City Girl Seduction Of A Yokel Fuck Buddy

The so-called “Tijuana Bibles” that had their pornographic heyday in the 1930s mostly featured parody versions of comic strip characters from comic strips that are long forgotten today. Fortunately, the action in these dirty little books is timeless, featuring delightfully rude filth that we have no trouble recognizing. The character “Boots” in this one was a bit of a flapper in Boots and Her Buddies, the presumably staid and boring 1924 newspaper strip by Edgar Martin. When we meet Boots’s pornographic alter ego, she’s picking up a small town yokel and offering to show him a good time:

He’s totally game: “Hot darn it, let’s go!” I guess street corners outside the local train station were the fuck pal hookup hot spots of their day. Where else was a bored and horny flapper chick looking for a good time supposed to go?

Whatever he thought or hoped was going to happen once he got back to his new flapper friend’s place, her direct dialog and especially her hand down the front of his pants quickly dispels all ambiguity. But yokel or not, he’s still a little bit worried that the lady might have an “old gent” who could walk in and disapprove of their sport:

Our man doesn’t need to be told twice. But even while laying some creditable pipe, he’s not so much the yokel that he doesn’t wonder: why him, exactly?

Some things don’t change across most of 100 years, and the ability of the average male ego to swallow implausibly large lumps of flattery is one of those immutables. She calls him “Daddy” and “a great big handsome brute” and sure, of course, it all makes sense!

The thing about these 8-pagers is that they were pornographic comics. And the “country bumpkin” yokel used to be a highly comic figure among city folk. Much of the comedy in this short book is wondering when the yokel will finally realize that his friendly city-girl fuckbuddy has a mercenary motive, which every worldly person would have understood from the stereotypical offer of a “real good time” in the first panel. His impenetrable lack of comprehension does not even give way when she matter-of-factly calls him a john. Perhaps that’s not a word they use in Oshkosh?

Finally she gets around to the the straightforward ask. Sometimes with the slow ones you have to be direct. “How about fifty dollars?”

And the joke slides home! “Gosh, no! Don’t give me money!” Nobody could be this stupid… or could they?

I’m not sure whether the entire joke is about the stupid yokel who never understood that he was with a sex worker, or whether there’s a less pleasant undertone. Is there a layer where we are supposed to wonder if the “yokel” was playing dumb the whole time, to take advantage of Boots and her “payment after services” business model?

Jane’s Victory In Europe

As today, May 8, is VE day, it seemed only appropriate to contribute a timely ErosBlog post.

I have always admired Paul Fussell as one of our most elegant writers on war. An infantryman gravely wounded in France in March 1945 who went on to become a Professor of English, Fussell has given us three magnificent books on the British and American experience in the First and Second World Wars: The Great War and Modern Memory (about the First World War), Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, and Fussell’s own memoir of his experiences as a soldier and after, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic.

Wartime contains a chapter entitled “Drinking Far Too Much, Copulating Far Too Little,” which might be of especial interest to ErosBlog readers. Fussell comments on the sparseness of erotic material available in the British and American world of the 1940s:

“Now, when the urban newsstand flaunts its pornographic wares which, if not heady enough, can be eked out with materials available at the nearest Adult Bookshop, and when your local X-rated film theatre routinely and legally depicts scenes formerly viewable only at stag parties, it is impossible to realize that things were once quite otherwise….There was no Playboy_ or Penthouse or Hustler and certainly no Squeeze, Rapture, or Adult American Dreambook. The sexiest magazine generally available was probably Esquire, with its drawings by “Petty” and “Varga” [sic?] of languorous girls with immensely long legs — thought more exciting then than now — and precisely delineated breasts.”

One wonders how our boys in uniform got through the war at all. Fussell goes on to say:

“Throughout the war the London Daily News ran a comic strip depicting a scantily-clad ‘Jane,’ much relished by the troops. Only on VE-Day did she go so far as to take off everything. This created a sensation, and many were not sure what they thought about it.”

I’ve often wondered about this particular May 8, 1945 strip. You can find some stuff on the Internet about Jane, but my casual search didn’t turn up the strip to which Fussell was referring. I had always imagined some sort of erotic payoff for the victors.

In a sense this turned out to be true, but not as I had imagined. Recently I acquired a book that contained the strip as part of its center plates, right adjacent to a portrait of a smiling Clement Atlee. (The book is Peter Clarke’s The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire.)

Jane prepares to celebrate VE-Day.

This leads to an unfortunate scene…

..that concludes with a joke in dubious taste.

Echoing a sentiments found in Clarke and Fussell, I must say that there seems to have been quite a shift in social mores between then and now. Or even between then and 1970. In 1945, a Playboy pictorial would have been beyond the pale. But something that looks suspiciously like a group assault on a young woman was the occasion for a joke in a widely-read newspaper.