Most Brevities stories fixated on the inevitable downward spiral of the modern '30s woman: she's drunk, she's stoned, she's selling her body or getting gruesomely hacked to death in a nightclub. One Brevities cartoon shows two upper-class women talking about getting laid by sailors and athletes as they stroll past a storefront sign advertising "English heels good for street walking." Another shows a young girl pulling up her skirt while asking her much older doctor, "Will you vaccinate me where it won't show?" The last page of each issue of Brevities contained a column called "Women About Town" that told a new cautionary tale each week about an unnamed, allegedly real woman who'd had too much booze and sex and ended up an impoverished spinster seamstress or suffered some similarly horrific fate. "Men sought her like bees around honey," reads one allegory, "and, even if her intentions were the best, she soon succumbed to the lure of easy money . . . She soon hit the bottle, and whatever chance she had for further work was soon dissipated as her scandalous actions made the front pages regularly . . . When you see her walking up and down the main stem with her basket, remember that . . . she is a confirmed drunkard and, although she has been in many institutions, she is still as hopeless as the day she started."
From top: a story about an older man and a very young woman; a cartoon fretting about upper-class amoralism; a gossip column written under a pseudonym. (Click images to enlarge.)
Such stories were written against the backdrop of a culture in which women had just won the right to vote. Some were getting desk jobs. Flappers were making premarital sex seem like a gratifying and intelligent choice. Anxiety over these "innocents" being consumed by their own liberation made for great paranoia-propelled copy, and Brevities was more than happy to gin up the crisis.
Brevities' April 4, 1932, cover story, for instance, was an "exposé" headlined "ABORTIONS KILL OVER MILLION." There was no data to back up the claim, but plenty of macabre narrative:
"While only a few women are killed outright by the fiendish operation, many are hurled into early graves as a result of the work done on them. Many, even when approaching certain death, will not admit what doctor harmed them. To do this would often implicate a lover. They shield their guilty secret with their death and the abortionist keeps on with his bloody work."
Even better than hysterical women having affairs and being butchered by abortion doctors were women having sex with each other. Tabloids were obsessed with homosexuality almost from their inception. Today, it's all about outing and speculation, but tabs like Brevities sought to uncover a seedy gay underground civilization. In the '20s, Brevities ran a series of at least thirteen articles collectively titled "A Night in Fairyland" that claimed to document the shadowy world of gay nightlife. An anthropological approach — observing homosexuals in their native habitat — was typical. One article describes efforts by a prominent sexologist "to investigate the conditions among followers of the divine Sappho in the metropolis of the New World." After spending time searching for "any genuine resort in the city for girl friends," Brevities reports that he was unfortunately "unable to meet Lesbians at close range . . . Because of these circumstances, no competent study of New York's slightly masculine women has yet been published. However, we are informed, one is now being prepared by an eminent authority in the field. He assures us that there really is a place. In fact many places." Brevities was shameless with its puns, particularly when it came to homosexuality. An article about gays emigrating to gay-friendly Europe is headlined "PANSIES BLOW U.S.: Hightail for Europe When Queer Antics Win Bronx Cheers from Normal Society. Yank Queens Go Native in Pretzelville and Flutter Purple Wings on Main Drags." Will Straw notes that it's "the only reference to 'blow' in that context that I've seen that early in anything."
Another issue of Brevities implied that employers of blue-collar workers were hiring teams of prostitutes to keep their guys satiated so they wouldn't turn gay. Under the headline "MINERS' HOT HOLES", a cartoon shows two construction workers coming perilously close to using a jackhammer as a dildo. "But the horny-handed sons of toil that roll up the shekels for the big boys must have their women. This is especially true of the coal miners, steel mill workers and other labor hogs who do the nation's dirty work. Gals give this class of citizen his only kick. And gals this bozo must have if he is going to keep on whooping up production while his wages and chances of getting ahead go to the devil."
