Today we’re talking about The Girl Watcher. It was a magazine about exactly what you think that ran from 1959 to 1959, and it will come as a great comfort to know its audience must now be tethered to a hydraulic water pump in order to maintain an erection.
The Girl Watcher wasn’t sure new readers would get its vibe, so the cover explained this magazine is “A GUIDE TO 👀 GIRL WATCHING.” And if you were still having trouble understanding what was going on, it also said, “Start a Girl Collection.” Hi, potential reader! We know you like checking out babes, and we already know your next question. The answer is no, they are not safe.
We’re going to read the first issue and this is how it opens:
“Humor” is too strong of a word for it, but the writers put in some effort to make their misdemeanor stalking sound like wildlife photography. Not a lot of effort. It’s a one note joke that unraveled quickly and completely, because imagine trying to extend that bit for a third paragraph. You can only dehumanize women for so long before you realize you’re not writing a comedy. Even in 1959 there was a threshold where a The Girl Watcher writer would go, “Oh, it stops being cute when we follow her to where she lives and tell her no one can save her.”
If you were expecting a magazine with mostly nude dames, this isn’t really that. It’s more about the men who stare at those dames when they’re trying to get to work. Again, it’s called The Girl Watcher, not The Girls Being Watched. So there are a lot of hilarious gags praising “true Girl Watchers,” like these fellows in the trash hoping to get a glimpse of pantyline. I love the idea of ancient perverts buying this magazine to masturbate with and finding out it’s mostly pictures of other perverts hiding in garbage.
Look here, 1959 comedy fans! A gentleman is hiding behind a tree to take notes on stranger butts! Get it? It’s funny because police will one day use that notebook to solve a string of sex crimes! I honestly can’t understand the premise of this. Is he really writing things like, “Calves of good size, haircut below average, couldn’t see face, 3:17pm.” Is there a conceivably funny answer to “fucking why?” This is so misogynistic many comedy lovers would reject it outright, but for the sake of argument, let’s say you hate and hunt women. Even for you, what’s the joke here?
“Some of the Girl Watchers pretend to read the newspaper. These lads know the importance of staying incogn– never mind, it looks like they’ve kidnapped one. The end of this article, I guess!“
For a sexy humor magazine, that was a heavy start. Let’s see if their second article is more light-hearted.
Oh fuck. Oh, no. It’s about hunting women in the park and that would be bad enough. But it’s also about a reader from the Congo who was given two 19 inch pygmy girls as a gift. He asks if he’ll still be a Girl Watcher now that he owns his own human women! So, okay, it’s probably not a real story for a couple reasons. One, it’s the first issue. How would they be getting reader mail already? And two, you can’t keep two Zoogo pygmies in the same terrarium. Unless you like it when Pygmon The Untethered forms, you fucking idiot.
The third article is a zany feature about helping Girl Watchers self-identify. In most ways it’s identical to the first article about the different types of Girl Watchers which supports my theory that this magazine was written by scattered inmates with no editorial oversight. Anyway, let’s see these goddamn Girl Watcher types:
It’s worse than you thought. Probably much worse. THE FLUSHER will fake being drunk to leer at women staying at the YWCA. I’m not sure I have an irreverent spin on that. If you told a man to commit the most unspeakable act of evil without touching anyone or committing crimes, THE FLUSHER would win. If these words weren’t literally already in The Girl Watcher, I might have said something close to “this is the kind of magazine that tells you to pretend to be homeless to scope out the babes coming and going from the domestic abuse shelter.” I would have thought I was an edgy, absurdist genius for thinking that up. I’m truly stunned.
Compared to THE FLUSHER, THE PEEKER is downright adorable. This guy only spills mustard when he smells a titty? Fucking marry him, ladies.
They refer to THE STALKER as resourceful and imaginative because he comes up with good ideas like, “hiss, crawl under the women and look up, hiss.”
THE PERCHER looks like he might be THE PEEKER on a three day titty bender. Which means he’s probably spilled enough food on himself that he’ll get swarmed with birds before he can get to stage two of his plan. Which… it’s got to be leaping onto a woman, right? It couldn’t just be climbing out of the tree after a day of public masturbation, could it? I mean, the joke can’t be “I’m perched up here, whores! You whooores!!!“
Soon the writer abandoned the silly descriptions entirely. He decided telling you which body part the stalkers liked was enough. “The Legman, fuck it,” he wrote. “It’s probably a guy who likes legs, they’ll get it.” And then he handed it to an illustrator who said, “Sure. I can draw a man probably looking at legs. People will get it. Hell, they’ll love it. Oh no, this next one is dark and I’m a hypothetical pantyhose sniffer in a comedy bit.”
This Girl Watcher didn’t get a character class. He’s only called “Lester.” And Lester had the idea of dismembering four different mediocre women to make one really good one. “That’s a complete joke and the perfect way to end an article,” thought the writer. And to his credit, what would you call this Girl Watcher? THE CORPSE FUCKER? Oh, you would? Well, then you agree, the choice to just use Lester’s first name was a good one.
Not all of the magazine is as silly as carving a woman into parts. Next up is a profile by the journalist Sir Oswald Chisholm, and it’s… oh no. God damn it. It’s called…
The article is about a 49-year-old fat man in London who definitely doesn’t exist, but who maintains relationships with young women around the world by giving them gifts. There is no moral or entertainment value to it. It really is a bland description of what it would be like to buy a dress for a sad woman in exchange for companionship. Here’s an excerpt:
I guess it’s a power fantasy about having enough money to turn all human relationships into prostitution? The other articles have been about objectifying women, but this one is about how, no really, you can just go buy them. Except I’m not making it sound creepy enough. I’m not even sure how to describe the depth of this article’s creepiness. Wait, wait, I just remembered it’s called “Collecting Pretty Girls.”
You might be starting to worry that the writers of The Girl Watcher had a real contempt for women. That should go away when you find out the next article is a nonfiction story about Eddie Waitkus. He was the baseball player murdered by a deranged female fan.
It’s… I don’t know, telling, that the writers of The Girl Watcher would be drawn to this story. It’s almost as if they could relate to someone whose loneliness turned into some kind of single-minded, irrational obsession. Like this author shouted at a cashier he was following to her car, “You know who gets dangerous when they long for a love they can never have? Fucking women.”
So far this magazine has identified the kinds of men who stalk women, stalked some women, and identified the kinds of men who stalk women. They’ve also implied that you’re lucky they’re men because if they were women, ladies, you’d already be dead. So it’s safe to say these men understand women. They should have no problem writing an extremely fake advice column by an 18-year-old British girl.
It’s going to sound like I’m kidding, but it starts with half a question from a “reader” who can’t tell if his girlfriend wants to kill him, and then completely abandons the text to show a picture of “the author’s” panties. You have to skip ahead twenty pages to learn his girlfriend chokes his neck with both hands while she’s on the back of his motorcycle. And her advice is to … I can’t be sure, but I think “she’s” saying to kill her before she kills him? Here, I’ll let you take a look:
They’re writing both sides of this, so it could have been anything. Well, not anything. They’re 1959 virgins. But they could have given this fake reader permission to make love to a chimpanzee. They could have worked together to turn a beach ball into something like a chimpanzee vagina. The point is, in the universe of infinite possibilities, they invented a woman who said, “INDECIPHERABLE NONSENSE, STRANGLE HER?”
Okay, enough for the fellas. These next helpful hints are for their PRETTY GIRL READERS only, and that’s not a joke, those are their exact words.
These goddamn maniacs are trying to sell the reader on the fantasy of “you’re holding the same magazine that beautiful women read!” Nothing has ever been less likely. There is no magazine more single-minded in its quest to alienate female readers than this. You would have to publish a magazine called Dressing Up Like a Hobo To Stalk Women at the YWCA Quarterly, which once again, this magazine already did sincerely, and I’m sorry for repeating the bit, but I still look upon it in cosmic wonder.
Suspiciously, one of their first tips for models is to fuck the photographer. “Suck his fat dick, if you know what I mean,” said their first draft. It’s shortly after this when the author loses their mind. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s not low effort or humorless. It’s like their shitty brain started to misfire in a medically upsetting way and no one was there to help them.
What the fuck is going on? If I’m being generous, I think the gag is how girls dream of being models, and they obviously don’t mean the wrong definition of dream, but what if they did and everything was all weird? This is horny madness. This is what happens when a murderer’s balls get so full they cause a brain swelling. And there’s more! Look at this shit:
Surrounded by the busy clacking of typewriters, the editor-in-chief of The Girl Watcher reads aloud from a draft handed him by his newest writer. “I AM GIRDLE BRONCO. MY BOSS IS WOLF, BUT MY PANTY GIVES ME SPEED.” He looks at the page for a moment, his expression impossible to read. “Looks good, kid. Fuck this syntax up a little bit and we’ll get it over to art.”
If you’re hoping for sanity in the next article, I have some bad news. It is written entirely in Jazz.
There’s no way of knowing what it’s about. Anyone who speaks this is dead, and I am genuinely worried some of that is racial slur. I am beginning to think letting stalkers publish their own magazine was a crazy idea. At least things are moving toward the deranged and away from the problema– fuck.
Okay, wait, maybe she will be okay. Maybe the writers of The Girl Watcher think of themselves as good people and imagined this girl would be perfectly safe in the presence of 26 men.
Are you fucking serious, The Girl Watcher!? Can we have just one article where a woman isn’t in mortal danger? Maybe a fun piece on, like, a dance craze sweeping the nation?
It’s hard to overstate how quickly this story about the popularity of bongo drumming transformed into the author’s fear of black penises. The protagonist of “bongo!” watched in racist apathy as his date got her purity and innocence pumped out of her by Big Wheel, king of the local bongo circle, and I wish there was more I could tell you about this story. It’s like a lore book no one expected you to read in a game called Assassin’s Creed: Jim Crow.
Oh yeah, remember June?
This poor guy can’t keep his best friend’s wife’s mouth off him. What should he do? “You little bitch, I’m going to emasculate you,” suggests this 18-year-old beauty from across the pond!
“My mommy told me to get laid, and I showed her! I found a gal whose bra size goes from 11-year-old girl to Hacksaw Jim Duggan. I’m confused. About more than bras. And not only me, the guy I’m pretending to be, but also me, the guy pretending to be you. June, me, please help.” – Shook
“Fuck you, Shook. You fool. It’s funny to me how you’re so stupid you can’t get laid.” – Shook writing as June about the blowfish girl they made up in a moment of desperate confusion
A confused-about-boobs virgin writing for The Girl Watcher has invented a character called Desperate because he’s desperate to have less sex. “I made love to the wife of the World Champion Skeet Shooter,” he complains. “Make love to ME NEXT!” he advises himself, adding no further ideas other than a compliment. Go ahead and live forever– you’re not going to see anything more pathetic than this. When he wrote this, this man’s genitals dropped off his body like the long evolutionary arc of a cave salamander’s eyes. It’s astonishing what the people our ancestors wouldn’t fuck were able to achieve.
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