The Past Is A Foreign Country...

...they do things differently there.

My wife came across this artifact from the past:



It's obviously old. There's no zip code, so it's pre-1963. You can read a bit about the company, which sold novelties in the back of comic books here.

It's mostly being passed around as a misogynist artifact now.

You can also find examples of this shoe on the other foot, like this cartoon from the New Yorker, which still seems to be on sale:


The metaphor of mate-finding as a form of hunting is an old one. This metaphor can make people nervous, for obvious reasons. And things that make people nervous... can also make them laugh.

It can be a delicate line
a matter of careful design
between outrageous gaffe
and belly laugh.