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.
The first one is supposed to be a “clever girl” because she put her phone number on her competition banner.
Most of them seem very familiar to me from the fifties magazines. Sexist cartoon books were pretty standard bathroom reading well into the sixties.
@katz
Of course not. That would be far too casual (c. ’42).
Another picture from the same article shows a 1936 Life magazine spread showing a long-haired (Soundgarden long, not Elvis long) and shirtless tattoo artist in a scene that reads more as ’90s than ’30s, though, so there was probably a variety of dress in the trade at the time.
@auggz – he’s planted his hand on her backside and she’s kicked his.
Remember these are from the 40s, 50s, etc – no use at all looking at the fashions/clothes and talking about irony or whatever. They’re not being worn now, it’s irrelevant.
@auggziliary
I’m pretty sure those are two separate comics – note the different signatures. Dunno what the “joke” in the Adam & Eve one is; “French” in “French comics” could well mean “rude” without having to plump for “adult”.
The second one’s “joke” is that he’s grabbed her bum and she’s kicked him.
Yep. And she’s getting a tattoo on her ass, right? So why is she topless? I know, for the boner, but these guys weren’t even giving plausibility a chance.
@Shiraz
Presumably she had a dress on before. No bra, apparently, though her boobs don’t seem to follow the laws of physics so one may not be necessary.
Yeah, but like, show the dress balled up on the floor or something. And in what universe (other than porn land) does a woman wear garters but no bra? I’m just saying. Lazy artist dudes…
Ok, that last one looks like some combo of a mannequin and the body shape resulting from a girdle (which, frankly, is just a weird piece of clothing, just call it a variety of corset) — damn near nobody has an “hourglass” figure that, uh, “perfect” (to the ideal, not actually perfect) without some form of shape wear // girdle // corset // spanx // you get my point.
And just where are my survey results?!
Adam got the boot from God for grabbing Eve’s ass.
Or having ribs removed as well, thought I don’t know if that was really done or is an urban myth.
My first thought on the “angels” one was that Angel was the brand of a blow up doll, and they were all alike because they deflate after the slightest use, or they can’t stand up on their own or something.
The way her arms are does not look like she’s meant to be a real human.
I doubt a blow-up doll would get into a cartoon then – at least, not one outside some sort of men-only magazine. The man’s not exactly convincing either; I think it’s just the way the thing’s drawn. He’s not meant to be talking, as far as I can tell; he seems to be puckering up, and she’s fighting him off.
@Kittehserf
Dudes and ladies have the same amount of ribs (most of the time!), but it’s more an Abrahamic myth than an urban one. . .
Anyone else think that the “window” in the angel one says “How to mate” ?
Someone should photoshop a thought bubble with the older woman’s “man of her dreams” in it, for completeness.
When I was a kid and staying at my grandparents’ house, they had all these books in the room I was staying in, and there was a little book of cartoons kind of like these, but they had a hospital theme, with the main character being a sexy nurse. I don’t remember them being really sexist, but then I was pretty young when I looked at it.
These sort of cartoons were also in old Playboy magazines – I found a bunch of them from the 60’s through the 80’s in my house when I was a teenager. I would have died if my parents had found me looking at those, but I found them interesting partly because they were so old. So much puffy, curly hair! And public hair. I’ve never seen any recent ones, so I don’t know if they still have those cartoons. I’m sure the hair styles are different, though.
Angel is an old term for financial backer of a stage play. She is meant to be an actress. I’m sure you can do the math in your head from there.
OK, I think I’ve figured out the “angels” one.
The thing in the background is a poster for a stage show.
“Angel” is theater slang for the backer of a play.
The young woman is a chorus girl. (Maybe she’s just come from rehearsal and that’s why she’s dressed so casually.) The man manhandling her is the show’s angel.
Oh shoot. Robert beat me to it. Jinx!
I’ve seen way too many Busby Berkeley movies.
So basically it’s saying she has to do this every single time she does a new play, fend off some asshole who tries to manhandle her… That seems like it should be a commentary on how awful Angels were back then(are now if it’s still applicable, which I’m sure it is in some areas), but I’ll bet it’s just another gross fantasy about trying to overpower a woman.
Yeah, SittieKitty, why it’s supposed to be funny is anyone’s guess.
There’s something deeply disturbing about the tattoo-sailor fellow’s expression. Looks more suited to some sort of Lovecraftian horror than an unusual tattoo request.
lowquacks, I’m talking about the story that women in the 19th century would get their lower ribs removed so they could squeeze into ever-tinier corsets. It’s not about men’s vs women’s number of ribs or the Adam and Eve myth.
SittieKitty, I thought it said “–how tomorrow” or something.
Of course, the theatre angel idea!
I only read Thrones, Denominations a couple of weeks ago, too. ::shame::
Re: the tattooist – yeah, I was trying to get my head round his expression. A let-out for the artist/audience, maybe? He’s a decent guy, of course he’s shocked that the BIMBO has taken her clothes off! Never mind that it’s all about sn1gger1ng at her nudity/stupidity. (Hope that doesn’t get eaten by the mod filter, but snickering is not at all the lewd in-joke sound I’m thinking of here.)