The other day my friend told me about a conversation she had with her former roommate, attempting to pinpoint the sexual difference between European and American men. According to them, my compatriots are happy enough to have their dicks sucked and leave it at that. The blokes of Europe, on the other hand, are more inclined to pussy worship.
It should come as no surprise, then, that perhaps the greatest pussy worshiper of all time, Robert Crumb, emigrated to France. For over sixty years, the psychonaut has left his perverse mark on every surface he comes in contact. As an early career in greeting card art ascended to publishing his own comics, he grew increasingly vulgar, lascivious, and mad. Crumb’s prolific output turned him into an underground hero, and he was responsible for some of the sixties’ most iconic images (see Keep on Truckin’ and Fritz the Cat).
But Crumb had a higher calling: carnal obsession. He drew the blueprint for incel culture decades before the proliferation of porn or the basement-dweller epidemic. His hostile, lusty depictions offer a lens of chronic dissatisfaction. The cartoonist remained married for the majority of his life, but he was also an addict. As much devoted to production as he jonesed for strong legs and fat asses.
In the southern French commune Sauve, his ambitions grew loftier, and gave rise to a complete graphic adaptation of the Book of Genesis, as well as a representation of Muhammad, which appeared in Charlie Hebdo just weeks after its staff’s massacre for the same act. He was never, however, able to escape his deviant reputation. In 2016, David Zwirner gallery exhibited a controversial, two-and-a-half decade catalogue of his reverent, voyeuristic, sometimes violent drawings of women. But by 2019, two years after #MeToo, he told the Guardian he’d put that behind him. “I don’t even look at women any more,” he said in New York. Had the interview been conducted abroad, I expect he may have spoken with more nuance.
-David Fishkind