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.
Since this seems dead…
The TV downstairs (almost certainly Fox) — “in this case, as in all criminal cases, the prosecution has to prove beyond a
reasonableracist doubt”FTFY Zimmerman trial
Is anyone else just wanting for the not guilty and racist cheers about how that [insert slurs here] got what he deserved?
Fuck, even if he gets found guilty, my assholery father is going to spent weeks whining about how he wouldn’t have been if they hadn’t excluded all the shit they excluded because it’s irrelevant and would bias the jury.
Right about now, I’d take the spiders. At least they honestly don’t know better and are just doing their creepy ass thing.
*waiting! WAITING!
Not fucking wanting auto-correct!
I am despairing about the Zimmerman trial, too.
A bit of brain-bleach for those watching the Zimmerman trial.
Remembering the fact that originally Zimmerman was going to get off without even facing a trial, because apparently shooting a young black man doesn’t really need any extra scrutiny… So the trial itself is a minor victory.
I don’t think the prosecution put on the strongest possible case, and I don’t think FL law is great on this. I’m just hoping he does some jail time, even if it’s only on the manslaughter charge.
@Argenti
The Zimmerman trial is one of the reasons I was so quickly enraged by that popehat thread
RE: spiders
One of the sad things about moving into a house is that we have to kill spiders and other creepy crawlies because I can’t manage to keep them balanced long enough to make it down the stairs and to the door. When we were in the apartment we basically never killed anything that wasn’t a cockroach or fly.
Husband just elaborated on this theory; the “where” isn’t “where do you want the tattoo?” but a challenge to the reader “where is the joke?”.
Maybe it’s a zen exercise… instead of imagining the sound of one hand clapping, you’ll meditate on the funny of a woman who’s simply getting a tattoo.
Shadow — I literally just got to Pollock saying:
“Now. There’s a stranger on the street near your home, wearing a hoodie and carrying a bag of Skittles. Should I shoot him now? Should I wait until I see him in your yard? Do I have to see him actually enter your house? How am I to know that you have invited someone over?”
Yes, I am seeing red and wishing I’d listened to myself and made coffee before starting that thread again.
Fuck the world, I’m going back to kirigami because Pollock’s idiocy has me wanting to HULK SMASH and cutting paper is totally acceptable. ARGH! You see someone looking sketchy…
1) around a house
1b) should you shoot them?
2) around a person
2b) should you say anything // ask if things are alright?
FALSE DICHOTOMY IS FALSE!!
I almost want Pollock to come over here, because Spot! That! Fallacy! still has Obsidian in the lead. But that would require actually putting up with him, and he’s too RAGE FACE to mock effectively.
P.S. Get a cat. Ours mostly hunts pipe cleaners, but the bugs seem to only exist in the rooms she’s rarely in.
And regarding “one hand clapping” this is brilliant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1tsCOkCoC8
Um… if you wonder when the right moment is to shoot someone, I’d say when that person tries to shoot you or someone else, or stab them or the like. Even if I was 100 % certain that I saw a burglary in progress I wouldn’t fucking shoot the burglar! *mind boggles*
Was Pollock raised by wolves? Seriously, are there people raised by other (non-abusive) people who were not taught to ask if someone’s alright if in doubt? This isn’t complicated!
Coffee Argenti, go get coffee!
Oh he goes on about how it could be your daughter’s boyfriend, so why intervene if not asked to?!
Because apparently “everything alright here?” is TOTALLY THE SAME as what Zimmerman did.
I am beginning to understand why Pollock had pecunium so fucking angry. He was just tedious before, occasionally “O RLY?!” but this? I need coffee for this level of intentionally ignorant. (Yes it’s an oxymoron, no I don’t care)
I missed a step there. The potential sneaky boyfriend is after his random (skittles having hoodie wearer) is climbing in your window. Which is kinda past the point of “meh, probably minding his own business”
So much hate, but this is the worst part.
Wait, let me fix that for you.
“Now. There’s a stranger on the street near
your home,THEIR OWN DAMN HOMEI had to explain to somebody the other day that he was two houses down from his father’s girlfriend’s house when he was shot. Two houses down. It was his community, his street, his home, not fucking Zimmerman’s.
But let’s just artfully elide that to make a point, right?
Oh but Howard! He was only living there because he got into a fight! He was predisposed to violence! So he must’ve attacked Zimmerman!
Yes, this is an actual argument I got in. Before I walked around in disgust that is.
There was another Popehat thread specifically about the Zimmerman trial, in which Pollock started off fairly reasonable (the vast majority of the commenters were enraged that the trial was even happening. They thought the prosecutor should never have laid charges because the case couldn’t possibly be won, and it’s such bullshit that people are bringing up race, it’s not about race, why are people so stupid, arglebargle. It was horrifying).
And then somebody challenged him on something, and he reverted quickly to “I passed the bar, I never said that, you’re misunderstanding me,” etc.
To be honest, the thread made me lose all kinds of respect for Popehat. Anybody who can claim with a straight face that there’s no racism component in the issue is seriously deranged.
I’ve been watching Lawrence O’Donnell’s coverage, and one of his expert consultants has been pointing out where the prosecution has been making weak arguments, and failing to create an alternative to the defense’s narrative. So, so frustrating.
And by “seriously deranged” I mean “has filters between self and reality such that no facts come through to conscious awareness”.
Tangentially, I want Mark – Lord of the Albino Squirrels to come play with us. For one, dude provided in detail evidence rape is about power, for two, albino squirrels.
(Yes I’m making coffee, I’m in the French press waiting stage)
Idk if it’s better (lol) or worse, but I’ve been seeing race brought up as, um, the prosecution is “playing the race card!!11!!”
RAEG
Jesus wept! A boy is dead and nobody in the local justice system seems to really care.
“Today, those filthy people with their filthy habit have been corraled to tiny reservations outside the buildings where civilized people gather, able to work and socialize free from unwanted intrusion by tar-heads sucking on their nasty little death-sticks. All it took was the noble and pure non-smokers speaking up for their rights to remain unpolluted. Even today, occasionally someone gets smoke blown into their face, but the number of time I inhale cigarette smoke has gone way, way, down… I don’t have to live in fear any longer, and I won’t.”
Smoking, totally the same as sexual assault!
Also “tiny reservations” why hello there racist dog whistle!
I won’t blow smoke at you Pollock, you won’t defend how none of rapist ex #1 said jack shit because I didn’t protest (cuz words, forming them, too drunk…falls over…totally have to actively ask for help and state boundaries, maybe I like that kind of thing!)
Though really, blowing smoke at him is the least bad thing I want to do to him right now.
As a lawyer once told me, “There’s your problem. You’re mistaking the legal system for justice.”
Touché.
As for Popehat, my favorite little mushroom has finally appeared! Will he take Pollock head on? Only time will tell! (Nobody tell me, that shit needs the game show approach)
No, I’m like 99% sure that’s the joke. Instead of a sailor getting that girl tattooed on himself, it’s a sailor putting a tattoo on a woman who looks just like that kind of tattoo.
…I didn’t say it was a funny joke.
Pollock is thicker than the sarcophagus around the Chernobyl reactors. That it is.