Tin from Sin

"l SNEAKED OUT AT NIGHT FOR

THRILLS!'' trumpets the April cover of Dell's Modern Romances. Wails quarterly Secret Confessions' current cover line: "I COMMITTED ADULTERY!" Inside the slick color covers, the so-called "confession" or "romance" magazines come through with sagas of sex and suffering that make the most lurid tabloid story read like Mother Goose. In the current issue of Standard Magazines' True Life Stories, a teen-ager in 7,000 action-packed words recounts her father's suicide, her poverty-ridden childhood with a lunatic grandmother, rape by a giggling maniac, seduction by her boss's stepson, addiction to "sex pills," confinement in a home for delinquent girls. Of eleven stories in the April issue of Macfadden Publications' True Story, three involve unwed mothers, two concern alcoholism, two feature divorce, another relates the plight of a girl who is forced by scandalmongers into an unwanted marriage.

While the primrose path for their heroines leads inevitably to disaster and thence to New Understanding, the passion pulps themselves are making a heap of tin out of sin. In the last ten years, while the magazine ranks have been riddled by casualties, only two confessional slicks have gone under. Though their combined circulation has fallen to only half the Korean war peak, the fall-off has stopped and today the 24 monthly and quarterly romance-mongers (top price: 25-c-) enjoy a steady circulation of more than 10 million. In the 38 years since the late Muscleman Bernarr ("Body Love") Macfadden blazed the trail with True Story, the confession industry has thrived by sticking to the same trite-and-true formula: first-person stories of subjective sex that are more often fiction than fact, and read like supercharged soap operas.

Gamy Gamut. Unlike soap opera, the average confession story runs a gamy gamut of misadventure and misfortune whose-Boccaccian detail is tempered only by the bowdlerized prose of Hollywood. A bastard is a "sin child" or "living proof," adultery is "cheating." But in the end, every Wedding-Ring Dodger and Faithless Mate, however devious, rises above the blighted past ("Is he remembering her when he kisses me?") and, overcoming the doom-fraught future ("A lifetime of not knowing"), concludes his or her chronicle on a hopeful note. "Sure, we're Pollyanna," shrugs Nina Dorrance, young (35) editor of superslick True Story (circ. 2,573,543). "But that's the way people are."

The people who read confession magazines, says Macfadden Publications, are "Wage-Town" folks. More than 80% of readers are women, mostly married and in the 25-30 age group. Slightly more than 50% finished high school. Their income levels are below-average. Thus, the confession slicks never indulge in drawn-out, complex psychological unravelings or high-flown dialogue.

The Ring of Truth. However naive the cumbersome plots may seem to more sophisticated readers, confession editors argue that they faithfully reflect their audience's view of society. Unlike white-collar women, the Macfadden people explain, Wage-Town women "seem to see all men as more powerful figures: dominant, independent, sexually active and demanding, and, over all, as more mature than women." Says Editor Dorrance: "In the movies the taxi driver, the waitress, the drop-forge operator are comic relief. In our magazine they're the hero and heroine. We have no comic figures. Women, after all. have little sense of humor."

The confession sheets not only sell to women, they also buy the great bulk of their plots from women, whose unsolicited revelations pour over publishers' transoms with every mail. Some publishers, such as Macfadden Publications, which owns True Experience, True Love Stories and True Romance as well as bestselling True Story, insist that all the stories in their magazines are based on "real-life" contributions from readers.

In actual fact, admits one Macfadden editor, so many changes are made in rewrite that "the confessor would not recognize her own confession." Most editors are less intent on publishing fact than on inserting enough fiction to give their stories the ring of truth; often a single story is patched together from unrelated episodes in newspaper clips or readers' suggestions. The magazines rely heavily on free-lance contributors (top price: 5-c- a word), who have a free rein. Most writers and editors are women. Says True Confessions (circ. 1,339,922) Editor Florence Schetty: "Even confessions stories by men somehow read more red-blooded if they're actually written by women."

Sob Sisters Under the Skin. Editors and writers share an evangelical faith that confession stories help their readers to solve their own problems. Gushes a top-selling Denver freelancer: "Lots of girls receive their first experience through these stories. I just know that many of them have learned how to react to love situations through what we write."

The magazines seldom propose drastic solutions that involve risk or hardship. Instead, they suggest that most problems can be solved by affection, tolerance, self-discipline--what Sociologist David Riesman calls the "newer, internal goals of happiness and peace of mind." Where their uptown sisters may lean on Norman Vincent Peale or Miltown, Wage-Town women have their magazines.

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