August 15th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
To Serve Woman
This illustration is both bizarre and surreal, if you think about it too much. Is the naked woman tiny, or the chef huge? Are those devil horns peeking out of the chef’s hat? Is she cooked and served, or merely “sleeping” on that service tray? And what the actual fuck is going on, there on her flank, or possibly her belly, depending on the extent to which her spine is contorted for that pose?
It’s possible that a reader of French could tease some useful insight out of the context, but it’s utterly beyond my abilities with machine translation. This artwork is by Lucien Boucher, and it illustrated an article, or perhaps a column, having the title Ne pas Dételer in the February 1950 issue of Voici Paris.
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Just read it all and, sorry to say, but no clear explanation. The only artwork related to the text is the guy filling his glass in the wine cellar.
And if you follow the link you can download the entire magazine. Some stunning photos and some quite bizarre illustrations. But my French isn’t up to making much sense of it.
Looks like the writer is attempting to rebuke accusations of being a “pornographer” (I couldn’t infer the exact context for this, but you could try doing some research on the author) and mounting a defense of human sexual appetites in general…
In doing so, he deploys an escalation of rhetorical flourishes that only thinly relate to each other (just like the cartoons illustrating them). He leverages his own medical doctor cred to draw a parallel between eating and sex as fundamental bodily functions, then at some point he breaks the analogy (and ventures away from tired sex-as-reproduction to sex-as-pleasure) by pointing out there are no recipes to sex – it’s all on the exact people involved. I suspect the cartoonist was inspired by this latter passage to a degree.
Am I the only one who flashed back to The Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man”?
Thanks, Rafu!
Alex… congratulations however dubious on having a mind that works somewhat like mine. I’m not familiar with the Twilight Zone episode specifically, but Wikipedia tells me it was based on a Damon Knight short story by the same name… to which, you guessed it, my post title was a deliberate reference.
I got that reference.