Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Warning: as is my way, a soupçon of smart-ass street talk.)

Two on gendered topics, plus another cartoon that’s incomprehensible unless you recognize one of its elements (and only incidentally has a gendered bit in that element).

Masculine identity for young teens in a One Big Happy (a re-play from 4/26/10 in my comics feed today); a display of femininity in today’s Rhymes With Orange; and then, in today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, on the equipment needed for a night lighthouse (with an incidental display of maleness).

One Big Happy. Rick Detorie — who draws OBH — with an advertisement for himself:

(#1) The Accidental Genius of Weasel High by Rick Detorie (2011); my high school was Wilson High, and I think there’s some intrinsic humor in weasels — as in  Weasels Ripped My Flesh (on this blog) — so I like the name

About the book, the short summary:

(#2)

A book for the Wimpy Kid [see Jeff Kinney’s book series Diary of a Wimpy Kid] who has grown into a Wimpy Teen: Larkin Pace [aged 14] desperately wants a new camcorder. How else is he going to become the next great filmmaker? But his dad won’t give him any money, his sister is determined to make his life miserable, and his nemesis Dalton Cooke is trying to steal his girlfriend. Now this height-challenged aspiring director must chronicle his wacky life for a freshman English assignment.

Larkin is short, eccentrically smart (about movies), artistic, and unaggressive, so he’s wimpy:

adj. wimpy: informal weak and cowardly or feeble: I’m too wimpy to express my own opinions. (NOAD)

And that’s bad for a boy to be — deviating notably from normative masculinity — but he will rise above it.

Rhymes With Orange. Piccolo / Price on an unhappy customer returning a pair of grotesquely high-heeled boots to the store.

(#3) Like Nancy Sinatra, she wanted boots for walking, but these are, let’s be brutally frank here, boots for displaying her body to entice men to fuck her — a presentation of herself as pussy in boots

(#4) Nancy Sinatra. Boots. These boots are, imaginably, made for walking.

(#5) Identità pointed toe ankle boot in genuine leather with internal zip and 100mm stiletto heel (it also comes with an, omigod, 120mm heel), $450.20 — these are fuckboots, aka pussy boots

The music. From Wikipedia:

“These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” is a hit song written by Lee Hazlewood and recorded by Nancy Sinatra [and released in 1966].

… Subsequently, many cover versions of the song have been released in a range of styles: metal, pop, rock, punk rock, country, dance, and industrial. Among the more notable versions are the singles released by Megadeth, Billy Ray Cyrus, Haley Reinhart, and Jessica Simpson.

You can listen to the 1966 recording here. Accusatory first verse and revenge chorus:

You keep sayin’ you’ve got somethin’ for me
Somethin’ you call love but confess
You’ve been a’messin’ where you shouldn’t ‘ve been a’messin’
And now someone else is getting all your best

These boots are made for walkin’
And that’s just what they’ll do
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you

The FMP posture. From Wikipedia:

High-heeled shoes, also known as high heels or simply heels, are a type of shoe in which the heel is tall or raised, resulting in the heel of the wearer’s foot being significantly higher off the ground than the wearer’s toes. High heels make the wearer appear taller, and also may serve to accentuate the muscle tone in the legs as well as make the wearer’s legs appear longer.

… Heels are often described as a sex symbol for women, and magazines like Playboy, as well as other media sources that primarily portray women in a sexual way, often do so using high heels. Paul Morris, a psychology researcher at the University of Portsmouth, argues that high heels accentuate “sex-specific aspects of female gait,” artificially increasing a woman’s femininity. Likewise, many see the arching of a woman’s back [and the accompanying pushing out of her buttocks] facilitated by wearing high heels as an imitation of a signal of a woman’s willingness to be courted by a man [see my 10/25/16 posting “tail in the air”, on the Fuck Me Please (FMP) (or lordosis) interpretation of tail in the air].

(“A signal of a woman’s willingness to be courted by a man” is a wonderful bit of cautious circumlocution.)

Bizarro. The night lighthouse.

(#6) What is that strange device? A mega-size night light, and if you don’t know about standard American night lights, the cartoon is incomprehensible (meanwhile, if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)

From NOAD:

compound noun nightlight [AZ: more often night light]: a small lamp, typically attached directly to an electrical outlet, providing a dim light during the night.

A slightly different style of night light, the Eaton Wiring 15 amp night light with rocker switch, in white:

(#7) The night light in #6 has no cover (shield, or guard); this one has an opaque cover; my bathroom night lights have always had translucent covers (the covers rotate, and can be snapped off)

The conventional American night light is a piece of good design for an everyday object: excellent for its function, easy to use, simple in design, and pleasing to look at.

When I went googling for night lights, I found tons of lights that were either elegantly stylish or fanciful (a squirrel holding an acornish object with a light bulb in it, flowers, moons, Tiffany night lights, various animals, and oh so much more). Text from the Wayfair company‘s site :

Whether you want a night light lamp to keep your baby soothed at night, or want night lights to keep your hallways safe after dark, browse our selection of night light wall lights. No matter how old you are, night lights can help put your mind at ease. We guarantee that you will find a practical plug in night light that will accent any décor. Whether you are looking for your standard night light lamp, or a fun themed nightlight, Wayfair has night lights that come in a number of styles, colors and themes…

Then I took the hint from this text and discovered that googling on standard night light brought me the things you expect to be able to find at a hardware store or an American all-purpose drugstore. (All of this took half an hour of my day, and I am resentful about that.)

Night light bonus. Your standard night light comes with a plug to insert flush into a wall socket; the ones above have two pins, but there are three-pin ones as well.

Well, that’s an object with protruding parts that you insert into an object with matching holes. Yes, insertive matched with receptive, so, inevitably, such plugs have been metaphorized as male (sporting a kind of dick) and the corresponding socket as female (housing a kind of pussy), thus providing the basis for jokes and a fair number of cartoons. We are relentlessly sexual beings (among many other things).

This entry was posted on April 12, 2022 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Books, Clothing, Design, Gender and sexuality, Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Music, Shoes, Understanding comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.