Friday, August 12, 2016

I Am Speechless. I Am Without Speech

 

6 comments:

Margaret Benbow said...

Oh, so that's how it happens! Now we know.
I love his cap with the golden scales, but
that big eye on his chest is just strange.

Debra She Who Seeks said...

Is that anything like the RCMP's "fruit machine" used to detect gays in the civil service in the 50s?

Cal's Canadian Cave of Coolness said...

Nothing in this outfit goes together or should. What is with the cap?? The eye. The open fly area, the queer machine is the least bizarre part of this panel.

Cal's Canadian Cave of Coolness said...

Did they really have a fruit machine, Debra. Let me guess, it worked 100 percent of the time.

Debra She Who Seeks said...

Here's an excerpt from the wikipedia entry for it:

"Fruit machine" is a term for a device developed in Canada that was supposed to be able to identify gay men (derogatorily referred to as "fruits"). The subjects were made to view pornography; the device then measured the diameter of the pupils of the eyes (pupillary response test), perspiration, and pulse for a supposed erotic response.
The "fruit machine" was employed in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s during a campaign to eliminate all gay men from the civil service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the military. A substantial number of workers did lose their jobs. Although funding for the "fruit machine" project was cut off in the late 1960s, the investigations continued, and the RCMP collected files on over 9,000 "suspected" gay people.
The chair employed resembled that used by dentists. It had a pulley with a camera going towards the pupils, with a black box located in front of it that displayed pictures. The pictures ranged from the mundane to sexually explicit photos of men and women. It had previously been determined that the pupils would dilate in relation to the amount of interest in the picture per the technique termed 'the pupillary response test'.
People were first led to believe that the machine's purpose was to rate stress. After knowledge of its real purpose became widespread, few people volunteered for it.

Cal's Canadian Cave of Coolness said...

OMG...this is barbaric. What if seeing gay sex makes my pupils grow bigger...like any sex act should if you were seeing it IN THE 50s and 60s where porn wasn't on every phone? I know people who have never seen sex on film or video or dvd or computer.