“The Bull is Mightier Than the Bullet.”
Tiajuana is a small town in Mexico just across the border from San Diego. It is the Havana of the west coast. The other day a theatre had just opened up to show the films of the Carpentier-Dempsey fight when the building caught fire and burned film and all. It was a tough day for the movies also in San Diego, for the “cops” at a nearby beach resort chose the day for raiding a playhouse that was screening a South American film called “Adam and Eve.”
According to the police there was an undue exposure of the feminine anatomy in the case of Eve. Mebbe so! We have not had the pleasure of seeing this tid-bit. But, it must have been some exposure if it had anything on the Aphrodite of the galleries and the halls of sculpture that are accepted as the product of “Art” and held immune from the incongruous draperies of Gothic prudery.
On our bathing beaches, too, everything goes on and off, and more than mere legs is visible to the naked eye unashamed. Why then, is the feminine form divine the most indecent product of the Creator’s handiwork? We have asked Gus and he says that all the girls of his acquaintance are bow-legged. That lets Gus out of the symposium. Perhaps some of the prude morality mongers can enlighten a poor, hard-working farmer from Robbinsdale.
Feminine modesty may be only shoe-high and roll-top stockings an incitement to masculine pruriency—but, thank heaven, most of us are not fashioned that way. The censorial Puritan may blush like an over-ripe tomato at the complete revelation of the feminine knee-joint.
However, no masculine connoisseur is going to do an emotional handspring over such a trivial, especially when it is common observation that three-quarters of the lower quarters, and other quarters that one sees parading down Main street nowadays, are too fat or too skinny or too gnarled to raise much of a ripple on a regular guy’s masculinity.
Immodesty is a relative term and a silk stocking, properly stocked, is not our idea of indecency. Therefore, we don’t incline to the grannies’ view that the bare leg on stage or screen is immodest for the very reason that the fat leg and the skinny leg and the bow-legged leg don’t get there. Or, at least, they don’t stay there long.
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Why does a man, having spent his years from the time of puberty to young manhood in an orgy of flagrant living and self-indulgence, demand of the honored girl whom he makes his wife that she be of virginal purity? And why in the name of all that is civilized should he adhere to the idea that no matter how degenerate he becomes, his wife should bring to him an unimpeachable chastity?