Thanks for the Ball-Kicks, Will Hays!

I'm starting this blog to record my progress on Japanese (and other Asian) articles at Boobpedia, write down passing thoughts related to that work, thoughts for future work, thoughts and activities only tangentially related to it, and totally unrelated stuff as it may arise in my ramblings. We'll see if this develops into anything fun. If it stops being fun, it stops...

At Boobpedia tonight I started working on bringing the JAMS New Sexy Zone series DVD articles up to date. Started three of them. The new site I found a couple days ago-- Fetish World-- has "synopses" in "English" (emphasis on the scare quotes). Paraphrased they usually say something like "Huge Tits Heckuva Big-ass goddess bouncy on incompetent man! Sucking, fucking and much paizuri!" It's kind of fun spinning this out into faux-sophisticated prose. I have in mind the long-winded, ornate style of the jokes in Playboy behind the centerfold. '60s cool-cat, pretentious twit, obsessed with T&A. (Not much of a stretch for me there, I admit.) I managed to get a little of that into Wikipedia. (I once referred to an actress' genitals as her "nether regions" in an article... some humorless twit changed it of course, probably citing some crackpot policy...) The magnificent Rei Tachibana (pictured at right) was the star of one of the DVD articles: Steamy Huge Boobs! Breast Therapy (or Perfervid Mega-Bazongas! Boobs Therapy to take the Fetish World translation... actually, I prefer that one myself... November 2010). It tells the inspirational story of a large, busty woman (Tachibana, again type-cast in this role) who uses her body to invigorate her clients. Not much of a plot, perhaps, but a simple and direct story that needed to be told. Rei Tachibana has a bit of a half-Asian-looking face, though I've never seen it mentioned that she was not pure Japanese. Gorgeous woman either way.

After the night's editing, I watched a Mill Creek 50 Comedy Kings film-- Goodbye Love (1933) starring Charlie Ruggles. Pretty dull, but, being pre-Hays Code, had a couple enjoyably risque touches. One was Ruggles speaking on the phone to his large, BBW, alimony-demanding ex while she is in the bathtub. Ruggles later addresses her as "my little dromedary". 1933 being in the blessed time before camel-toe pants-- before plumber's ass-crack became a fashion statement-- he can only be addressing her two prominent, large and bouncy fore-humps, which, unless my weak eyes and hyper-active imagination deceive me, we had a fairly good look at in the bathtub... In another scene, Ruggles is walking on the beach, and is stopped by an outraged yelp from a large woman buried in sand. Ruggles is standing where her crotch should be located, and says, "Oh dear! I seem to have put my foot in it!" then leers at the camera. "It" being, one can only presume, the woman's cunt. One more year, and Hays would specifically ban foot-in-cunt jokes... One can only dream of what heights of pudenda-related Tom-foollery US cinema might have reached if not for Hays, in the later '30s, '40s and '50s when even the faintest whiff of genitalia, much less the insertion of a foot into them, was banned from Hollywood's output. And what a loss that is...

Imagine a Harpo Marx free to grab a butt-cheek and a boob or two once he's caught a fine specimen out of that endless stream of blonds he was always chasing... Imagine Larry telling Moe to go fuck himself, and receiving a sharp kick to the groin in return. In fact, had Moe been free to kick his cohorts in the balls, maybe Hollywood would have got the gratuitous ball-kicking out of its system back in the '40s and we wouldn't have to suffer through it in the theater today. Who knows? It worked with the ass-kick.

Take a look at Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914). Here it is at the Internet Archive. Ass-kick, ass-kick, ass-kick. Ass-kick-o-rama. Not an ass appears on screen unless that ass is soon to be kicked. And these ass-kicks are totally at random, without motivation. An ass is kicked simply because it's there... We're told in the history books that this movie made money. In fact it was a huge hit, and a milestone in cinema. But what is left out of the books is that it seems to have rung the death knell for the easy, cheap-laugh that the ass-kick offered comedians. Oh, I'm aware that comedic ass-kicking lingered on through the rest of the 1910s and even rears its head occasionally to this day, but the ass-kick's power to thrill audiences in-and-of-itself had lessened once Sennett dropped 82 minutes of non-stop ass-kicking action on the theater-going public with Tillie. And, except for the occasional well-thought-out ass-kick, the ass-kick with something socially relevant to say (for example, when Laurel and Hardy use ass-kicking as just one step in the escalation of violence in the hilarious closing scene of sidewalk mayhem in You're Darn Tootin', 1928), it's pretty much fizzled out since then. Ball-kicking, on the other hand, like foot-in-cunt jokes, was stifled by that prude Hays, and not allowed to play out naturally, and to eventually be overtaken by more evolved schtick. So the primitive old gratuitous blow-to-the-balls lingers with us in today's cinema, long after its natural time period has passed... Sort of like a gag version of the rhinoceros. Or the coelocanth... And we, the audience, suffer the consequences... Thanks a lot, Will Hays...

God damn all holier-than-thou prudes and censors! God damn 'em to Hell-- or send them Hell's online equivalent: Wikipedia. We keep imagining the human race progresses, but we will never be free from the evil forces of self-important bigotry. Anyone who doubts that need only edit anything slightly controversial or slightly out of the Anglo/WASP-mainstream at Wikipedia. Yank aside the fig-leaves of "notability", "reliability", etc., and you have the same old elitist censorship which kept Edgar Rice Burroughs and L. Frank Baum out of libraries a couple generations ago. (At right, Rei Tachibana returns to give the censors what they deserve.) At least those censors, as hired librarians, had some authority. Wikipedia's censors, while refusing "Original Research" or much anything else from its contributors-- even if they are actual authorities in their area-- have given themselves authority to censor-- by removing sourced information which doesn't meet the rules they created. Wikipedia could have been a great populist encyclopedic project... among other things, a compendium of interesting pop-culture trivia useful for future generations. But that's not respectable enough for the elitist prudes. As always, they've got to save the masses from what the masses want. They-- the prudes-- know what is better for everyone else. So Jimbo Wales allowed the self-appointed, self-important elitist blow-hards to take over, and now Wikipedia aspires to be, at best, a pale imitation of a print encyclopedia. One which will never have any authority whatsoever... but which will have humanity's largest recorded discussion on what some uninformed, arrogant semi-literates think an encyclopedia should be. What a crime.

And with that rant, I wipe the spittle off my chin and stumble off to watch something tonight... a Spaghetti western maybe?...