One of the first images I remember seeing as a kid was a Popeye cartoon. It was an old "Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp," I was a huge fan of Popeye and I still am. Whenever I catch the show (usually on the Boomerang Network) I'll watch it eagerly even if its a show I've watched several times. When I started living with my now wife we would watch it together. She wasn't a big fan but became one as we watched it. While watching it with her one day, we made some observations that were quite new to me even though I had watched the show literally my whole life. One is why were Bluto and Popeye always fighting over Olive Oyl who was clearly not an extremely attractive woman? I answered with the fact that in a number of the shows, Popeye and Bluto were both sailors on the same ship on shore leave. Now everyone knows the promiscuity of sailors. It's a very widely accepted thing that sailor will fuck just about anything that hoves into their field of visions with a pussy and that is rightly so. Unless you're gay, or asexual, the situation of being on a small cramped boat with a hundred men seems stifling. So it makes sense that the two men would jump ship and look for some strange and the fact that they both fight over Olive Oyl further shows that men without women for a long time will throw themselves at anything, including a flat chested chick with big feet and a shrill voice. Popeye and Bluto are literally willing to kill themselves and each other in order to "get with" this very plain woman. Which is a powerful statement on the relationship between men and women. What power women have over men in a psychosexual sense. That brings me to the other valid point which is why is Olive Oyl such a fickle bitch? She easily, and with no remorse, jumps from one sailor to the other. Which means she's either dumb or a whore. In the span of a short cartoon she's hops from Popeye to Bluto back to Popeye then to Bluto and in the finale back with Popeye (a.k.a. the winner). She teases these men and plays them against each other constantly and laughs and plays the innocent snarking maiden in the tower. Is this a statement on women? I know that the cartoon was made in the past, when everyone was a lot more chauvinistic but all jokes have a basis in reality, so does this mean that women love to play men against each other to see who will get her trim? Certainly some women do. This, if taken at face value, would cast a dark shadow on Olive Oyl as a manipulative bitch and how women will use their sexuality for power, and how they make men run through the tricks to allow them to "be with them". Which leads to one of the final points it raises. How men express their manliness with exhibitions of extreme violence and projected humiliation. The two men spend the majority of the show kicking the shit out of each other in hilarious but extremely violent ways to please Olive which inevitable ends with Popeye swallowing some spinach and beating the shit out of Bluto, but it doesn't stop there does it? No you have to humiliate your opponent, to make sure that he doesn't forget that this is YOUR girl and that you should keep your damn distance. It's not enough to trump your enemy, you have to kick a little dirt in their face when they're down if you really want the girl to love you and stay with you. This is indeed a grim lesson to teach children. Solve your problems with violence, and in the end only the winner will be allowed to mate with the woman. And we thought we were being so progressive and brave.
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