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 think the point of “I’ve seen worse” is that these guys have watched/judged a lot of beauty pageants and are jaded to the beauty of the women in them. It’s still not a joke, though.
Argenti: 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.
I think it’s the shifting of the displaced ribs, as they move back to place; esp since the intracostals will be compressed/attrophied.
auggzillary: Also, chile is fucked up. I don’t have the link now(it’s on huff post, but I feel too sick to look at it). Basically an 11 year old girl was raped for 2 years and is now 14 months pregnant. The dictator of Chile talked to her in private and now she’s “chosen” to keep the baby, and now he’s given a speech praising her for her “mature” decision.
While Piñera, may be a douchebag, he’s not a dictator: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_presidential_election,_2013 Chilean presidential election system
@argenti
I dunno. I have some friends who are fans of a number of activities who might disagree with you…
Misandry in action update: My boyfriend and I just flew and he was seated next to a young child and nobody requested he change seats.
That poor baby.
(::crosses fingers:: typo typo typo please typo … Whew.
14 weeks.)
(Whoop … hey … I have a Papa Bear side. Scary.)
This has nothing to do with cartoons or corsets, but Argenti, I thought you might like to see this post on spined loaches, recently split off from the family that clown loaches are a member of.
It sort of fits the topic of manboobz as a whole, because the post contains the phrase “sperm parasites”.
/taxonomy geekery
Lol, yeah, should’ve said accidentally in pain or something, still yeah *masochist*
Awww, who’s a cute little loach!
@Argenti: I did click on some pages to read, and yeah, tight-lacers say these old drawings aren’t correct. But they also say themselves that the organs does shift around if you get a really thin waist, only they say it’s not dangerous, because the organs shift around when you’re pregnant as well, so the body can do quite a lot of shifting around with no ill effects. Plus everyone points out that you don’t go completely limp in your body like a 1950:s astronaut just because you tight-lace… and I get that, but it’s hard to believe that there’s no weakening of the core muscles if you wear a corset all day?
Ah well, people can do what they like with their own bodies, including shifting internal organs around. And I do think many women with super hour glass figures look really hot, so… I’ll try to just avoid thinking about their intestines.
auggzillary: Chile used to be run by a dictator (thanks to the US), so it’s not hard to forget things changed.
Yesterday and the day before, people were posting multiple stories to r/mr about a MAN was turned away from Legoland because they assumed since he didn’t have a child with him that he was a PEDOPHILE, OMG SO UNFAIR. Except that it turns out that the park’s policy was that ADULTS of EITHER GENDER would only be admitted when accompanied by a minor, unless it was on one of their frequent ADULTS ONLY nights, as was explained on the park’s web site, and this is why the MAN AND HIS ADULT DAUGHTER were both turned away (but told they were welcome to come back at the right time), and it had nothing to do with pedophilia but just about keeping the park child-centered the majority of the time.
Still, obviously this was misandry and everyone should boycott Legos forever.
Pry my Legos out of my room temperature, oddly claw shaped yellow fingers!!
Our Lego curses have them
runninglimping scared!I actually like the “Where?” one. I imagine it as the tale of a talented yet hopelessly prudish tattoo artist who desperately wants to practice his trade but is reduced to incoherent embarrassment whenever anyone wants a tattoo on any remotely private part of their body.
I sort of thought the tattoo one was funny because she’s the exact image of the girl you get in pin-up style tattoos, but she wants a tattoo on her, so it’s like some kind of inception thing, but I doubt that was the intent.
My take on the ‘Where?’ tattoo cartoon is that the woman already has so many tattoos of the names of her previous beaus there isn’t room for the new name she’s requested of the artist.
auggzillary: Also, abortion used to be legal in Chile, but it was outlawed by PInochet, who was a dictator. Or so I’ve read.
@Cloudiah
Misandry, I’ve come to understand, is preventing men from doing anything they want. Quite simple, really
Or maybe it’s just simply a guy giving a tattoo. She told him which one he wants, so now he’s asking where she wants it, and he just has a weird resting face. The joke is that it’s just so straightforward, a subversion of punchline.
Also, he appears to be looking away from her. He might’ve been told that there was a sniper after him, so he’s scared. He now needs to know where this sniper is, so he asks “Where?”
Also, since I just noticed it’s called “Jake’s Tattoo Parlor,” and my name is Jake, I have to complain: Why is every character named Jake so unlikable or just some plucky comic relief? Why can’t there ever be some space viking who slays demons and dragons named Jake?
RE: Cthulu’s Intern
Here now, one of my favorite book series is about a folk-musician/bartender/father (depending on which book) who saved the planet, the universe, and all time, plus had a wonderful wife and a child with the entirety of the Internet circa 1988 downloaded into her infant mind. Your name has an awesome precedent!
Not like me. The only character with MY name was a fucking Highlander from a romance novel. (My husband bought it. He claims it’s his favorite book.)
Ah, but does he want you to gad about in a kilt? (Somehow I think Mac would be more the kilt-wearing type of the two of you.) 😉
@LBT: For a moment, I thought by “Highlander,” you meant an Immortal from Highlander. I was wondering why you’d complain about that.
Well, to be fair, there can be only one.
::groan::