Rusty Warren's been called a femme fatale, a proto-feminist, bawdy & risqué, and the "Mother of the Sexual Revolution." She's all these things.

Rusty Warren used humor to deliver her message that women do have sexual appetites. She wasn't the first to do so (and with this club, she won't be the last), but Rusty is special because she chose to do so at a time when sexuality, especially female sexuality, was extremely repressed. That's the short answer.

But to really understand the importance of Rusty Warren's work, you have to listen to her performances and understand the context of the times. (This is the long answer. *wink*)

Listening to her albums, you feel you are there, sitting in that nightclub in the 50's or 60's... there's the clink of ice cubes in a high ball... the laughter of couples... you can almost see the men in suits, the women in little black dresses...

These couples are the heads of suburban households, the mom & pop of nuclear families -- or they are on the path to being such. The women sit in clothing that today seems glamorous, at least to me, but underneath their cocktail dresses, their lives are more restrictive than their foundation garments. They chafe not from underwires and rubber, but from the reality of being "Mom" even to their husbands. They dressed that night with hopes that "Daddy" would see them, once again, as a woman. They hopped the alcohol would loosen inhibitions just as they had when they were dating -- and that they'd find themselves steaming up the backseat of the car, or at the very least, they'd get some action once they got home. Oh, pray that he wouldn't drink too much and the only activity she'd see would be removing his clothing as she tucked him in...

In this Atomic Age, sex was to be saved for marriage, and then it was a functional part of creating a family. Sex had no other purpose, and thank God, for everyone knew women didn't like it! Women were not the only ones brainwashed into this plight; men suffered too. And no decent person questioned it -- at least not outloud, for no good person would speak of such things! It was the ultimate unspoken insanity of life in the 1950's.

There was Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute, who in 1948 told men they were 'normal' but this was research. It didn't speak of sex in context of relationships and daily life. Kinsey's work broke the silence, but it wasn't in the language of the average Joe. And it would be another 5 years before there would be any information on women; and by then, Kinsey would be be pinned to a board & scrutinized like the bugs he once cataloged & collected -- only the bugs weren't invalidated.

Around that same time, in 1953, Hugh Hefner launched Playboy. Hefner spoke the language of the average Joe -- photographs -- and introduced men to the idea that women with their clothes off belonged in our lives and they (both the naked women and the men who liked them) were okay. Men were being educated & enlightened in a sense, but Playboy was about pinups, models and possibly the girl next door -- but it wasn't about your wife (or anybody else's wife either). At least someone was speaking to, and perhaps for, men in such a repressed time. Who would do the same for women? Rusty Warren.

Mixing saucy parodies, naughty sing-alongs, and blue stand-up humor, Rusty exposed male hypocrisy, gender stereotypes, and the female libido to a conservative American public. Working with the realities of relationships, marriage and sexual encounters (often literally taken from the audiences before her), she challenged the repressive American attitudes toward women and sex. And she did so without being offensive. She didn't attack men, or blame women. She didn't use four-letter-words. Rusty was smart enough to know that the message will be dismissed if the messanger is rejected. With each performance, Rusty balanced truth and humor, entertainment and enlightenment, sassy and classy, to achieve a message worth listening to: Women are sexual beings too. She's arguably done more to promote healthy female sexuality than condoms, and so we re-started her Knockers Up! Fan Club.

Rusty herself has said "The hit Knockers Up! gave birth to a devoted cult of over a million Knockers Up Club fans. Turns out I wasn't a breeder; they're my only offspring."

As Official Knockers Up Club Members, we are Rusty's offspring; we are the legacy.