Or How Jack the Weakling Slaughtered the Dance Floor Hog – and other stories. Or put simply, how the Ad Men of yesteryear attempted to persuade men to get muscles and their own back. An ever so slightly tongue in cheek but fond homage to the bodybuilding ads from the publications of yesteryear.

In the comics of fifties onwards, among the myriad of adverts for sea monkeys, X-Ray specs and other such dubious products the likes of Charles Atlas and Joe Weider exhorted the youth of the day to exchange with their cash in exchange for muscles, girls and getting their own back on the bully boy.  The psychology of the ads certainly seem somewhat dated now but do they give us an insight in to how the mind of the male of the species once worked (and possibly still does)?

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It is fairly obvious from the ad above that adjectives, as a weapon had not been discovered yet.  Instead of answering the bully boy tactics with an array of withering words, as the metrosexual of today would be expected to do by his erstwhile dance partner, the secret here was to deal with the bully by – well, becoming one.  There is only one language that these types understand and that is the language they speak themselves – or so proclaims the advert.  Jack goes from being abandoned by his date to winning her back – and has a number of eager females to take her place should he so choose, simply by joining up to the Charles Atlas program and waiting until a little ‘later’ when he has the ability to beat the bully at his own game.

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If the beat the bully tactic didn’t work then selling bodybuilding as fun was possibly the answer.  The age old before and after shots were de rigueur already – eve though the before shot does picture Ken Grimm (the photo model with the huge ears, sorry muscles) at about the age of ten.  From skinny-shrimp to He-Man this advert promises that for a dollar (not a great amount of money in those days, but enough) he can add inches to his chest – and if the ‘red-blooded’ guarantee is anything to go by, elsewhere too.  It doesn’t take a genius to work out, however, that with a ‘a big book of photos of strong men’ free with the plan, then it may not have been an altogether heterosexual audience at which this advert was aimed.