Spank The Police!
I am blaming Pandora Blake for destroying the productivity of my morning. Only, not really; because I got a blog post out of it.
So there I was, lying in my bed with my phone at my face, catching up on the night’s Twittering (as one does) as an alternative to actually getting out of the bed and commencing serious work like a grown-up. And I saw that Pandora had tweeted this rather awesome image sequence of two biker women spanking a female traffic cop with her own leather belt (don’t forget to click to make larger):
On my tiny little phone screen, it looked an awful lot like the work of famous gay artist Tom Of Finland. I’ve seen spanking art by Tom of Finland, but I’d never seen any that didn’t feature exclusively male subjects. Could this possibly be?
Of course it was not. But the web searching and blogging to sort it all out consumed my entire morning. {Shakes fist at Pandora}
Technically speaking, we are looking at a Tom of Finland homage by queer post-punk Canadian artist G.B. Jones, who has been called (it turns out) “the female Tom Of Finland” for her Tom Girls series of drawings. Originally appearing in various editions of her zine, J.D.s, the Tom Girls drawings were also printed in a book (title: G.B. Jones); it’s a scan of the book pages from here (I believe) that Pandora tweeted this morning.
According to the artist, the G.B. Jones book got banned in Canada because of this bondage cop imagery:
WB: Why exactly was your book G.B. Jones banned in Canada?
GB: You can see on the Customs form that they’ve typed in “Bondage” as the reason they seized the books. There are only two drawings of people who are in bondage in the book; one is of a police officer, who gets tied up and spanked for giving two girls a ticket for parking their motorcycle in the wrong place, and the other is of a prison guard, who is trying to make it with one of the prisoners, but gets tricked and tied up instead. I wouldn’t want to speculate too much about their thinking at the border, but I suspect it may have something to do with the occupations of the women in bondage, more than the fact that these two women are bound. After all, lots of mainstream pornography gets into the country that’s a lot worse than my drawings.
So, that’s the history. But I was finding myself frustrated by the reduced size of the first two images on Pandora’s tweeted scan. Surely I could find bigger, better, scans on the web?
You’d think. And, eventually, I did. Sort of. But only sort of.
The images in question have titles; they are called “I Am A Fascist Pig” and numbered 1 through 3. Unfortunately, the scans of I Am A Fascist Pig #1 and #2 are just 230 pixels wide. Not good enough! The scan we have (via Pandora) of I Am A Fascist Pig #3 is fine:
The click-through image on that is to a much larger and more satisfactory version found here.
At the same place we find a highly satisfactory (although somewhat dithered) version of I Am A Fascist Pig #2:
Unfortunately, all the versions of I Am A Fascist Pig #1 that I could find on the web were as tiny and/or muddled as the one at the top of this post. More futile curses! Plus, what to do?
Well, when in doubt, one never goes wrong by following the advice found in classic movies. Inigo Montoya knew how to solve a problem like this even when he was staggeringly blind drunk:
“You told me to go back to the beginning. So I have. When the job went wrong you went back to the beginning. Well, this is where we got the job, so this is the beginning.”
OK, so it’s back to the beginning we go! This artwork first saw the light of day in the J.D.s zine, right? So maybe I can find the zine somewhere on the web?
Sure enough! There’s a downloadable .pdf here of J.D.s #1, and though the textures are much washed-out due to too much photocopying, the size and detail is better than anything else we have for #1:
For completeness, here are #2 and #3 in the same style:
So there you have it. Was this triptych of manic pixie lesbian bicker-chick spanking dream girls really worth obsessively blowing an entire morning of web searching and blogging time on? As to that, my dear reader, only you can say…
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