Today, a guest post from Etelka, the blogger behind the hilarious Wretched Refuse blog, which you all should read every day.
***
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.
I’m confused with what is going on in the Angel one.
These are all vastly improved by the addition of the class “Christ, what an asshole” caption.
Me too. I guess it’s “progress” that they now add to the joke that the wife is grumpy and disagreeable, while before, her being old was enough reason to despise her. The Lockhorns is another example of the trope of a henpecked husband fantasizing about bikini models half his age.
At least the older couples I know are nothing like that. My mom is in her mid 60’s, but to my dad, she is a beauty queen. I’m sad for misogynists who are too bitter and selfish to feel that way about someone else.
I don’t know if they still do this because I don’t live with my folks anymore…..
But some days I would wake up and come downstairs and gag loudly at the doorway so my parents would know how disgusted I was that they were dancing around the kitchen together.
The boobs on the “WHERE?” lady are so badly drawn.
@hellkell
I kinda get the impression they were drawn from the assumption that bullet bras showed the actual shape of breasts or some possible ideal shape.
Re the “Angels” cartoon:I get the impression she is telling him off: He’s playing, “guardian angel” and failing.
lowquacks: The problem with the, “where” cartoon isn’t the specific shape (I have seen a couple of real life breasts in the shape of the more defined left breast in that drawing) as much as the don’t match, and are resting in such a way that one of them is “wrong”, for want of any better term. Real breasts can’t point in tow directions like that.
They are also two, radically, different shapes.
My favorite Socrates quote! I will focus on that and not on the depressing/baffling cartoons.
I think maybe the angel one is supposed to be him making an ironic comment? Like women are angels, except not, because she’s fighting back? Gross.
It’s a titanic mess.
I bet this is where Rob Liefeld got his ideas of female anatomy.
Two directions and two very different shapes are quite possible for meatspace boobs. Not like that, at all, but they are.
I originally thought the head on the angel one was a drawing on the poster in the background. And that she was…a headless mannequin? Maybe the poster was talking? I don’t know, but that head is definitely not actually connected to that body.
I do like the “what now?” one. Whistling is so stupid, and I always wonder what someone would do if I did something like that. Too bad that kind of thing only happens when they’re really far away or driving by.
The whole proportions on the angel one are all wrong. The way the arms and legs are…..
I can’t figure out the setting for the Angels one at all. She looks like she’s wearing a badly-fitted swimsuit, or maybe a playsuit, which would be a bit looser. I thought the frame in the background was a blackboard, but why there would be a blackboard on a brick wall I have no idea.
As for the proportions – meh, they’re cartoons, it goes with the territory. Garfield and Jon aren’t exactly realistic either.
Yuck, the meat one is a disgusting look into an MRAs mind.
Oh, and An Inconvenient Truth? You do know your man parts are going to shrivel into useless pieces of flesh, no? By then I think you’ll be compensating with drugs. How sad.
@Xen – His man parts will need to shrivel to keep up with his brain. It has a head start (no pun intended) from lack of use.
The whistle one reminds me of the time I was crossing a street while a dude stopped at a redlight kept peeping his horn at me and leering. I got to the sidewalk and walked towards the vehicle until I was able to lock eyes with the driver. “What do you want?” I asked. He just kept shaking his head and said repeatedly, “Nothing…nothing…nothing.”
kind of embarrassed.
Anticlimatic, huh?
“A Cartoon Guide To The Battle Of The Sexes”? Looks more like “A Cartoon Guide To The Life Of Ed Gein”. Except then the artist would have to draw a shack in the woods.
Also, the “Meat Market” cartoon…that dude is holding a cleaver! He’s holding a cleaver and thinking of her as a piece of meat. That’s some “Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer” shit going on.
Ah, jennydevildoll and me had the same thought at precisely 7:08 pm.
Why is Jake the tattoo guy dressed like a milkman?
I think it’s meant to be a sailor’s get-up, given that tattoos would have a strong nautical connotation at the time of the cartoon being drawn.
It’s a “romper” on the angel one: https://www.google.ca/search?q=1970s+romper&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=rfPdUaT5C8eayQHs9YDABA&biw=1155&bih=696&sei=sPPdUefjBKTqyQHivYGQAQ
I was thinking sailor, too. Though even at the time I doubt tattoo artists dressed up like it was a theme restaurant.