I was introduced to the beauty of french postcards by the glory of the book that is Nude 1925: One Hundred Classic French Postcards pretty early in my youth. In our household artistic nude images were never taboo or off limits, and being a lesbian household if anything they were celebrated. Frankly I remember years in which the bathroom was stocked regularly with Playboy. As my younger brother and I aged those things changed in the name of decency, but art nudes were never hidden. That said, this book was always shelved or stored somewhere to discourage us from examining it too closely, but it was sought out with regularity anyway.



The images below are NOT from this book, they are simply public domain uploads found on Flickr, but they will give you a sense of the work I'm talking about.

I geniuinely and incredibly thank my mother for exposing me, not only to the beauty of these figures, but to bodies that in the breast-augmentationalized 1980s were anything but ideal. It was more educational than I possibly could have known at the time, to see women clearly unlike those I was seeing all over MTV, but still portrayed similarly as objects of desire. Even at the age of 8 or 9 I knew that what I was looking at in this book were not just artistic nudes, and long before I had any understanding of lust I began to understand the power and beauty of pornography.

That's right, I think pornography is beautiful, and although there is no love lost between myself and the average  cum shot, I have a deep respect for and tremendous fascination with photographic pornography. The roots of which were planted, both in myself and the industry, with the French Postcard.

I can actually trace a number of affections of mine back to these incredible images, but that's a story for antoher time.

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