CSotD: Sex, Kids and Comics

I’m old enough that, like Stephan Pastis in this Pearls Before Swine (AMS), I have trouble remembering things, and it’s comforting to know that “senior moments” are perfectly normal.

He’s right that you can remember things if you stop trying. I’ve likened that aspect of aging to losing night vision, in which you can see something better if you don’t look directly at it. What I find particularly frustrating is that I can be writing and have a particular word in mind until I get to the point in the sentence where it fits and … it’s gone.

My solution is to open a new browser window, think of the general idea and Google for synonyms, but I have no idea how writers dealt with this before computers.

However, John Milton went blind and managed to dictate Paradise Lost to his wife and daughters, which is a good argument against divorce and an even better argument for not whinging.

My other symptom of aging these days is to ponder how I got to where I am today, which is, fortunately, a good place, rendering contemplation more of an exercise than an exorcism.

Here’s an example of the kind of winding road it leads me on:

Here is a Red and Rover (AMS) that I can’t figure it out unless it means that Red’s little girlfriend is bisexual, which is okay with me though it might upset Nancy Mace.

However, given the general tenor of the strip, I can’t help but think that’s probably not the point.

Obviously, sexuality was the point when Lynn Johnston addressed it directly in FBOFW and I think we all suspect Schulz of skating around it with Peppermint Patty and Marcia, but I’m going to assume there was some other intention here.

Maybe the point is that they’re too young to understand much of anything, though I’d question that on developmental grounds. I remember being too young to know the mechanics but I was always surrounded by clues about romance itself.

Not all of them accurate and helpful, which is my point today.

Big Nate (AMS) is in middle school, so it’s less surprising that he has been bound up in prepubescent romance, but Lincoln Peirce steered it right into the danger zone and made me laugh.

Kids today are readily able to find things by accident. It was harder, in the pre-computer days when I was that age, to stumble into places you were pretty sure you shouldn’t be looking.

I liked both science fiction and the stories-with-a-twist in Alfred Hitchcock Magazine, but I remember picking up a book that included a story about an aging fellow who was given a pair of magical shorts which restored his youth and vigor, the twist being that if he took them off, the effect vanished.

Which he realized to his chagrin in the presence of a naked and willing young lady.

I was old enough to get it but young enough to be aghast.

Of course, at my current age, I’m still aghast but more in the sense of finding it pathetic and I’m even more aghast to sense a resurgence of empty macho chest-beating.

I thought the Sexual Revolution was over, and they’re down there fishing the tea bags back out of Boston Harbor.

Betty (AMS) and Bub address the topic somewhat accidentally, because Bub is right that we had a lot of influences that we didn’t recognize, though I don’t think he’s thinking of sex.

But that’s okay, because I have been.

Specifically, I’ve been pondering the idea that Freckles and His Friends, a popular cartoon about teenagers, was relatively straightforward.

The romance here is complex, because Judy may like Freckles but he’s hanging out with her to try to uncover a villain at the bank where they work. And both Judy and June — Freckle’s real girlfriend — are attractive, but they don’t flaunt their bodies.

That wasn’t a feature in teen-oriented comic strips, which I would point out are probably read more by pre-teens than by high school students, and thus potentially formative.

Granted, the girls here don’t understand sports, so there’s a stereotype but this particular storyline is mostly about Freckle’s job at the bank.

He cares about June and dating is a large part of his life, but he’s not, as Thumper would say, twitterpated. Freckles McGoosey was a lot like Wally Cleaver: He got into difficulties but was a sensible kid.

By contrast, Archie has always seemed to be about teenage lust, with Betty as the “good girl” and Veronica as the “vamp,” and both girls trying to be alluring rather than, like June, being a classmate and pal. The strip stars Archie, but seems mostly about romantic rivalry.

Archie was often seen in a state of goofy arousal, with cartoon hearts swirling around his head. He’s definitely twitterpated much of the time.

Not that the artist, Dan DeCarlo, was a dirty old man or anything, mind you.

But there’s got to be a difference between coming of age reading Freckles and His Friends and growing up with Archie and gang as role models.

And it wasn’t just Archie. Dobie Gillis would have been far better off with Zelda Gilroy, who was smart and devoted to him but was unacceptably plain, than mooning over spoiled, manipulative but gorgeous Thalia Menninger.

There’s still plenty of eye candy around now, but maybe the kids are better off today, despite the ready availability of porn, because they’re also being served up a number of options, such that a girl like Sheila Kuehl — who played Zelda Gilroy — can figure herself out before she’s in her 30s and has lost friends and jobs over it.

Her life and career is like having a half century compressed into a five-minute history lesson. In this short video, she talks about being a role model for smart girls, but the Wikipedia article about her is far more detailed, and, while her acting career seemed to end when her sexual orientation became a rumor, she later was also a staunch role model for the fact that you don’t have to find — and capture — a man in order to fulfill your life.

Who knew?

Well, not the people who grew up believing this 1964 Bacharach/David recipe for a happy life: