Life — August 11, 1910 — page 29: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a satirical cartoon mocking magazine advertisements of the era (likely early 1900s). An older woman ("Auntie") lies on a bed surrounded by magazines, visibly distressed. Her niece asks why she's upset. The joke: Auntie complains that after viewing all the advertisements, she feels as though she attended a party where men wore only underwear and women wore only corsets—meaning the ads feature extremely scantily-clad models in states of undress. The satire targets two things: (1) the increasingly revealing and sexually suggestive nature of magazine advertising, and (2) the shock this causes to older, more conservative sensibilities. The cartoon criticizes advertisers for using near-nude imagery to sell products, presented here as scandalous to Victorian-era propriety.