘Glee’ is “innocent fun outside, hardcore social liberalism inside.” 

There would be more. In 2017, Focus on the Family with their multi-million-dollar budget re-launched ‘Brio,’ a magazine that put forward what Bob DeMoss, vice president of content development saw as a ‘biblical worldview.’ The organisation states that abortion, premarital sex and being LGBT+ is “a particularly evil lie of Satan,” and President Jim Daly has said marriage equality means the destruction of civilization. The organisation was started by Dr James Dobson who promoted strict discipline and spanking children.

In the west, Muslim communities also produced their own magazines to reflect the conservative values of their religious families.

Fundamental religious communities didn’t stop at teen magazines to reach children. There were after-school clubs and organised vacations too. And if they couldn’t get into schools, Christian evangelical groups sometimes parked converted buses outside schools to proselytise. In 2013, shocked parents discovered an extreme religious sect had been rubbishing evolution and brainwashing their children entirely without their knowledge for eight years. ‘The Daily Record’ reported the U.S. Church of Christ infiltrating Kirktonholme Primary School in Scotland after a head teacher invited them in to minister to pupils in 2005. Members worked as classroom assistants and even accompanied children on activities outside the school. The Church of Christ posted videos on Youtube suggesting that they were the only true representatives of Christianity in Scotland, and it was their mission to save the country.

The scandal only surfaced after a five-year-old showed his parents a book he was given as a gift from the Church of Christ for all the money the children had raised for their ‘church planting’ expansion. The dad explained that his son had burst into tears when he tried to take the book away. “When I asked why he was crying, he said the man who gave it to him told him it was really, really important.”

The children were handed copies of Kyle Butt’s controversial anti-science book ‘Truth Be Told: Exposing the Myth of Evolution.’  The book was accompanied by illustrations of dinosaurs pulling carts and being ridden by men. Children were persuaded that if evolution was true, dogs would give birth to animals that were half-dog and half-cat. These ideas were outside of mainstream Christianity and stemmed from a long-refuted ‘creation science,’ a 20th century heresy that had its roots in Henry Morris’s Genesis Flood and Seventh Day Adventism.

It also transpired that a notable pro-creationist who worked with Answers in Genesis, Dr Nagy Iskander, sat on the education committee of South Lanarkshire Council which oversaw the school. He was able to do so through a bizarre Scottish law that permitted three unelected religious affiliates to sit on every one of Scotland’s 32 education committees. One from the Catholic Church, one from the Church of Scotland, and one chosen from another religion. In nineteen of the committees, the Church of Scotland boasted it held the balance of power to make decisions.

In the USA, the Supreme Court helpfully ruled that Creationism was a religion, This meant they didn’t have to pay taxes on their revenue and donors could deduct the value of their gifts to them from their taxable income.

But it didn’t end there in the parallel universe of creationism. A book published by one of Answer’s in Genesis’s employees in 2006 accused Hollywood of using subtle tactics to slip “evolutionary content” into ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ ‘Lilo & Stitch’ and ‘Finding Nemo,’ affirming that, “as Christians we need to reflect the Bible’s standards and not Hollywood’s perverted version of reality.” In 2020, AiG launched its own streaming service, Answers.tv, intended as an alternative to streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+.

The efforts of religious organisations outside of the mainstream have persistently sought to capture the minds of the young. Ostensibly to ‘save’ their souls from perdition. But in practice, produce a new generation of obedient social conservatives to fill the cavernous mouth of the far right. Evangelical churches supporting Donald Trump, Orthodox churches supporting Vladimir Putin, mosques supporting Ali Khamenei or any number of other authoritarian leaders grabbing the attention of the pious on ‘X’ or ‘TikTok.’ Teenagers have never been so vulnerable.

Apart from a few online editions, teen magazines of yesteryear have been virtually wiped out. Teens have cut out the middleman and now follow influencers and their favourite stars on social media platforms.

What the future holds is anyone’s guess. The times they are a-changing’.

Garry Cobb, 2024.