Nothing To Do But Fish

This 1937 cartoon from Pleasure magazine works, I think, precisely because it up-ends the typical oversexed assumptions about marooned castaways on tiny desert or tropical islands:

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Not Here, Not There, Not Anywhere

Sam has yet to discover some important life wisdom. A woman who deploys the reflexive “not here!” response to public displays of affection won’t stop doing it when the two of you are in private:

Cartoon is from a 1957 issue of After Hours.

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Two Pump Castaway Chump

To continue the conversation about the sexual politics in 20th-century cartoonery of shipwrecked castaways marooned on desert islands, here’s a 1970s Sex To Sexty gag that breaks the third wall and mocks not only the genre itself but also the sexual prowess of washed-up would-be cocksmen:

The caption reads “I’ve been in these desert-island cartoons before… he won’t last until the ink dries!” Artist signature is Miller.

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Island Castaway Disappointment

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.”

Marooned Sailor Doesn’t Want To Share

Some people in my Twitter feed were mocking a load of gender-essentialist TERF nonsense that I didn’t actually pay attention to, but which apparently consisted of elaborate last-humans-alive shipwreck fantasies designed to make some sort of nonsense point about reproductive plumbing being more important than gender identity. I dunno, I wasn’t there, you guys aren’t paying me enough to read that stuff.

What brought me into the conversation was somebody’s observation that women in these castaway fantasies are never allowed any sexual agency; it’s always assumed they are free for the fucking by whatever man washes up on the same beach with them. So I shared this 1950s cartoon recently seen on ErosBlog as a reinforcing example of the trope.

Just now I remembered that Bondage Blog recently published yet another perfect illustration of that notion. In this one, the castaway women are explicitly reduced to bondage fuck-chattel of no agency whatsoever, and the cartoon is about a desperate bluff by the dude currently in possession to avoid sharing “his” island harem:

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