The mechanical bride 21 taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grill work on a car. They are date-baited power levers for the management of the male audience. Thus, for example, the legs “on a Pedestal” presented by the Gotham Hosiery company are one facet of our “replaceable parts” cultural dynamics. In a specialist world it is natural that we should select some single part of the body for attention. Al Capp expressed this ironically when he had Li‘l Abner fall desperately in love with the pictorial scrap of a woman’s knee, saying (January 21, 1950), “Why not? Some boys fall in love with the expression on a gal’s face. Ah is a knee man!” Four months and many lethal and romantic adventures later, Li’ l Abner was closing in on the owner of the knee. The “Phantom Pencil Seam Nylons” ad presents another set of spare parts against a romantic landscape. Some people have heard of “Ideas with legs,” but everybody today has been brought up on pictures like these, which would rather appear to be “legs with ideas.” Legs today have been indoctrinated. They are self-conscious. They speak. They have huge audiences. They are taken on dates. And in varying degrees the ad agencies have extended this specialist treatment to every other segment of the feminine anatomy. A car plus a well-filled pair of nylons is a recognized formula for both feminine and male success and happiness. Ads like these not only express but also encourage that strange dissociation of sex not only from the human person but even from the unity of the body. This visual and not particularly voluptuous character of commercially sponsored glamour is perhaps what gives it so heavy a narcissistic quality. The brittle, self-conscious pose of the mannequin suggests the activities of competitive display rather than spontaneous sensuality. And the smartly turned-out girl walks and behaves like a being who sees herself as a slick object rather than is aware of herself as a person. “Ever see a dream walking?” asks a glamour ad. The Hiroshima bomb was named “Gilda” in honor of Rita Hayworth. Current sociological study of the precocious dating habits of middle-class children reveals that neither sex nor personal interest in other persons is responsible so much as an eagerness to be “in there pitching.” This may be reassuring to the parents of the young, but it may create insoluble problems for the same youngsters later on. When sex later becomes a personal actuality, the established feminine pattern of sex as an instrument of power, in an industrial and consumer contest, is a liability. The switch-over from competitive display to personal affection is not easy for the girl. Her mannequin past is in the way. On the male, this display of power to which he is expected to respond with cars and dates has various effects. The display of current feminine sex power seems to many males to demand an impossible virility of assertion. Fair tresses man’s imperial race ensnare, And beauty draws us with a single hair. Men are readily captured by such gentleness and guile, but, surrounded by legs on pedestals, they feel not won but slugged. To this current exaggeration of date-bait some people reply that the glamour business, like the entertainment world, is crammed with both women-haters and men-haters of dubious sex polarity. Hence the malicious insistence on a sort of abstract sex. But whatever truth there may be in this, there is more obvious truth in the way in which sex has been exaggerated by getting hooked to the mechanisms of the market and the impersonal techniques of industrial production.