“Contra toda forma de opresión”: Sexo, polí­tica y clases medias juveniles en las revistas de humor de los primeros ´70

Abstract

This article explores how the magazines devoted to political and cultural humor in the early 1970s became a source of self-reflection for a readership, or “social space,” that emerged around them. Through the analysis of the most important of these magazines, Satiricón, it is possible to show that in socio-demographic terms that social space was made of youth, middle-class, and intellectualized groups, who could at the same time laugh and make laugh””chiefly when the magazines highlighted the inconsistencies in their sexual and political experiences. The magazines elaborated on many inconsistencies: the calls to sex education interwoven with persisting old sexual beliefs; the “psi” language domesticating, instead of helping liberate, sexual repressions; men fearing the end of their privileges in the context of women’s sexual assertiveness; and, more broadly, political militancy as a way of oppression. These inconsistencies were the basis for the laughable, focused on middle-class youth who was called to a kind of reflection that, in that political context, perhaps was only viable through exaggeration, and humor.