"The Kind Men Like"

The female figure in the lower right has the banner: "Hello Sailor."

"The Kind Men Like" was a slogan in England and America around 1900 to designate particularly Guy-Pleasing underground porn, either Art Image Porn, Photo Porn, or Text Porn.

Vleeptron recently republished a Sindbad Voyage from a translation by Sir Richard Francis Burton. It had to be privately published and sold as a private subscription, bound in fancy leather, with no title on the cover. The Thousand and One Nights / Arabian Nights, in its original Arabic, is a pretty ........ (comment dit on?) ........ Earthy book. Most English-speaking readers are only familiar with very heavily censored Kiddie-Oriented fairy tale translations of it (like Lang's).

But Burton's translation put the penises and vaginas and the heaving and thrusting back where they belonged. And added a gazillion scholarly footnotes that were even more Earthy than the stories themselves. In an early and interminable footnote, Burton the African Explorer claims to have taken a substantial survey to measure the lengths of penises of Africans, to scientifically settle once and for all the Urban Legend that, etc. (In the interests of Science, mine's 43.6017 cm.)

This all happened smack dab in the middle of the Victorian Era. The private edition of Burton's translation was "The Kind Men Like," you betchum. Typically such tomes would be discreetly concealed in the Library or Billiards Room, and would be consulted and passed around after supper, with brandy and cigars, whilst the Ladies would retire to the Music Room to sing Stephen Foster songs.

In previous posts, other notorious "Kind Men Like" banned and underground tomes were "Lady Chatterly's Lover" and "My Life and Loves" by the turn-of-the-20th-century American editor and writer Frank Harris. Young Frank Harris is portrayed by Jack Lemmon in the Dalton Trumbo-scripted movie "Cowboy." Not a lot of heaving and thrusting (well, some), but a remarkably authentic and adult look at the mythic business of a cattle drive from Texas to Chicago, which young Frank actually volunteered for and experienced.

Okay, Ladies, 'fess up. What are "The Kind Women Like"? Anaïs Nin? "The Wilder Shores of Love"? "How Stella Got Her Groove Back"? Leave A Comment.

When I Image_Googled "The Kind Men Like," the first thang that popped up was this tattoo design by artist Mitch O'Connell. (I got a little Chinese dragon on my upper right bicep.)