It’s time to end the shame of being attracted to partners who fall outside the range of who our society tells us we should be attracted to. In a recent interview (L) Miley Cyrus discussed her sexual fluidity. (R) Vintage Love Comics
The selling of who we may love has finally reached its expiration date.
In a country that long prided itself on endless choices of toothpaste, breakfast cereal and shampoos, for far too long there really was only one choice when it came to who you could love.
You stuck with the brand you knew and trusted.
Heterosexual – It’s the right brand. Time tested, dependable , AMA approved, loved by millions. Don’t accept substitutes.
Don’t Box me In
Vintage Romance Comics
Today there is a cultural shift as we slowly begin to shrug off the need for definitions and labels in how we conceive gender or who our society has told us we should be sexually attracted to.
From Facebook and its 50 shades of gender to Miley Cryus discussing her sexual fluidity, the choices are widening, encouraging those who are uncomfortable being slotted into a gender binary.
Vintage Romance Comics
Appearing in an interview in Paper magazine the 22-year-old agent provocateur discussed the fluidity of both her sexuality and her gender identification stating :
“I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn’t involve an animal and everyone is of age.”
Cyrus’s comment is in line with an approach to sexuality that is gathering momentum among her fellow millennials and a departure with the conventions of the past.
The Normal Heart…Love Honor and Obey
Vintage Romance Comics
With the media obsessed with defining and exaggerating gender codes of masculinity and femininity, never was the insistence that everyone fit into a heterosexual cisgender model stronger than in mid-century America.
Never was the insistence that everyone fit into a heterosexual cisgender model stronger than in mid-century America. The media was obsessed with defining and exaggerating gender codes of masculinity and femininity.
Images of the nuclear family and happy heterosexuals as the norm permeated popular culture, scattering its potent assumptions of family, marriage and who we should love deep into our collective psyches.
Girls Romance
In the late 1940s and early 1950s romance comics were aimed at teenagers and young women in their 20s but they appealed to a younger market ranging from 10 to 17.
Vintage Love Comic
When it came learning about love, mid-century teen girls turned to romance comics, ground zero of mid-century hetero-normative love. The wholesome advise offered was more akin to Hannah Montana than Miley Cyrus.
With names such as Young Romance, Girls Love and Secret Hearts , the colorful, pulpy pages were filled with heart throbbing stories about the rocky road to love in the quest for Mr Right.
Interestingly enough romance comics were written and drawn primarily by men. Even the advice columns with bylines attributed to women were written by men
The formulaic stories were instructive, telling the readers how to find a man, how to keep him, how to be beautiful for him and most important how to get him to put a ring on your finger.
Skating on Thin Ice
Vintage Love Comic
There was only one path to true happiness and anyone who veered from that was headed for trouble. . Fast girls who got pregnant got the shame they deserved but could be redeemed, but a girl who wasn’t boy crazy? Unthinkable!
Vintage Love Comic
No one wanted to be thought of as being “That Kind of Girl!”
Let’s follow the instructive story of “Liz” the non too subtly named Tomboy who queerly shows no interest in boys .Despite the taunts leering comments and shaming pointed our way our hero er …heroine stands firm.
That is until… she meets the Right boy, in a story entitled “That Strange Girl!”
That Strange Girl
Vintage Romance Comics
Failure to conform to these confining roles meant there was a whole lot of shaming going on.
The Key to Femininity
Vintage Romance Comics
Vintage Romance Comics
Vintage Romance Comics
Vintage Romance Comics
She Doesn’t Go For Boys!
Vintage Romance Comics
Vintage Romance Comics
Vintage Romance Comics
What Do You Think I Was…?
Vintage Romance Comics
Vintage Romance Comics
This story appeared in a romance comic from the early 1970s. Still grounded in the morality of the 1950s’s, the Love Comics genre could never adjust to the new changing morality despite trying to deal with contemporary themes, eventually dealing a death knell for romance comics.
Today’s changing morality has likewise signaled a death knell to limitations on love.
By the end of June, the month long associated with love and weddings, the Supreme Court will issue a milestone decision about the right of two men or 2two women to exchange marriage vows, extending same sex marriage to all 50 states, making it the law of the land.
(©) 20015 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved
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