As with most of my comics, this one is based in history. A little less than a century ago, men made these…. lovely… automata for the 1939 World Fair. They surely enchanted and delighted the World’s Fair crowds with their oh-so-seductive gyrations.
Here is a colorized video of their stunning debut, with haunting music to boot:
If there’s one thing I know about automata, it’s this:
their hips don’t lie.
I became aware of these Shakira-esque robots through one of my favorite follows, The Morbid Anatomy, which was originally a blog run by Joanna Ebenstein, and is now a curated collection of lectures, exhibitions, classes, spectacles, symposia, field trips, books, parties, and films. They cover anything that sits in that spooky intersection between art, medicine, death, and culture—they are the original haunted librarians—smart, creepy folks after my own gothic little heart.
I’ve supported The Morbid Anatomy over on Patreon for a while now, and every month I get access to lectures on the coolest topics imaginable—things like the above automata, seances, tarot, witches, Victorian death culture, and of course, all the morbid anatomy my gooey little eyeballs can stomach. Their whole team is brilliant, and absolutely worth a follow if you’re interested in history, art, medicine, and the occult. (Find them here on instagram to see what I mean.)
The video above popped up on their feed a few weeks ago and I was absolutely smitten. In addition to these dancing girls being just lovely, there’s something so comforting about their ridiculousness. Women have been robotically sexualized for so, so long. It’s incredibly satisfying to strip down the female sexual commodity to its bare parts.
It’s bare, gyrating parts.
It makes me think how cynical the “sex sells” people must be. To them, what is desire, but the simple, unbridled appetite for some clonky, gyrating hips? It’s so absurd, so unsexy. So much of a person’s deliciousness is lost when you eliminate their juicy, complicated wholeness. Likewise, when you reduce a person to their parts, parts are all you’ll ever see.
It makes me think of our former president’s relationship to his daughter, Ivanka. He got a lot of guff for the way he talked about her (not enough to keep him from being elected, obviously). He couldn’t stop talking about her body, her sexiness, her desirability. A lot of people couldn’t fathom how a father could talk about his daughter like that, but he wasn’t talking about her as a father talks about his daughter.
He was talking about her as a salesman talks about his product.
Hips and lips. Gyrations and rosy cheeks.
Truly, it’s all just gender nonsense—it’s just so very obvious here.
I hope you enjoyed the comic.
Thanks for being here, today and always.
Yours ~gyratingly~
🖤Becca Lee, the Hunted Librarian🖤
PS - If all this is as interesting to you as it is to me, The Morbid Anatomy hosted a fascinating lecture called “Gendering the Living Machine” by artist and historian Jason Lahman last week. Check out their Patreon to get access. I’m not being paid to talk about them, either, I just really love their work and wanted to share.