Studies in Crap Unveils Picture Stories of the Sex Life of Man and Woman

Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from  basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Picture Stories of the Sex Life of Man and Woman

Author: Dr.
David H. Keller, “America’s most consulted sexologist”

Publisher: Cadillac
Publishing Company, New York

Date: 1941

Discovered at: Collection of
Nancy Hulston

The Cover Promises: “317 Instructive Pictures Explaining How Sex Functions in Human Beings”

Like any regrettable hook-up, Dr. Keller’s Picture Stories of the Sex Life of Man and Woman gets all its words out of the way early, merely offering justification for the hardcore action to follow. For Keller, that justification is helping Americans achieve “the highest happiness life holds for us humans: ideal married love.”

To that end, he offers this guide to ladyparts:

You see, marital happiness depends upon men’s understanding of the sexual potential of lungs, armpits, scar tissue and blisters!

So, Dr. Keller claims his images make sex better. This one shows how nerves and glands dance the maypole around the brain.

And I learned a lot from this space-olive Spaghetti-O waterslide.

Could you pick the clitorises of your loved ones out of a line-up?

At this point, I think we need to bring words back into this. Why,
exactly, did Dr. Keller feel the need to publish a sketch that makes a
“negro porter”‘s clitoris look like Popeye’s chin?

From his introduction, titled ”

Your Automobile – Your Radio –
and Your Body: The Need for Straight Thinking on Sex in Words and
Pictures”:

“It certainly is an interesting commentary on our civilization that a man who is able to name
correctly the parts of his radio or automobile, cannot name
accurately the parts of his own body or describe the manner in which
they function to promote his health and happiness.”

He argues that reproduction “makes of man more than a machine. It
makes him into a creative god.”

I’ll cede that point. Keller’s creative. He comes up with 317 ways to not actually show the fleshy bits instrumental in “sex attraction”:

More justification, please!

Keller cites Havelock Ellis, “the great English sexologist”:

“If there were a due degree of familiarity with the natural organs and functions of
the opposite sex, ninety percent of the indecent acts of youths with
girl children would disappear.”

And:

“The ignorance of the physical facts of sexual love is marked not only in women but also in men, for the
civilized man often knows less of the facts of sexual life than a milkmaid.”

Sadly, neither sexologist makes clear just how images like this are supposed to help with the ins and outs of in-and-out.

Is there any beauty greater than that of a butterfly emerging from its uterus?

Shocking Detail:
Other topics Dr. Keller covers in his deeply unhelpful fashion:

• “The Process of Erection and
  Excitement Explained”
• “Emotional Climaxes of Married Couple
  During Coitus”
• “How the Organs Look If the Front of the
  Female Body Is Opened”
• “Facts You Should Know For
  Defloration On Bridal Night”

And this defense of an ideal:

I applaud his rejection of corsets, yet I despise his rejection of arms.

Highlight:

Observations:

• Genital play begins at 8. Dinner to follow.
• While men all follow one sexual trajectory, women have two choices: married or single.
• The man’s peak comes when the married woman is in labor?
• Between 40 and 50, single women either take a lover or become homosexuals.
• At 55 married women choose whether or not to entertain a lover. This is
  three years before they are widowed and, somehow, five years before
  their husbands’ erections become “weak” and “poor.”
• For men, the 60s are a hotbed of “sex plays and books.”
• At 60 the life journeys of married and single women converge. This is The Golden Girls hypothesis.

The Crap Archivist lives in Kansas City, where he originates his on-line Studies for the Voice‘s sister paper, The Pitch.