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 vino trollitas.
– Tumbleweed Calvin
Looks like Mr 90%’s paying a visit in his religious guise.
Did someone say music of the spheres?
http://youtu.be/IvHcE0dgHy4
And yeah, I call Al.
Al it was, and Al is banned (the Dark Lord’s mills ain’t slow).
I guess he’s old enough to drink now, in which case you’d think he could find something more fun than trolling to do.
Half the time he seems to be drunk trolling anyway. Must sit and drink at home – maybe the local pubs have banned him for being an obnoxious little shit even when he’s sober.
It’s like he’s drunk dialing us from the pub, basically. Shame he doesn’t have any friends who could confiscate his phone until he sobers up.
They’d probably have to confiscate it permanently. Not that he’s always drunk (presumably) but all the evidence so far says he’s permanently a shithead.
Shadow: I use a piece of stiff paper (cardstock) and a glass.
pecunium!! I want to tell you that you’re amazing!! (Am almost finished the popehat thread)
A good deal of the covers here come from the daily VINTAGE SLEAZE THE BLOG site which you are all welcome to follow. The site has 94,000 followers on Facebook and tells a true story from the Glory Days of Smut Every Day! By the way, nearly half of the followers are women. http://vintagesleaze.blogspot.com
RE: Kittehserf
Yup, fair-skinned redhead. He looks pretty good in browns and blues, but unfortunately, these are not popular drag queen color schemes. Also he’s a fan of ungodly leopard print, because something is terribly wrong with him.
And I too miss the bygone days of the truly awful trolls. Truly, in comparison to such frothers as NWO and Meller, none compare.
Except Tom Martin. Tom Martin was great.
Oh Owly! How many times did I counter his whole trans* people are a biological impossibility with fish? (A shit ton of fish switch genders)
Speaking of fish, I lost way too many to the last case of ich and just started restocking (again). A cory, and she’s a gorgeous girl, hopefully mine are boys and I’ll get eggs; two danios, with 3 eyes between them, the old danio is feeling out how to get cyclops there to play; and a cute little 3″~ plec, who’s working on cleaning up the tank while the other’s play.
I’d be worried about one eye, but it’s fully healed and obviously he survived that so he’s gotta be a hearty fishie.
Sparkly blue leopard print, maybe? Hey, if you’re going to be tacky you may as well go all out.
RE: CassandraSays
He says sequins and hell yes.
I dread the day he actually gets the guts (and the bankroll) to buy all that hideous shit he sees in the Goodwill.
Unless the point is to push one of two related narratives.
gillyrosebee: That comment cloudiah posted about Snowden reminded me why I don’t think I could ever date men even if I wanted to. You never know which ones think some version of that reductionist bullshit.
That’s not a men issue. It’s a people issue.
Which is still an awful question!
Pecunium! Do you prefer mangos or rum? ANSWER NOW!!
See, awful question.
pecunium: that was me, who couldn’t date men because they might believe such nonsense.
I’ve met misogynist women who believe reductionist bullshit before, too, but 1. they are typically not interested in dating women the way I like to date women and 2. it isn’t quite as insidious as it is with dudes, in my experience. Women who are raging misogynists tend to give you some warning sign right out of the gate, men tend to reveal themselves somewhat later (often after months of saying “but I love women, baby” or “no, I totally respect you and all the work you do”).
Maybe it’s just me, but from the testimonies I’ve read from other women, it’s not just me. There are clearly cultural influences at play here, though, I’m not saying it’s innate. Obviously when you have one gender socially encouraged to think of and treat the other as less, such that it’s basically saturated the air you breathe, it’s going to seep into your behavior no matter who you are. Gas masks, like feminist thought, can filter out only so much — and since society is on the side of the dominant party (eg, men), those of us on the lower rungs of the ladder can often feel like we’re constantly doing a form of cost-benefit risk analysis. Schroedinger’s Rapist is just the farthest end of that continuum.
Just to clarify: I know a lot of readers here are dudes who don’t believe rabidly misogynist nonsense, and you’ve demonstrated it, which is great and genuine props to you — but understand that guys like Hugo Schwyzzlestick also think *THEY* are good enlightened dudes who don’t believe rabidly misogynist nonsense either. Hell, even a lot of openly rabid misogynists featured on this blog probably think they aren’t *really* rabid misogynists, because assfax and reasons.
Just like most rapists won’t come right out and say, “Yeah, I am totally a rapist,” until you ask them to tell you what they did and they go on to describe rape.
Some guys, like the Elams of the world, are pretty easy to pick up on right away; others, like many of our abusers (I know definitely several of mine) are harder to suss out. Especially if they express desire to shed their prejudices, so you think they are fundamentally decent people and feel like you are going to help educate them It can be a very slippery slope with annoying or even potentially fatal consequences if your dice rolls wrong.
Does that comparison really make sense? Yeah, there are many species that switch gender, but that’s usually not what goes on with trans people, right?
I’d think that in order to be trans you’d need to be self aware enough to be able to think about gender and your own identity. So my guess would be that only human beings are trans people – possibly a few other species with advanced thinking besides us, but not fish and the like.
No fucking clue where Sir Pecunium is, or I’d ask if he smells Pell, since he’s more versed in Popehat trolls.
Not Popehat trolls (I generally don’t read the comments, because the issues aren’t such that I see a large need to expand on the questions (Popehat is pretty guy on 1st Amendment issues, and copyright trolls).
But from secondary poking around, Pollock is some sort of troll. He has the trick of moving goalposts down to a routine, and he’s fond of equivocation.
That he’s passed the bar (or claims to) is dispostive evidence of ill intent.
1: He did go to law school, and so was trained to avoid equivocation, and moving targets (as the courts frown on this, you tend to lose and your clients are unhappy, which annoys the partners [or means you have poor word of mouth, should you be in private practice).
1a: Such behaviors are therefore done intetionally.
2: He didn’t go to law school, and is lying about it to bolster his credibility.
The sad thing is (and I don’t know if it’s a more telling comment about us, or Popehat: Check that, yes I do, and it’s a comment about Popehat): We spotted him in a heartbeat. much of the Popehat commentariat don’t see him for a troll.
I’ve been other places (Making Light, Slacktivist, Seannan’s Lj, Whatever) where he’d be chopped liver as fast (or faster, there are some fearsome troll-whisperers in some of those places. Abi is a blessed terror: All the slack in the world, until she’s sure, then the rope you made hangs you higher than Haman).
Which tells me, for whatever reason, Ken either is blind to it, or doesn’t think it’s as serious a problem as those other places (and manboobz). The effect is that trollish behavior becomes acceptable. It’s a side effect of the bystander problem: Everyone looks to someone else to set the acceptable standards, and for lack of someone saying, “that’s not right”, it gets tolerated. This is part of how the levels of tolerated harassment come to be set.
Wired ran a piece on it recently: Why Human Decency Isn’t Enough: Conventions Need Harassment Policies
Dave doesn’t police as actively as he might, he leaves it to us. On the flip side he has set limits on acceptable behavior (no socks, very little tolerance for rhetorical violence, and none for actual threats of).
And we’ve set some pretty stringent social norms. This is part of why we get the, “echo chamber” charge. Anyplace I’ve been which has a real sense of community, and is not willing to gladly suffer trolls gets it.
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that those fish (and other things like amphibians) switch sex, not gender? They switch sexual organs, but there’s no evidence they understand gender in the way we do, and we know that sexual organs =/= gender of a person. (This is just me being nitpicky, sorry, but conflating gender identity with ownership of specific sexual organs is a pet peeve. I’m aware that’s not what you meant.)
To answer your question: No, that’s not usually what happens. People usually are fairly solid in their gender identity, it just happens to be incongruent with what society deems should be their gender based on external characteristics like sex organs, gender roles, perceived sexual function, ect. There are some people who are multi-gender, some people who are genderfluid, but even they are certain of their gender, it just doesn’t conform to the idea that you “Must be a gender and that never ever changes!”
@Sittiekitty: Thanks for correcting me, right, should have said that fish switch sex rather than gender. Although that just stresses my point, that these fish aren’t really trans-fish the way some people are trans-people.
And none of the trans people I know think they “switched gender” at any point, but I still wanted to put a question mark there just out of… humility I guess. Since I’m not trans myself it felt a bit presumptuous to go “this is what being trans is like!” with no question marks.
Dvärghundspossen — yeah, it wasn’t a comparison of mental state, but a counter to his claim that biology says that you are the gender you’re born as. Which fish laugh at (if they could laugh).
He couldn’t get his head around it enough to grok anything above the whole “people have surgery for this” part, and thought that was, to be kind, stupid. Because biology says you can’t change genders! When nope!
Owly seemed honestly unable to grasp that other people have thoughts and mental states actually. At least, beyond the ones he ascribed to them (us…I’m a “zie creature”!)
Lol Argenti, it’s people like that who don’t understand that everyone has a different mind and personality – “We all have the same organs, brains and the like, why aren’t we all robots!” “What do you mean identical twins have totally different personalities and psyches?! They’re IDENTICAL biologically!” It’s such a silly concept that our minds/brains are totally tied to our bodies, and one demonstrably false with a few quick exercises on perception.