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! Hadn’t heard that one. Thanks and sorry.
There was/is an urban legend that attached itself to several ’90s popstars (most notably Marilyn Manson, but I’ve heard it about Trent Reznor) had a rib removed to allow autofellatio, and I’d heard the aesthetic rib-removal thing about Cher, but don’t believe it’s actually something that’s happened.
That said, a lot of really out-there shit has happened.
Good grief, I’d never heard of the ribs/autofellatio bit.
Someone should tell MRAs about it. It could solve all their problems.
lowquacks, I heard that about Maynard from Tool. Can’t see that ever happening either 🙂
Speaking of Adam’s rib, I’m partial to this theory:
http://vridar.wordpress.com/2010/06/20/which-bone-was-eve-made-from/
@Lady Mondegreen – so, does that mean the phrase should be “bone of my boner”? 😉
Idk about modern times, but rib removal almost certainly either didn’t happen, or was exceedingly rare, in Victorian times. For starters, it would’ve been HIGHLY dangerous. Like, chloroform wasn’t a thing before 1850~ and most surgeries we think of as relatively routine had absurdly high mortality rates.
Now, with medical advances, maybe. Then? The odds of surviving make it really doubtful. Now, tight lacing can squish around the floating ribs creating the appearance that they’ve been removed entirely, but they’re still in there, just at a different angle (and I do mean tight lacing, not corsets, corsets in general just kinda redistribute fat so more is in the breasts and hips than the waist, quite a bit like spanx and whatnot)
Oh and keep your back straight. Proper posture is amazing for ones appearance (regardless of gender)
That remark about Cher brought back a memory from long ago, maybe the late 80s. At one time it was stated by those always reliable women’s magazines to be one of the most frequent cosmetic surgeries, Cher being the poster girl for this procedure. Which balloon was promptly deflated by her doctor publicly confirming in 1990 that she still had a full set of ribs.
I don’t recommend googling “cosmetic remove rib”. It is apparently a thing, but not approved of by reputable surgeons.
Dave, I’m off topic here, but how hard would it be to find evidence of the Thomas Ball manifesto being up on AVfM for so long? I kinda need it because MR-E is hosting an event at the public library soon, and I don’t think that’s an appropriate venue for a hate group.
Argenti – yeah, I’d be surprised if it were real. It would have to be late in the century, when the corsets were really extreme (mid-century ones were shorter and didn’t need to be laced so tightly to get a tiny waist: the crinoline skirts made waists look small anyway). Plus medical advances, but it sounds more like a myth contributed to by doctored photographs.
Okay, must be off, see ya later!
@Shaun DarthBatman Day
Try using the Wayback Machine to retrieve the deleted manifesto: http://web.archive.org/web/20130423205908/http://www.avoiceformen.com/activism/tom-ball-murdered-by-the-family-courts/.
About the angel one: When I first saw it, I thought it was that he’s coming on to her, but she’s rejecting his advances by physically pushing him away. Basically saying “No, I don’t want this” as loud as possible. He’s saying that angels (or, women he finds attractive) are all alike in the fact that they all resist his incredibly creepy advances.
God, I hope I’m wrong.
Well, obviously! Both the angel one and the tattoo one solved then!
I learned everything I need to know about cartoon ladies from the Lockhorns.
Also, is it just me, or is the showgirl (“angel”) an Escher Girl?
‘These cartoons aren’t just unfunny, they’re downright surreal.’
So of all of the gadzillion old comics out there why did you chose these? I don’t find any of them even funny.
An ancestral Escher Girl, maybe? She doesn’t have the real spine thing going, but that arm twist is impressive.
I’ve got fairly flexible arms (well, I can lick my elbows), but I can’t get them anywhere close to what that woman in the last comic has managed. That looks quite painful, actually.
Also, I’ve seen a lot of vintage comics where the punchline seems to be just, “Haha! Women! Ha!”, as though the very existence of women is something extraordinary and amusing. It’s a little bit bewildering.
It is actually possible to get a super hour glass figure that stays that way even when you take the corset off, if you wear a corset like 24/7 for long enough. I was a member of a forum with lots of goths for a while, and some of the goth girls were crazy about corsets and using them to mold your body. There was this one girl who posted a photo of herself in undies that was pretty… fascinating. She was clearly overweight, but her waist bent inwards really sharply – basically, her waist was as small as the waist of a skinny woman. As I understand it, to achieve that body shape, you need to order customized corsets, and then gradually move to corsets with a more and more radical hour glass shapes as your body gradually adapts. And eventually you’ll have a super hour glass body.
I seriously doubt that it’s healthy to do this if you’re fairly thin to begin with, because in that case, radically narrowing down your waist means that your body will shift around the internal organs a bit since there won’t be space enough for everything at waist level that normally goes there. (Of course, women who are into this kind of thing always claim that it’s totally safe, but I’m doubtful.) But I imagine that if you’re overweight and narrow down your waist to a skinny person’s level, your body will just shift around body fat, which seems less dangerous? Although idk since I’m not a medic.
Dvärghundspossen — idk if it’s safe for thinner people, but I wouldn’t try it considering I’ve heard once you tight lace down to a dramatic difference it’s actually uncomfortable NOT to be laced up. Which seems terribly unhealthy.
And yeah, I forgot the case of that shape via corset, but not currently wearing it.
I prefer my corsets just a smidge thinner than my natural waist. Shove my spine straight, don’t move much else around! Of course, I don’t own a custom one because $400+ which means tight lacing has got to be very expensive.
Unfortunately, one need only a quick glance at demotivational memes on the internet to know that the modern version of sexist cartoons is alive and thriving.
@Argenti: I reckon the muscles of your torso would sort of atrophy if you wore it all the time?
Did a Google Image search on “tight-lacing” and you get a) loads of women looking hot in their corsets, and b) some scary, scary drawings of where the internal organs go and how the ribcage gets deformed if your waist goes small enough…
He looks like he just stepped off Thurston Howell’s yacht, which just adds to the confusion. Is this tattoo parlor located in the Hamptons?
I think I’m fixating on Jake’s hat in order to avoid looking directly at the cartoons and risk being blinded by the misogyny. Anyone have a piece of smoked glass? (That one of the mother urging her lingerie-clad daughter to take a tumble with Mr. Cullen is particularly heinous.)
Oh, is she her mother? I didn’t catch that.
I admit, I’ve been staring at the “I’ve seen worse” beauty contest for minutes now trying to figure out what the joke’s supposed to be.
Ha ha, many women don’t meet the ridiculously high beauty standards of our culture. LOL.
“b) some scary, scary drawings of where the internal organs go and how the ribcage gets deformed if your waist goes small enough…”
Those are, afaik, basically anti-corset propaganda.
And idk if it’s the muscles, or tightlacing does shift organs and then having them shift back into place hurts? Either way, if “success” causes pain, your doing something wrong.