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.
Oh gods, no I was never trying to use fish sex changing as an analogy for anything besides the biology of trans*-ness. Because yeah, the issues train is now arriving in problem central station.
But if you’re going to claim biology says I’m going to counter it, no matter how bad the analogy is beyond the biology part. Cuz dude, no, your god did not dictate that sex is fixed at conception! (Gods, Owly and his damned religious BS, and utter inability to grok that gender =/= sex)
And read this, about derailing a creeping.
Argenti, knowing what I do about reproductive biology, the idea that sex is fixed at conception is actually laughable to me. Who the fuck are these people! Why are people so insistent on believing shit about stuff they know nothing about? Idgi.
All conversations about Owly’s thought processes are best summed to “it’smOwly, you expect it to mak sense?”
Tangentially, the other master of completely off the wall nonsense, my father, was claiming last night that he was receiving radio waves. Like, hello neon flashing “I am not the only crazy one here” sign. But psychology is quackery, paranoia is justified, and radio waves transmit into his brain.
Best part? He was trying to tell us this over the final battle in King Arthur, no one was amused. (And then I had a fit about who they killed because I know that mythos and that doesn’t happen!)
Like, my mother was literally all “that’s good for you dear, now can we watch our movie?”
Pecunium, that is A.W.E.S.O.M.E. And I mean that sincerely.
Also, I’ve been asking Pollock why he chooses to be obstruse, and he’s referring me to you. I’m going to go ahead and guess that being Manboobz readers makes us infer things that were never intended, on account of we understand how things like “words” and “punctuation” are generally meant to be understood by people who aren’t disingenuous asshats.
Well, either that or he recognizes that Sir Pecunium can do anything you do, but better. (I’m paraphrasing from his Magick: the Gendering card)
Which reminds me, do we have any other Royal Assassins currently? Cuz we definitely have someone here who can drop a troll with a well placed sonnet!
Argenti – do, do get your Parental Unit a tinfoil hat. I bet he could be persuaded to wear it.
I think there’s just the general card “Royal Assassin”, with the little “Trained by Sir Pecunium himself”. And of course the “Pecunium the Infnitely Skilled” is, as always, amusing.
Fibinachi — yep, and he bestowed me the honor last summer during That Glossary Troll (you know, the one that spawned Spot! That! Fallacy!)
I can’t get the picture of your new plec to come up, Argenti! 🙁
Hmm…this work?
http://instagram.com/p/buGxBFI9iw/
From the comments on the Wired article.
The self-serving bullshit is strong with this one.
Yes! Yay for cute little plec!
That 60-year-old plec was amazing, btw.
I want a sad trombone for this guy.
I’m just reading that Wired thread too. What a pathetic little turd he is.
Oh, and “There is no such thing as rape culture.” Yup, sub-troll level, this one.
One of the reasons I like this place is that it doesn’t tolerate assholery. I know that I might get assholes here, but I also know that folks will back me up here, and I’ll take that over a goddamned “safe space” any day of the week.
RE: CassandraSays
Oh, boohoohoo, trolly man. I WEEP for you. I mean, I know my gay eunuch self is just SOOOO emasculated by the fact that I can’t just hit on any guy I want.
(Seriously, I really wish dumbasses would stop using the term ‘eunuch,’ ‘castration’ or ’emasculation’ to refer to anything but chopping off body bits. No, dude, you don’t know jack shit about what being emasculated really feels like. Get over your damn self.)
At this point I’ve come to the conclusion that there must be a super seekrit guidebook that these guys are all quoting from. It seems to be a sort of code, like bushido but for whiny misogynists. We shall call it The Way of the Asshole.
Actually, upon further consideration, that’s too vague. This particular how-to book is definitely The Way of the Creeper.
The Way of the Wannabe Rapist. It’s more a matter of degree than kind (am I getting that phrase right?) with sexual harassment and assault with these creepers.
This one’s trotted out every damn cliche there is. Hating on male sexuality, women saying no then saying yes, women used to just slap a man (and totally not get beaten for it), harassment is only when someone ugly dares to talk to anyone, hot people can’t harass, women who complain about harassment are just man haters, MISANDRY and all the rest.
He’s like the Reader’s Digest Condensed Troll.
I find the endless outrage over the idea that things that might be welcome from person A may be unwelcome from person B hilarious. A lot of the time people try to kind of dodge that issue, but, well, that’s not really my style. So…
Yes, guys, a woman can welcome hugs/flirtation/whatever from some other guy and not welcome it from you, and sometimes that will be because the other guy is more attractive to her than you are. This is not misandry, it’s people having sexual preferences. The initial fact of you, say, offering a drink (and being turned down) isn’t the part that makes women call you a creeper. The bit where you ask, she says no, and you press on regardless/call her a bitch/whine about how unfair it is that you’re not her type? That’s when people start calling you a creeper, and at that point you deserve it.
People are allowed to not be attracted to you. Deal.
Also, an anecdote that might explain my lack of patience with this particular misogynist trope. I’m super huggy with friends, and on more than one occasion this has led to random guys walking up to me at a bar/party/concert and trying to cuddle me out of the blue/nuzzling my neck/generally getting up in my grill. In several of those situations the guy has turned round and said “but you were letting him hug you/put his arm around you/sitting on his lap!”. Because apparently being willing to be physically affectionate with one guy means that there is an “open for business, come one, come all” sign above your head.
This is why I have zero patience with the “but you’d let me do it if I was better looking/taller/cooler” crap. Women get to choose who is and isn’t allowed to touch us. Don’t like it? Too bad.