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Newspaper stories from the good old days say the darndest things. So every week on the Sexist, let’s take a ride on journalism’s way-back machine, to a time when men were publicly embarrassed for actin’ slutty, because women were too weak to be responsible for their own actions.
This Week in Sexist History:
Good Ol’ Day: July 30, 1908
Dateline: Washington, D.C.
Subject: A District man’s “attentions” to local married women—-the phone calls! the hugging!—-inspire a band of husbands to retaliate. Their weapons? Tar, feathers, nude sitting-on, and accusations of turn-of-the-century witchcraft. (In 1908, they called it “hypnosis”). Let the olde-tyme male slut-shaming begin:
Calling on a woman? In the evening? Bad slut. Bring out the tar:
So, Bliss comes to visit this chick in Columbia Heights. Says they’re engaged. In love. Headed to New York to seal the deal. NYT reporter, however, is not buying this guy’s love story at all. But couldn’t this all be cleared up by—-I don’t know—-asking the woman what happened? No? Fine:
Side note: How do you spontaneously tar and feather someone in a Columbia Heights basement? Where do the feathers come from?
Kinky. Though he arrived in the home as a mere adulterer, he left as THE SLUTMONSTER OF CAPITOL HILL:
But surely, the three dudes who captured him, stuck him in a basement, took all his clothes off, sat on him, painted him with tar, and then dusted him with the insides of a couch did so for good reason:
He’s a witch!
Ah, the old I-fell-under-his-hypnotic-influence-at-an-innocent-dinner-party-and-was-unable-to-control-myself-when-I-got-his-messages-by-mental-telepathy trick. How dare this man take advantage of this poor, weak-brained woman! Only this hypnotist’s slutty witchery could possibly have caused her to stray from the dude who sits on naked people in his basement and then exacts olde-tyme tortures on them. Yep, she sure is lucky she wasn’t whisked away to New York City, never to see her husband again. Whew. Close one.
Telephone calls? Embraces? It’s about time we got this guy off the streets, and into some crazy olde-tyme BDSM basement in Columbia Heights.