Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "How Not to Get Trapped Into a Marriage" (1972)

What better article to review on Valentine's Day?

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "How Not to Get Trapped Into a Marriage." Originally published in Pendulum (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 4, no. 1, April/March 1972. Credited to "Dick Trent."

Excerpt: "Not all men are looking to get married. On the other hand most women are looking for that state of the union. It seems to be born in them. The woman has much more of a capacity for love than the man. Most men can have a quickie, promiscuous affair and when it is over put on his pants and shoes and go home and think little about it except that perhaps he has had a good time (or a bad one as the case may be). And with most young males, searching out new conquests, a variety in love partners is their aim and the girls know it."

1952: Li'l Abner gets married.

Reflections: Nathan Detroit tried to warn us, many decades ago. "What's playing at the Roxy?" he sang to his pals. "I'll tell you what's playing at the Roxy. A picture about a Minnesota man so in love with a Mississippi girl that he sacrifices everything and moves all the way to Biloxi. That's what's playing at the Roxy." 

Ed Wood's 1972 article "How Not to Get Trapped Into a Marriage" is intended as an advice manual for the man who is single and plans to stay that way. It espouses the same basic viewpoint as the musical Guys & Dolls: namely, that shrewd women are constantly scheming to trap helpless men into marriage. Nathan Detroit, for one, gives into the pressure and marries his longtime girlfriend, Adelaide, thus abdicating his life of gambling and carousing.

I don't know that I've encountered too many examples of this phenomenon in real life, but it's a fairly common stereotype in popular culture. Or it was, anyway. This year will mark the 70th anniversary of Li'l Abner Yokum's marriage to Daisy Mae Scragg. Now virtually forgotten, the event was a pop culture sensation in its time. One of the 20th century's most famous bachelors had been hogtied.

Before you start calling Ed Wood a sexist pig, you should know that this particular article is yet another example of Eddie blatantly recycling material from another writer. Once again, he read an article in the adult-oriented tabloid The National Informer, found it interesting, and decided to pen a response. In this case, it was an article called "How You Can Trap A Man Into Marriage" by Sherman Cooper. Basically, what Ed does here is pass on all the sneaky tricks that Sherman Cooper advises women to use against men. After quoting extensively from the Informer article, Ed then adds:

And there it is laid right out in the open for any male who can read and digest both sides of the coin as it has been presented here. Now it becomes only the thought as to how hard the male wishes not to be trapped. He can now go into an affair with his eyes wide open. But no matter how many words of warning are put down on paper there are still those girls around who are ever scheming and they will always be coming up with new plans to trap the male into the altar trip.

And that's how the article ends. Eddie really never tells us how to avoid marriage. He just tells us which red flags we should be aware of. I'm reminded of Louis Jordan's 1946 record "Beware," which was similarly intended as a warning to single men about wily women.

So what are the tricks? The first one that probably came to your mind was the old-fashioned pregnancy scare. The woman will either allow the man to impregnate her or will simply pretend to be pregnant long enough to get the poor dope to walk down the aisle. But Sherman Cooper advises against that strategy. If you actually get pregnant, the man might just take off and abandon you. Then you're left with some dumb baby that you never wanted in the first place. He advises instead that women make themselves "indispensable" to men through cooking, sex, and shameless flattery. Cooper describes it as a matter of salesmanship. Remember, gals, that you're selling yourself to your boyfriends.

Ed Wood doesn't really have a lot to add to Cooper's article, apart from a semi-coherent preamble about the pitfalls of "quickie" marriages. I said earlier that he must've found the Informer piece "interesting," but maybe that's not it. Maybe he knew he had to turn out a lot of text in a short amount of time and needed to take ideas from wherever he could get them. So he scoured the tabloids for anything he could repurpose and sell to Bernie Bloom.

Next: "Sexual Freedom & Sexual Ignorance" (1972)