Q:This idea that there might be sexual chaos following a nuclear
attack also found its way into popular culture.
ETM: Well, it wasn't only the scientists and the people in the public health field who
feared that there might be sexual chaos after the dropping of a bomb. It was also
something that emerged in the popular culture as well. Not necessarily seen as
a negative or as a dangerous thing, but maybe as a good thing. The early
rock 'n roll hit, 1954 hit by Bill Halley and his Comets, "Rock Around
the Clock", a song that most people of a certain age in America have
heard many times in their youth and since. But if they ever turned
over the record in the old days, the 45, and found on the flip
side, they would have seen and heard the other song that Bill
Halley and his Comets sang, which was called thirteen -- "Thirteen
Women and Only One Man," which was a post-atomic-bomb nuclear sexual
fantasy about the dropping of the H-bomb. In the first line of
the song he talks about how the dropping of the bomb came and wiped
out his town, and he was the only man left, and there were 13 women
and him. And the rest of the song is his fantasies about what
those 13 women did, and how they took care of him and cooked
for him and kept his house nice and made his clothes, and a lot
of them with double meaning and sexual innuendos about what this life
was like after the dropping of the bomb with only one man and 13 women
to do his bidding.
So you have both the terror of sexual chaos, expressed in the medical establishment as in
this particular article by a doctor worrying about venereal disease being rampant after
any kind of nuclear attack, and at the same time Bill Halley singing about the joys
of surviving an atomic holocaust and having 13 women all to himself.
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