An excerpt from the book 1939 Profitable Showmanship by Kenneth Goode and Zenn Kaufman:
Sex Is Here to Stay
>Writing in defense of "Tobacco Road," the "oversexed" play that has been running for more than six years in New York, Brooks Atkinson said once in the New York Times :
<It is one thing to deplore the theater's lack of fastidious sensibilities. But to maintain that the theater should be devoted to the fine aspects of the human race is to imply that the human race is innocent of corruption. The function of art is not to promote a code of standards or to establish social ideals, but to tell the truth about all the people who inhabit the world.
>Mr. Atkinson, as a dramatic critic, is, of course, more or less committed professionally to the principle that since plays are written to be produced, anything that may properly be written may with equal propriety be produced. That in turn means offering plays as "entertainment" indiscriminately at a $3.30 top, eight times a week, openly to the general public. It sounds brutal, even here, to say for the benefit of our book sales that the most profitable "truth" in "Tobacco Road's" six-year run is the pursuit in and out of the scenery of a young girl by her own father. This demonstration of a specialized activity was given to members of a mixed audience, old and young, whose lives were lacking the kick of exact knowledge as to that branch of their education.
>Publishers of pornographic books have, somewhat similarly, always confused muddle-headed magistrates with arguments about "art" and "literature." The only real question ever involved is not the truth of the matter represented nor the skill of the artist who presented it, but simply the social desirability of the prostitution of both truth and art to the commercial profit of its exploiter.
>So long as society is enabled to carry on from day to day its less enticing routines only by the simple expedient of resolutely keeping its clothes on, except, let us say, at beaches and formal dances, the use of too much sex in business will remain, like too much skill in playing cards, a question of how far any individual is willing to cheat to his own profit in commercial competition with those of his fellow artists who, from one stupid inhibition or another, stick to more temperate vehicles and so suffer.
>Too much use of raw sex, on the other hand, may be as inexcusable and unprofitable as its antipodal blunder: too little sex! Sex as sentiment above-the-belt sex is not only the greatest motivating force in all human affairs but the single, absolutely reliable, unvarying, nondeteriorating force in business. Raw sex used temperately, like alcohol used temperately, is perfectly permissible and generally desirable. The failure to find vigorous use of some sex attraction to promote practically any business might reasonably be regarded as prima-facie evidence of mismanagement.
>George Seldes' book, You Can't Print That! tells of a confidential report made by M. Paul-Boncour. "Please stop sending us your old men as speakers. They look tired and worn-out and have to be put to bed with hot-water bottles the minute they get here. No wonder Americans picture us as a feverish, exhausted race. Send me some younger men with some charm. "
>Miami Beach, literally, was started on its way by getting whole groups of high-school girls to pose in bathing suits for the Sunday rotogravures. Hot chance New England winter sports have against that! One of the most interesting of recent sex encroachments in what used to be an utterly masculine field is the craze for young female drum majors with American Legion bands. In fact, through Hollywood perversion of ideas on how a football audience ought to behave, our spectator sports, like our public parades, have gone Ziegfeld, if not Koster and Rial. Even small-town high-school girls, formed into "Pep Clubs," parade at intermissions. And "Miss Lady Godiva" could have left her hair and horse behind to join a modern beauty contest.
>The hit of the day at a luncheon of the Women's National Press Club in Washington was Sylvia, the Hollywood beauty expert. And the all-time high for attendance at the New York Sales Executives' Club was the day they had Sally Rand. Also, you may have read of the complaint made by a C.I.O. unit to the National Labor Relations Board that they couldn't get a quorum for labor meetings because every meeting night the company ran a free strip-tease show in competition with the union.
>At a recent meeting of the State Librarian Association a complaint was made by one of the delegates that the SEX tab in her filing system was worn down long before the rest of the other tabs, and she wanted to know if the equipment manufacturers couldn't furnish an extra SEX tab with every set.
>Out in Chicago the John Hertel Company does a nice business selling Bibles from house to house. In fact, it has nearly seven hundred men who make a living selling Bibles. The Bible costs $19.50 on easy payments, and the company gives you a handsome premium if you pay cash. After experimenting with different premiums for many years, it has found that the best on-the-line-cash-getter is a good SEX book!
>This is all good and proper, so long as it is frankly recognized as sex and is not made dishonest by calling it anything else. Outside of sports events like baseball and boxing, few forms of entertainment can survive without some sex interest. Music has it. We have only to read Lawrence Gilman's notes in the programs of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to see that there is a "boy-meets-girl" twist in music. Books certainly have it. And in one issue of the New York World-Telegram there was a story of an acrobats' convention at which the chief bit of business was the unanimous passing of a resolution advocating more sex appeal in tightrope walking. Practically all pleasure cruises, whether to attract their customers to the frozen Land of the Midnight Sun or humid Africa, rely regularly on a girl or two in a bathing suit, generally an American girl. Bali alone seems able to introduce an original note.
>Other items less sexy than tours, and even such "un-sexy" items as furniture and rubber tires, rely upon girl decoys. The Whiting Plover Paper Co., for example, dramatizes the secretive quality of their Permanent Opaque Bond by running a trade-paper insert in which the leading characters are three partially clad girls. Covering each girl's picture is a different type of paper. The first girl is covered with ordinary bond. Her outline is, of course, quite visible through it. The second girl is shielded with permanized paper, which gives her a bit more privacy. The third girl, however, protected by Permanized Opaque Bond, is entirely invisible until curious prospects lift the paper. The soundness of this practice is based on the fact that any group of buyers of furniture, tires, bicycles, bottles, or printing is identical with the audience required by the acrobats, a matinee crowd at "Tobacco Road," or any other section of the Great American Public whose good will and respect were so strongly coveted by M. Paul-Boncour.