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.
In breaking news, there’s a cat having a dement in here. Running around, wrestling and chewing her scratching board, leaping on and off furniture.
I think there’s a solid fuel dump on its way.
Yup, fuel dumped.
RE: Kittehserf
Yes, this saddens him. He so desperately aspires to femminess, and yet pink is denied him. Sad.
Hmm, he’s a redhead, yes? What about soft greens or maybe some shades of blue? Or colours in the purple family?
LeShiggedyDiggedy, thank you so much! <3
Pollock’s smoking thing? If I follow, which is hard with his dancing goalposts —
Women have to ALWAYS AND IMMEDIATELY enforce negative consequences on harassers and assaulters. Always. If she thinks she’s in danger doing so, too bad, it’s for the good of “the sisterhood” in the long term. (Also, if she’s a child and never reports it she holds some responsiblity to his future victims)
Yeah sure you might get shunned, but so where the first “brave people” to speak up against public smoking, and clearly that worked!
He got all “way to alienate a potential ally!!” to which pecunium, and others, went “with friends like you, who needs enemies” // “thanks for making your lack of support clear before anyone needed it, BYE”
Is that what it was about? I remember his bullshit about women having to make a loud complaint on the spot and never mind if that means worse happens, but missed where he compared it with smoking. ::smh::
‘Sfunny, I’ve worked since the 1980s, when smoking in offices was still the norm here. I went through the whole process of it being slowly eliminated, and saw it via the public service, where I spent my first decade-odd working. It happened sooner there than in the private sector, but I don’t recall it being a matter of having to speak out and be shunned. There was a public recognition of the health dangers, and the laws changed to recognise that. They’re still doing so, bit by bit – we’re behind with things like making outdoor eating areas smoke-free, but we’re getting there.
So for here, at least, the comparison doesn’t work even on that level, though I don’t know what it was like in the US, where I presume the Pillock lives.
Funny that he used the smoking example, because in any areas where smoking is officially banned but there’s a tacit agreement among the people in the space not to enforce the rule, it doesn’t get enforced. For example, I can give you a list of bars in San Francisco where you can smoke and nobody will stop you. If someone does try to get in someone else’s face about it they’ll be ignored or asked to leave.
Not the smartest analogy he could have chosen.
Not the smartest guy, really, although he’s said in at least 3 threads that I’ve skimmed that he’s passed the bar. Also, he’s a professional educator.
He passed the bar and now he’s teaching? I smell a Pell, though a more articulate one.
No fucking clue where Sir Pecunium is, or I’d ask if he smells Pell, since he’s more versed in Popehat trolls. But I emailed him Serious Business hours ago and haven’t heard a peep, so I assume he’s not near electronics.
I don’t think it’s the same guy, just the same kind of guy, ie. fond of making shit up to try to bolster his positions. If the conversation was about science he’d probably claim to be a scientist too.
Yeah, not Pell himself. (Although I’m still stunned that he pulled off Steel for so long without breaking character. Boggle!) Just seems to be really, really fond of thinking he’s one of the in-group amongst lawyers. And, of course, being incredibly obtuse and disingenuous.
If I get bored I might go play with him, see if I can bait him into making more shit up.
Well, as an astronomer I feel that…
I was an astronomer too! And let me tell you know, astronomy supports the idea that women should STFU.
Oh I didn’t mean our Pell, but what Cassandra said — need a lawyer? He’s a lawyer! Need a doctor? He’s a doctor! So what I meant was that I assume pecunium would know his “résumé” better than those of us not on Popehat.
And Steele was Mr. Al btw.
Unimaginative – Steele was Mr Al, not Pell. No way could Pell keep that up.
If Pillock passed the bar, all I can say is it was set way too low.
Right. To be honest, I find most of the trolls here to be pretty much interchangeable. There are a few standouts, but mostly they blur together after three or four posts of all the same crap.
Probably why I’m not very good at recognizing sock puppets. It doesn’t matter if it’s the same person posting under another name, they all post the same shit.
They do indeed. Gone are the days of the
appalling, bizarregreat individual trolls, the Mellers and Owlys!The ideas all blur together, it’s the linguistic tics that are distinctive. Like when Meller tried to sock and not only wrote exactly the same way but used the same pattern for how he constructed his nym.
To be fair, Meller’s doll fetish was definitely unique. What would you call the equivalent of a furry who’s into porcelain or resin instead of fur/plushie fabric?
I know I am late to this, but I wanted to complain about the Big G of surveys. I used to work there, it was so awful. Half the time the questions didn’t even make sense. I just started avoiding the current events ones because we were not allowed to explain ANY TERMS AT ALL. Respondents would get so irritated with me. Eventually I would resort to, “Think of me as a vessel, and the survey flows through me.” Much scoffing would ensue. So any Big G polls you see? Yea, they’re crap.
Cassandra – a smoothy? A shiny?
Meller trying to sockpuppet, that’s precious.
It’s definitely the tics that give ’em away these days, or in Pell’s case, instant ragesplosion.
… Say, you don’t think Pillock-totes-a-lawyer is Pell’s father?
As a rule I do not approve of cartoons. They lead to debauchery of thought and imbalance of character. Indeed these particular ones are quite sexist. Yet men not only began mysogynism, but feminism as well. On this site we see the unholy triumvirate of David F, the craven herrretic Pecunium, and Howard B, leading the monsterous regiment of women (as the intelligent but nethertheless heretical John Knox aptly coined the phrase). Yet the music of the spheres that promotes and profounds the sun virtual energy of the unmoved mover and the cuase of God continues to move on and the power of this site unmasks itself in, through and as the not quite satanic but still flawed force that it is. God bless you all and amen. Yes this is drunken rambling, I admit it, but such is life.
Oh and God bless the Texas legislature as they continue the cause of protecting women through restricting access to abortion. I am currently writing a pro-life poem in the style of the prophet Jeremiah; hope you will all look forward to reading it.