Maybe we'd all be better off if this Thurber fellow did bring the etchings down

by Ken

I don't know how many times I've looked at this classic Thurber drawing over the years, and of course I've always laughed, but it's never produced me quite the effect -- a hearty guffaw, yes, but also some sort of jolt -- it did today when I saw it again in this week's edition of "From the Desk of Bob Mankoff," the New Yorker cartoon editor's newsletter-slash-blogpost, which I've described here as the most welcome offering I can look forward to finding regularly in my e-mailbox. (We've talked about it a bunch of times, most recently in connection with Bob's promotion of prima cartoonist Roz Chast's invention of Stranger's Day.)

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In blog form Bob's musings this week carry the title "My Sexual Revolution." (The newsletter version has no title.) He begins:

So Ariel Levy tells me that my generation did not invent sex. Bummer! Now I have to cross that off my C.V. It turns out there were previous sexual revolutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If you say so, Ari, but ours had better music.

Still, I always thought the term “sexual revolution” was minted in the sixties, until I came across the 1929 book “Is Sex Necessary?,” by James Thurber and E. B. White. From chapter four, “The Sexual Revolution: Being a Rather Complete Survey of the Entire Sexual Scene”:

The sexual revolution began with Man’s discovery that he was not attractive to Woman, as such. The lion had his mane, the peacock his gorgeous plumage, but Man found himself in a three-button sack suit.


His masculine appearance not only failed to excite Woman, but in many cases it only served to bore her. The result was that Man found it necessary to develop attractive personal traits to offset his dull appearance. He learned to say funny things. . .

(The Ariel levy link is not, as you might guess, to a memo Levy sent to him on the subject, but to a "Books" piece of Ms. Levy's in the September 19 issue called "Novelty Acts," blurbed "The sexual revolutions before the sexual revolution" and starring the master of the orgone box, Wilhelm Reich.)

And then Bob pops in a couple of examples of "funny things about the new sexual freedom, and how it befuddled the Thurberesque male" which Thurber went on to draw, starting with the old favorite we've already seen at the top of this post, and proceeding to this even more cheerful one:


About the etchings drawing, I realize that at this point in time I have very little idea what anybody knows and so entertain the possibility that readers under a certain age may not even recognize the "etchings" gag -- a standard line once comically attributed to would-be roués who attempted to lure innocent young females up to their hives by asking, "Would you like to come up and see my etchings?" (I think all the versions I ever heard involved coming "up," and so presumed either an apartment or a hotel room. I just don't think the gag would translate to a colonial or ranch-style house.)

I don't know what it is about the Thurber etchings cartoon that so tickled and tugged at me today -- something about the poor fellow's utter unawareness of his cluelessness? But I do know where Bob's musings on sexual revolutions past sent me: straight back to the 12th grade at James Madison High School, where as Howie and I have both had frequent occasion to note we jointly served time way back when.

There wasn't much that thrilled me about that education, but there was certainly a smattering of teachers who changed me forever. Howie and I have both written about our 9th-grade English teacher, Mr. Fulmer, the man who pointed out regularly, "In a thousand years we'll all be dead, and all that will matter is our record of truth and beauty," and who never let any of us use the verb "think" when it referred just to stuff dribbling out of our mouths as opposed to being produce by the actual thought process. (Looking back, I find a surprisingly timely 2009 post I was quite fond of called "Do folks like Texas Gov. Rick Perry keep their brains turned off because they're afraid the battery will run down?") But I don't think I've written about my 12th-grade English teacher, Miss Tannenbaum, another great teacher, who in her rather different way was equally unforgiving of teenage bullshit.

And one subject that inevitably came up a whole lot in a class of 12th graders was sex. It was left to Miss Tannenbaum our colossal if hardly original misimpression that we had invented sex. It's a misimpression common (I think) to every generation, going back a lot farther than Dr. Reich. I guess it's the power of sexual impulses that causes most everyone who's just experienced them to imagine that we must surely be the first -- or else the world would be an entirely different place from what it is. On the contrary, I suspect, the world is the way it is precisely because every generation has made this same discovery, and hardly anybody since then has had much clue what to do about it.

Suddenly today I guess I'm thinking that our Etchings Guy may, in his laughable befuddlement, be if not smarter then at least more sensible than the rest of us. Maybe we should just have him bring the damned etchings down.

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