Previous Bizarre Sex Education Posters from the Early 20th Century

[LaurenG]

This is the headline so don't yell at me for bad grammar. Sexist, nasty, scare tactic posters, we all know that only females spread vd... right :eyes:



http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-std?utm_source=scribol&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=scribol

[mainegreen]

1. I love old Public Message type posters.

Those are pretty good, some I haven't seen before.

I'm more fond of the Communist artistic style, esp North Korean propaganda.

[FloridaJudy]

2. I used to have a wonderful lunchbox

From Archie McPhee that had an art deco "Have you been spreading syphilis?" message on it. Ten years in the employee refrigerator, and I never had my lunch stolen - unlike many others.

Unfortunately, my son commandeered it when he went to college (along with my "Leather Goddesses of Phobos" t-shirt). I'll never see their like again, alas!

[Xithras]

3. Context. Those all look like military posters.

Until very recently, the military was practically all men, so the posters were aimed exclusively at them. VD used to be a huge issue on military bases, where soldiers would regularly hit up the local prostitutes whenever they had R&R. These posters were part of the military's fight against that practice.

If I remember right, something like 20,000 soldiers in WW2 picked up venereal diseases that were serious enough to pull them out of combat. That's on TOP of the estimated several hundred thousand who picked up relatively "minor" STD's ranging from crabs to herpes.

This stuff doesn't make the mainstream history books because nobody wants to think about the fact that their noble hero grandpa might have been banging some Italian hookers as he fought across Europe, but it happened and these posters are a reference to a nearly forgotten bit of history.