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| This is always how my driver's license photo turns out. (Photo from Gold Diggers) |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" Originally published in Gold Diggers (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 4, no. 1, January/February 1971. Credited to "Shirlee Lane."
Excerpt: "The best way for a certain type of female to be seen, or so she believes, is to commit a crime. There certainly she will have taken out some of the steam or revenge and all the world will know about it in one quick sweep. She has won some kind of a psychological point."
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| A phrase that haunted Ed Wood. |
Reflections: How appropriate that When the Topic is Sex should end with an article called "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" That title comes from a 19th century English nursery rhyme that has been attributed to poet Robert Southey. In case you've forgotten, it goes like this:
What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails and puppy dog tails
That's what little boys are made of
What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice and everything nice
That's what little girls are made of
That simple little verse had a major impact on Ed Wood, probably from his early childhood when he was still forming his ideas about masculinity and femininity. When little Eddie was a boy, he didn't want to be associated with "snips and snails and puppy dog tails," especially not when he could be made of "sugar and spice and everything nice." (What the hell is a snip, anyway?)
Ed worked through some of these gender confusion issues in his directorial debut, Glen or Glenda (1953). There, Bela Lugosi's godlike character, The Spirit, repeatedly talks of "puppy dog tails and big fat snails." And during the film's extended dream sequence, the cross-dressing Glen (played by Wood himself) is taunted by an unseen little girl who makes this speech:
I'm a girl. I'm nice. You're a boy. A puppy dog tail. Ha ha ha. Everything nice. Puppy dogs' tails. Puppy dogs' tails. Puppy dogs' tails. I'm a girl. I'm nice. Everything nice, everything nice. Ha ha ha. Puppy dogs' tails.
Eighteen years after Glen or Glenda, Ed Wood was still thinking about that pesky English nursery rhyme. Under the pseudonym "Shirlee Lane," a variation on Ed's own drag name, he penned the 1971 article "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" for Gold Diggers magazine. The premise of the article is rather outrageous. The women's liberation movement, it states with apparent sincerity, is causing women to become criminals! That's right. Men and women are switching roles in our society. Men are becoming more effeminate and wearing their hair long, while women are become more masculine and are stealing cars... and worse! Ed writes with obvious alarm:
A pistol or a rifle in the hands of a woman can be just as dangerous as if held in the hands of a male . . . and just as deadly as if the weapons were being held on target by the best weapons expert.
Female criminality is another classic Wood-ian motif. It's at the center of his scripts for The Violent Years (1956) and Fugitive Girls (1974), plus his novels Devil Girls (1967) and Hell Chicks (1968). The tough, snarly female characters in these stories often act and talk like men. The distaff delinquents in The Violent Years even have masculine-sounding names like Paula, Geraldine, Georgia, and Phyllis (variations on Paul, Gerald, George, and Phil, respectively). Basically, this article suggests that giving women the vote in 1920 eventually led to a generation of female supercriminals. (And, yes, just as in "The Changing Woman," he specifically points to the ratification of the 19th Amendment.)
Does Ed Wood have any sources for the bold claims made in this article? Yes, surprisingly. He quotes Professor Herman Venter, head of the criminology department at the University of Pretoria. According to Venter, South Africa is witnessing a dramatic increase in female criminality as a direct result of "the emancipation drive." He also states that "men throughout the world are losing their fiber and are becoming more and more effeminate." I cannot verify these particular quotes, but Professor Venter was quite real. Wood also quotes a psychiatrist named Dr. John Levy, who also seems legit.
However, Ed Wood's main source for "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" was an article in The Los Angeles Herald Examiner by columnist Phyllis Battelle. Ms. Battelle was a prominent writer from at least the 1950s to the 1970s, guesting on The Tonight Show in 1959 and writing a book about the Karen Ann Quinlan "right to die" case in 1977. Apparently, Ed Wood saw Battelle's article in the Herald Examiner, thought it was interesting, and decided to piggyback off her research. He even ends "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" with a passage directly from Battelle:
However in closing this article which was inspired by Phyllis Battelle's column it is only right in using her own closing words: "So in the long run the liberation movement, may prove to be healthy after all. If only we can restrain the female sex from carrying their aggressive privileges too far."
In a sense, then, we can say that When the Topic is Sex ends with Eddie borrowing another writer's words. This, too, is entirely appropriate. Many of the articles in the book were written this way, with Ed casting about for ideas and appropriating the work of other authors.
But there's still plenty of room for Ed Wood to be Ed Wood in this article! He even mentions his beloved angora sweaters, suggesting that the newly-effeminate males are now wearing them, along with "velvets, satins, nylons and laces." And "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" contains plenty of Ed's trademark tortured syntax. For example, he begins this piece with a long, rambling paragraph about mischievous schoolboys dipping girls' pigtails in inkwells.
We can't help but wonder that if the ball point pen and the automatic Flair pen were not invented and each desk in the schoolroom still had the open inkwell if certain aspects of school life might have reversed itself in that at one time little boys were always dunking the little girl's hair in the inkwell. The little girls didn't have a chance to reciprocate in kind, when those open inkwells were in style few little boys ever had long hair. We wonder if those open inkwells would find the girls of today dunking in the long hair of the boys.
Good god, Ed. That is the longest, most confusing way to phrase your idea. Just try diagramming one of those sentences. It'll kill ya. And Ed keeps the awkwardness going in the next paragraph:
Retaliation devices are in the making if the Women's Liberation puts their demands completely to the foreground.
You might well wonder what the hell "retaliation devices" are. I couldn't tell you. I doubt Ed Wood could have told you in 1971. It was just a phrase that popped into his head. And if it was in his head, it damned sure wound up on the page. That's just how he worked. And this marvelous passage is followed by one in which Eddie states that girls are becoming "just as much of a slob as the boy." That's the magic of Ed Wood. Reading When the Topic is Sex is like being able to download the contents of a man's mind.
Next: My concluding thoughts on When the Topic is Sex