An amusing book review here about the history of the "personal column" in newspapers and magazines.
A magazine devote to it was started in England in 1915, but it was considered a moral scandal:
The police were particularly interested in the number of young men who claimed to be artistic, musical, unconventional, or fans of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. Officers also had their doubts about women who claimed to be “jolly” or “sporty”, thinking this might be a euphemism for what might now be called “up for it”.This part of the review is particularly interesting:
...the anthropologist Gilbert Bartell and his wife posed as swingers to compile a study of wife-swapping in the Chicago area (making excuses and leaving at the vital moment).The image of swinging, as sold by magazines such as Playboy, was all glamour and decadence. So the Bartells were surprised to find their fellow swingers were, well, rather dull. “The typical male was a slack-waisted, balding man of about 5ft 10in,” reports Cocks. “Women averaged 5ft 4in and, if not exactly fat, had succumbed to the early ravages of middle-aged spread. They were not enormously overweight, but at the very least tended to be over-endowed in the hips, thighs and stomach. For all the advertised charms of big breasts, the women tended to be relatively flat-chested.”
Well, I already knew that from watching Fast Forward a couple of decades ago.
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