Muscle-Man
HAVING committed themselves to the proposition that all men are created equal, the Americans spend huge mounds of dollars each year in trying to correct the self-evident fact that men develop unequally. Hence 'You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine,' They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but . . .' and 'Practice psychiatry on your friends with this handy self-instruction kit.' Hence also the success of merciless quacks like Bernarr Macfadden who exploit some existing fact—in his case that self-discipline can produce surprising physical results—into a machine for squeezing money out of the credulous. In this bitter book his wife leaves out no loving touch to prove that Macfadden was a fraud, a cheat, a liar, cruel in his sexual demands, pretending they were for something other than self-gratification. He picked up his wife in a competition for a 'perfect woman,' what we would now call a 38-22-36 girl, and put her in tights as a come-on for gaping provincials as he toured around showing off his muscles, Which he expanded partly by the use of trick lighting. Mrs. Macfadden herself claims 'credit' for one of the most appalling ideas in American journalism—the 'True Story' magazine. Her husband exploited the idea and made a fortune out of it, adding other ways of raping the American intelligence and depressing the nation to a level of boobishness which made even Mencken despair. The redeeming feature of this book is that Mary Mac- fadden shows a nice sense of irony, as when she understates her husband's fury at being given a pair of pyjamas for a wedding present : 'Trousers in bed, he said, were a sinister invention calculated to thwart the inspirational moment of procreation; an unnatural and serious interference with the production of the
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