ADVENTURES IN THE SIN TRADE (Village Voice, 1975)

I CONFESS

So, okay: it’s 1975, I’m 22, and over the moon about bullshitting my way into The Village Voice, where I’ve somehow persuaded an editor to assign me a piece on Confession Magazines.

The Voice! Just stepping into the building, I think, like a total l lit-rube, I am walking where Mailer walked. I could not be more excited! Until, that is, the reality of actually having to go and interview strangers sets in, and the excitement morphs to rank anxiety.

In the next post, I’ll be writing more about my mortifying intro to the big time..

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ADVENTURES IN THE SIN TRADE (Village Voice, 1975)

The land is flat in corn country, and it would seem that the lives of most Middle Americans describe a similar terrain. Beneath the surface. however, teems a darker, more twisted universe. Here raping fathers spawn baby-beaters and whores, virgins cursed with birthmarks kill nightly in their dreams. For such creatures, whose repentance demands testimony, American publishers developed the Confession industry. Victims and victimizers alike can profit: “True Love" buys sin for a nickel a word. Since 1918. when Bernarr Macfadden put out the first issue of True Story, the unspoken torments of women have been communicated at length. Today's confessions translate contemporary themes to the timeless verbiage of frustration, guilt, and lust. Consider Women's Liberation "The Night 1 Wouldn't Let My Husband Climax-To Show Him What I Always Go Through." Or homosexuality "I Watched My Brother Seduce My Boyfriend – I Couldn’t Stop That Kind Of Sex.”

Certainly, a stab at the readership of Uncensored Confessions means probing the heart of the heart of the country. New Yorkers will wince, but reality just might be a beauty parlor in Iowa. As local ladies hide their roots, the twists of each character's fate mold lives in a way no "fan-zine" ever could. Confessions, simply, are the real people's People magazine. Empathy replaces awe. Liz and Dick become just another pair of flirtatious folks next door.

Enough surveys have been done to establish that the archetypal confession reader is a married woman between 18 and 30 who believes in God, and that people are rewarded for their good deeds and punished for their sins. Of course, the description also fits the standard protagonist. Modern Romances specifies that its stories are for "wives and daughters of blue-collar class…..”

This is the only literature many women read.

How, then, to reconcile the meat-and-potatoes demographic portrait with the hot stuff of the mags themselves? Editors inevitably dismiss their sensational photographs and titles as mere eye catchers. And in fact, a jaunt through any given story uncovers the discrepancy between promise and fulfillment. The zany prospects implicit in "Our Neighbors Laughed As We Made Love." for example, are somehow never realized. In this case, the plot centers on a woman whose husband Fred bugs their houseguest's bedroom and then plays the tape later to excite them both. As fate would have it, one wild night Fred records himself and the narrator in the heat of passion-when she calls him "Tiger"-and the recording falls into the wrong hands. There follows much embarrassment in the community, but the young thrill-seekers soon learn their lesson and understand that what they did was wrong.

The naive consumer, lured by the quasi porno come-on, may well wish to sue for fraudulent packaging. Like the vitamin list on "fortified" white bread, the contents offer ingredients that just don't exist. The gamiest tits-and ass embellishment dissolves to an X-rated Andy Griffith show. As meagre consolation for this deceit, the advertisements provide a modicum of titillation. Indeed. As much can be gleaned from the square-inch fillers as six pages of moral angst Imagine those stolen moments with a "Ben-Wa Vibrating Egg." Garnish those fantasies with Frederick's of Hollywood extras.

In the same way that moral malfunctions are resolved with Real Love and Truth, there exists a catalog of bodily horrors for which mail-order cures exist. Stretch marks, age spots, thighs "as big as saddle bags"-all ravagers of the wifely form. Stories within stories, the full-page hypes of each item divulge the same cosmic dreads as the confessions, but with the added attraction of ending the reader's problem as well as the protagonist's. When Mary Young of Ohio says that "Ayds" cut down her "television snacking”, sister snackers need only pick up a box to go straight themselves. On the Trouble Scale, guilt is only a little harder to lose than fat.

The type of advertisement that tends to spiritual malaise perhaps best represent the genre. Like the fiction they interrupt, products of the "Cross of Magnator" variety at once alleviate and exploit people's problems. In astonishing ur-Lampoon prose, the "Magnator" ad can boast, "Some claim they walk without crutches for the first time in years…..”  But a few paragraphs later the same copy offers a $100 "honorarium" to those purchasers who "want to tell others of their experience. " Thus, the kind of faith and logic in "true stories" manufactured by professional writers re-emerges in these "amazing offers." As the thinking goes, even if they're lying, the story's good. And besides, it might be true. But, of course, the real intrigue of Confession magazines resides with the individuals who put them together.

Despite the dozens of publications on the market, there are actually only a handful of publishers. Three major firms- Macfadden Women's Group, Magazine Management, and Dauntless Books- together account for some 17 titles on the stands. Dauntless, though, has already manufactured its remaining 1975 issues and folded. Other houses, such as Lopez and Sterling, have also followed the national trend toward cutting back production.

The most successful firm. Magazine Management, said that recent figures put average monthly circulation at 170,000, a figure down from earlier tallies. Like the men in a confession reader's life, the publishers feel the first bite of layoffs and shrinking employment. Many magazines are still prospering, but those catering to the backbone of the country are slowly being broken.

At a grass roots level, the recession chokes the industry by making it impossible for the women to spare the 40 to 75 cent cost of the magazine. Her husband out his job, the missus can hardly ask money for frills. Those who can spare the change are rewarded with stories that reflect their on ever-worsening plight. "The world is closing in on these people." says Ardis Sandel, editor-in-chief of Real Sory. "In the '50s and 60s, the women had no need to think beyond their own homes and families, now national concerns are becoming private ones.

Beyond the economic pale, the reader's reaction to the Real World is of central concern to the editors. The fact remains, after all, that the professional New Yorkers who assemble these products lead lives of a radically different nature than their audience. As a result, their jobs demand promotion and recognition of truths their own positions often contradict. How the individual involved perceive this role reveals much about the different magazines, and a bit about power itself.

Cara Sherman, the young editor of True Secrets and five other titles, shares few tastes with her midwestern peers. A love for Helen Gurley Brown or Esquire will not win friends in Winnemucca. In an office flaunting Vogue posters and competence, the director determines what will and will not become the stuff of her readers' consciousness. Daughter of Brooklyn Turns Mad. Ave. Ms.- Smart Girl Sells Thrills To Kansas! Her credo- you've got to be sincere. The paradox does not trouble her.

Abdicating the Natahanael Westian potential of the situation, the lady at the True Secrets helm has rejected Miss Lonelyhearts for a more Joyce Brothers-y approach. Cynicism goes unrealized, or unremarked. Toward an audience she sees as "frustrated, bored, and semiliterate," sympathy nevertheless prevails. "We try to tell them what they deserve to know." says Sherman. "The magazines perform a service as well as entertain " Basically, editors feel a personal sense of duty. To Jean Silberg of True Confessions women are interested in "other people's dirty laundry." If this happens to be all they read, then the kind of grime takes on new importance. For Barbara Britt, also of the Macfadden group, identification is the key. Mrs. Once-With-The-Milkman sees herself in print and sighs. Whatever the details, the real therapy comes down to escape. A lifestyle or a lonely afternoon can both be altered with a story.

Just leafing through a True Confessions is a trip through time: Forgotten thought processes dominate; whole chunks of culture resurface. Whether the characters seem like freaks or your twin sibling ultimately doesn't matter. Most writers interviewed found their readers bizarre, yet all successfully "became" them to produce an emotion. For authors, the confession experience demands a stripping of awareness, the ability to shed one's own values for however long it takes to produce an "authentic" tale.

"I am not -what I do," insists Susan Breslaun, whose latest story, " The Computer Killings-One Day A Strange Little Card Arrived In The Mail," is featured in September's My Romance. Says Susan, "The difference between myself and my readers is that my I.Q. is over 40."

The sentiment emerges frequently. Linda Asher, current editor of Model's Circle, broke into "the business" by writing confessions, but eventually turned to urban women's magazines, which have an audience more like herself. "My manuscripts kept coming back marked ‘Take out the humor.’ You've got to completely forget your cynicism, because it always shows.” Readers need to know that the story has been told by one of their own.

Viewed one way, the nature of these stories belies an essential unity of experience. Consider the social distance being bridged: patronizing aside, that professional, urban women can create drama which their peers in small-town America can relate to perhaps indicates how insignificant these contrasts are. People's differences, as Lopez and Sterling's Ardis Sandel believes, are largely circumstantial. "We are each other” emotional kin." Pain hurts, in other words, rich and poor alike.

This theory works to a point - then, who says that toy executives must have the mentality of eight-year-olds? What kind of person invented Barbie? The very fact of educated human beings making myths for less educated ones may be the most cynical element of all. New York as cultural control center: this might be propaganda, or it might be art.