Newspapers: Sex, Sensation & Significance

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Cudlipp, a working-class Welshman who at 25 became editor of the Sunday Pictorial, denies that sex looms large in the overhauled paper. The country has entered what he calls the "do-it-yourself" sex age, he says, and Britons no longer need titillation from the tabloids. To prove the point, one Mirror executive held up a picture of a demurely necklined deb and declared: "I defy you to find her cleavage." Nobody bothered to search, for the Mirror can still be counted on to reflect racier stuff. Only last week it ran a picture of Kim Novak that posed no plunging-neckline problem because there was no neckline. In fact, there were no clothes at all.

Watch Out, Girls. Under the guise of advice to teenagers, to brides and to mothers—in or out of wedlock—the Mirror squeezes several additional columns of sex into its pages each week. "WATCH OUT, GIRLS," wrote Audrey Whiting in a discussion of illegitimate births. "You are asking for it—and too many of you are getting it." Columnist Marjorie Proops advised brides-to-be: "The quick tumblings in a not-very-private corner at a crowded party, or the rapid assaults upon each other in the back of a Mini-Minor, do not add up to the kind of sex you will share after the wedding."

Whatever other publications may say about the Mirror's prurient preoccupations, its editors are well aware that the readers are coming back for more. "Newspapers," says Publisher King in the current issue of the highbrow quarterly, 20th Century, "have helped to create a social atmosphere in which change has become possible. This has been achieved almost exclusively by the popular press, presenting news vividly so that millions who would read nothing else read newspapers."