During the 2nd World War, propaganda posters were used for everything from encouraging people to buy war bonds, to asking them to kindly donate all of their scrap metal and even bits of rubber.
After all, supplies were in short demand.
Today this kind of media, propaganda, whatever you want to call it… would be done over the Internet, but in the 1940s, posters were all the rage. So was venereal disease, if these posters are to be believed. Masses of soldiers banging prostitutes and picking up diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea. Yikes!
This was a big problem for the allied forces. If soldiers were sick, they couldn’t fight, and if they couldn’t fight, they couldn’t win the war. So what was the solution? More posters of course! The army needed to teach soldiers about the evils of loose women with even looser gonorrhea filled lips and they had to do it in a hurry. The result is this almost laughably (by today’s standards) collection of “anti-VD” posters produced by the military.
I’ve got to say, some of these posters really made me chuckle. It’s not that I don’t agree with teaching safe sex practices – quite the opposite, I don’t think the education system is going far enough, especially in the United States – but instead that these posters are so amazingly one sided and misogynistic.
Among other things, we can’t even pretend that many men aren’t “loose” as these posters put it….
So man or woman, next time remember… there’s no medicine for regret.
