Here are some of the “handful of interesting propositions” that Babs has gotten:

In a dorm room: “Can I take off my boots and stay a while?”

While working at a diner: “So, do you like to drink beer and listen to polka music?”

While working at a resort: “I like really young girls, but I need to keep it legal. So, how old are you?”

In Moscow: “You know, I’m looking for a wife.”

In Wisconsin: “Do you wanna go south of the border?” (Babs’ reply: “It’s a long way to Mexico, honey.”)

I have seen women making the point on Twitter more recently: they deal with a constant background noise of mostly-unwelcome propositions that most men have no idea about.

This vintage blog post comes, via the Internet Archive, from Sure Things Babs; it dates to 2001.

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Long ago, when ErosBlog was young and my bullshit detectors were not as sensitive as they have grown to be, I participated in spreading a story about a family encounter via an escort service, as had been reported by the BBC. Of course aware readers today would recognize it as a viral legend, dating in internet terms to the 1990s but documented by Snopes as having literary precedent going back at least to the 1920s.

It’s funny because in 2002 I considered the BBC a high-quality news brand. In recent years it has so clearly been captured by the British version of neoliberalism that it no longer has much credibility with me, but back when this blog was new, it never even occurred to me that they’d print a complete bullshit story. But of course when you read it, it has all the hallmarks: a single source to an overseas press source of unknown trustworthiness, combined with a complete lack of verifiable specific details. As Snopes describes its “legend” rating of tales like this: “events so general or lacking in detail that they could have happened to someone, somewhere, at some time, and are therefore essentially unprovable.” Indeed.

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A few months back, I posted a couple of old cartoons and got in a conversation on Twitter about the old trope of men and women shipwreck victims as desert island castaways. The most common version of the trope treats women as especially-valuable flotsam; it always seems to be assumed that whatever man washes up on an island will get to enjoy the sexual services of any castaway women who might share his marooning.

I was therefore somewhat amused to find a century-old joke in The Magazine Of Fun (August 1921) that flips this trope on its head. The male castaway is an earnest and energetic gentleman, and the woman washed up on his desert island finds him wanting:

Deserted!

They were cast away together on a raft. So far as they were able to ascertain they were the only survivors from the good ship Lekytub. On the morning of the third day the raft came to rest on a sandy island.

He at once set to work to build a shelter. He built two shelters.

“Now,” he said, “we’re fixed. There’s one house for you and one for me.”

Quickly she ran down to the beach, and getting aboard the raft, shoved off.

“Good-by,” she called, “I’m going to find a new shipwreck partner.”

Somewhere in the United Nations building in New York City, I’m sure there’s a document in more than 100 languages. It probably contains detailed instructions on the proper operation of the floor waxing Zamboni machine.

I am fascinated by fantasies of deep time. I love to think about the tiny fragments of data that, through happenstance and cultural preference and sheer random accident, will turn up in some archive thousands of years hence. Understanding that I am speaking purely in analogies, some future scholar will be dealing with a pile of files that’s the equivalent of:

Every word processing file that ever got created in the DOS era
Every file that ever got shared on NAPSTER
Every porn movie that ever got uploaded to a tubesite
Every blog ever written
every email ever sent via gmail

That’s just to establish the notion of “the researcher is working with an archive that has a large volume of random shit in it.” Now imagine: all the filenames are gone, all the dates are gone, it’s all in one flat directory, and file formats are pretty much a mystery, although you’ve got some tools that are pretty good at brute-forcing a lot of different tries and guesses. Again, analogy: imagine that somebody has shot this stuff full of holes with a shotgun, repeatedly.

Now the reality is, this hypothetical researcher in 6,210 (or whenever) doesn’t have anything like a complete archive of ANYTHING. 99% of everything from back now is irrevocably gone. Languages are dead, data formats forgotten, archives don’t exist, fact that the archives ever existed is a disputed argument among academics. The datasets they have to work with aren’t “sets” at all. They are, at best, serendipitous lumps of data that somehow miraculously didn’t get deleted or destroyed. Each one has a story, there in the deep future. Metal or quartz disks launched at the moon by people with archival agendas, money to burn, and really good luck. Data troves that people hit “copy” on every generation, for an utterly implausible number of generations. Optical disks buried in clay, in silt, in forgotten safes, in abandoned salt mines, under landfills. Compilations scraped together from the best archives that ever existed, most long failed and many long forgotten. Damned little of it, if any, making the leap all the way from “now” to “then” in one jump. Most of it the proud baby of some archival rescue, burned to some “best we can do” “permanent” storage format, then stored, dispersed, forgotten, lost, and then only some tiny fragment surviving the next long jump into the deep future. Rinse, lather, repeat, with near-total loss at every repetition.

In thinking about all this, I’m convinced that some of the best-surviving stuff will be porn, because people hoard porn. Yeah, it doesn’t get as much academic archival respect, but most serious archivists are willing to quietly give it hard drive (or whatever) space, because they are true believers and they don’t throw data out of the lifeboat. (Even the stuffy British Library has a porn collection.)

And that is why I think my good friend Dr. Faustus has done something that is not only culturally important in our time, but which has the potential to survive in deep time, with his publication of Beware The Asylum.

Beware The Asylum, which Faustus has quite sensibly lodged at the Internet Archive (the premier archive of our generation), is a no-dialog ero-horror graphic novelette with an “interesting” set of tags:

mad science, tube girl, liquid girl, insane asylum, robot, mind control, forced washing, youth serum, catgirl

Although the comic itself has no dialog, the reason I invoked the idea of the famous Rosetta Stone and wrote that huge long rambling essay about my fantasies of data in deep time (glossing horribly over all the known difficulties with long term data survival, about which I am optimistic to a point that drives data professionals quite mad) is that Dr. Faustus has written a captions file containing an totally-optional caption for each panel of the comic. And what’s more, he’s arranged to have those captions translated so they are available in (take a deep breath before reading this list aloud):

English, Arabic, Bengali, German, Esperanto, Persian, Filipino, French, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Punjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Yiddish, Chinese (Simplified Characters) and Chinese (Traditional Characters)

I can’t speak for Dr. Faustus or whatever fantasies he might harbor about data in deep time, but it amuses me rather greatly to imagine that when the bug-eyed monsters from Proxima-9 are picking over the digital ashes of our civilization, they never find the riding-floorwaxer Zamboni instructions from New York City. So they wind up having to use this file, and it turns out to be their only key to unlocking half a dozen languages. Meanwhile their scholars are trying to figure out the role that catgirls and tubegirls played in our culture…

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Here are some dirty haikus from a blog that hasn’t existed in many many years, courtesy of the Internet Archive:

“Talk dirty to me”
Is what she told me to do
“Mildew! Dust! Dry ROT!”

She’s bucking wildly.
He teases her pussy. Hard.
In walks their daughter.

These girls, they’ve gone wild.
Lifted shirts show plump bosoms.
These girls don’t wear bras.

I’m not sure how much sense that last one makes if you don’t remember the Joe Francis late-night-television soft porn empire.

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Back in 2002, the San Francisco Bay Guardian (the Bay Area’s much-loved alternative weekly, defunct for years now) published a sex issue. How long ago was 2002? I forget sometimes how far we’ve come as a culture in our attitudes about sex. Even in freewheeling San Francisco, even in the edgy alternative weekly, here’s the oh-so-trangressive graphic they put together for the cover of their online edition:

It turns out I linked to one of their stories when this blog was young. Updating that broken link is how I stumbled over the hilariously anodyne 2002 graphic.

This cartoon from Man Junior (August 1957) is only superficially funny:

The caption has two showgirls eyeing a plutocrat as one says to the other “I’m worried; he thinks money can buy everything… and he has the cash to back him up!” The joke, filtered through six decades of changing social attitudes, seems lie in the tension between the conventional morality that she’s not supposed to be for sale and the ancient truism that enough money tends to overwhelm conventional morality.

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