Today, a guest post from Etelka, the blogger behind the hilarious Wretched Refuse blog, which you all should read every day.
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Thanks for letting me sit in, David! As I was telling you, I recently did some rooting around in a unique cranny of pre-manosphere media: sexist vintage cartoons. In the late ’40s and ’50s there were a lot of them published in books like this. (Some of the book covers that follow have been borrowed from the Vintage Sleaze blog here.)
My investigations had a purpose: I was blogging about castration anxiety, and I thought I might find some old cartoons that had something to say about it. Not likely. The vast majority of these artworks have two themes: Young women are hot, and old women are dried-up and useless.
Often expressed in the same panel.
Some dramatize the existential terror that gnaws at the core of every PUA:
Others offer date-rape fantasies:
Still, I’ve always liked looking at these old cartoons. There’s something uniquely voyeuristic about them. After all, they were never meant to be glimpsed by women. These cartoons are as pure a conduit into the male id as the girlie mags of the period.
I find they elicit a surprising range of emotion. Some give you a smug sense of how far we’ve come…
…if not in attitudes, then in comedic chops.
Others provoke meditations on whether we’ve come that far at all — and where we’ve ended up. This one reminds me of a certain dicey scene involving a thumb in the movie Bring it On. (That being the dicey scene in which the guy cheerleader nonconsensually violates the girl cheerleader’s nether parts with said thumb.)
This cartoon invited men to snigger at the idea of uninvited vaginal probing; 50 years later, Bring it On invited teenage girls to do the same. Progress?
Feeling queasy yet? Gird yourself for a full-on dry heave with this one, previously featured on Manboobz:
Yep, it’s definitely the undiluted male id we’re talking about here. That’s why this next group of comics is so strange. They’re from this book:
Why is the guy looking behind the painting? To get a glimpse of her nipples? Ha ha… I suppose?
But that’s nothing to what’s inside. If sexist cartoons reveal the male id, then what are these revealing?
Ha ha! I guess!
Um… ha? No. No ha.
Uh…
Riiiiight.
These cartoons aren’t just unfunny, they’re downright surreal. They remind me of those Nancy or New Yorker caption contest parodies where people deliberately put in non sequitur captions. (You’ll notice that the front cover of the “French cartoons” book up there doesn’t make any sense either.) If I were a psychoanalytic literary critic, I’d wind this up with something about how repressed urges can explode into incoherent displays of hysteria. (The non-funny kind of hysteria, obvi!) Instead, let’s conclude with one more mystifying example, this one from “Satan!” magazine.
Where? WHERE? It’s a question to ponder.
These old cartoon leave me feeling a bit sad. It’s not so much the disrespect for women which seems to be part and parcel of the time; but instead just how sad and confused the men seem to be.
How can someone really go through life seeing just over half of the human race as a fundamentally alien adversary?
Some things never change.
“The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have
no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all
restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes
for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are
forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress.”
– Socrates (Plato’s Republic)
Some people’s attitudes never change. Now get off my lawn.
Ummm…
Wha..?
On the other hand, given the MRM’s failure to create anything remotely approaching a well-designed poster (and the incoherent verbosity of many of its major figures), it seems like frothing misogyny often leads to communication failures.
“I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.”
(Shakespeare)
I regard these surreal cartoons as mysteries to be solved. What ARE the jokes supposed to be? I even asked Husband for help in resolving this question (via Facebook, since he’s at work, we’ll see if he chimes in later on).
Like the way assholes like you think of women as “useless” if you don’t want to bone us, as if we exist solely for you to fuck at will? Sadly for you, IT, those attitudes are changing.
@Viscaria:
Well, let’s try…
The first cartoon is a sharp satire of corporate culture, while the second woman represents the state of New York the first woman is the contestant from the phone company (Ma Bell). The humor would be in the stark possibility of corporate statehood with her closed eyes as opposed to the more animate and aware lady representing a state…. (/overreaching metaphor)
Heh, that reminds me it’s been a while since I checked out The Monkeys You Ordered.
http://www.themonkeysyouordered.com/
That was, of course, directed at Dvärghundspossen’s idea, silly me for not rereading my own comments.
RE: Inconvenient Truth
Some things never change.
Neither do your comments.
His desperate need for attention certainly never changes.
I was gonna say, this is one of those ‘stealth’ comments, where he seems to think he’s being sooooper clever for slipping in a double meaning. “Ha-ha, feminists, thinking I’m talking about how male sexism never changes, but secretly I’m hating on old ladies, ha-ha!”
But that doesn’t work when you’re coming around to where we all know what you’ve said previously.
So why bother hiding it? Fly your woman-hating flag high!
That penultimate one is really baffling. I’m assuming she’s fighting him off? What is it supposed to say on the window behind them (it looks to be in reverse), are they in a store?
Really weird!
I totally agree with Hyena Girl- these are depressing and really don’t reflect well on men at all.
But the thing that got me was from the red book cover: “…assembled from the best of America’s foremost family magazines.” Were these in Readers Digest? Or what?
I should do my research first. From the linked page: “This is a collection of cartoons that originally appeared in all of the A-list publications of the day: Collier’s, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, This Week, Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal and The American. And these are some of the major cartoonists of the day. Burr Shafer provides the cover.”
The penultimate one:
Worst recasting of “Its a Wonderful Life” ever.
I feel bad for the old lady on the “For Stags Only/here’s to the girl of my dreams” cover. Usually the undesirable women in these cartoons are portrayed as grotesque and mean so the viewer will identify with the man, but this woman looks pleasant and happy and yet you’re supposed to laugh at her.
Dustin Hoffman crying about being an ugly woman in Tootsie
Why does the woman in the “angels” drawing appear to be wearing a diaper?
And yeah, these don’t exactly speak well of the men of the era.
Has anyone done a study on how much of humor reactions is informed by the knowledge that it’s supposed to be a joke? So you laugh because you can tell it’s supposed to be a punch line, not because there’s anything funny about it.
I found it a surreal moment when I realized that print comics of all sorts are almost never funny. Even the ones I always liked were unfunny as often as not, and it’s more common for a comic (especially a one-panel comic) to have two or three funny comics in an entire anthology.
The “artist” of the For Stags Only cartoon? My parents had a whole book of his cartoons, and even as a kid I knew it was fucked up.
I checked out Wretched Refuse. I have to agree that using books as decoration seems almost sacrilegious. What a waste of books!
Thanks to wifey for that vote of what I will take as confidence and damn the evidence. The first three Surreal Cartoons… aren’t they just really, really dated and nauseatingly unfunny? There’s nothing really outré about them, I think. The last two though…”Angels”, well I got nothing there. “Where?”… the only thing I can think of is maybe she doesn’t know exactly where the sun doesn’t shine? So she decided to ask her local tattoo artist, because… why the hell not? I don’t know?
One of the best-loved British sketch comedy shows of the last twenty years, [i]The Fast Show[/i], debuted to a mixed-to-negative reception at first because its catchphrase-based humor relied on prior familiarity with the characters – for instance, the more you know in advance that oily car salesman Swiss Toni will compare something wildly unlikely to “making love to a beautiful woman”, or that something desperately and absurdly tragic will befall Unlucky Alf, the keener the sense of anticipation becomes, and the funnier it gets.
But that simply doesn’t work with just one instalment – you need to watch a minimum of two to really grasp it.