I’m always a fan of pulpy novels featuring predatory female figures. This one’s particularly good, with both a sultry blonde and a tough as nails older woman. However, the catchy line above the title – “She lured him into the world’s oldest trap’ – is a bit puzzling.
The luring part is fairly obvious, given the flashed leg and low cut top. But what’s the world’s oldest trap? In modern internet slang that would imply that the older woman was packing a penis in her panties. Given the context though, I doubt that’s it. Marriage doesn’t make sense, as that’s a relatively modern social idea. The same goes for monogamous coupling and child rearing. I’ve got to think that the world’s oldest trap is a pit covered in branches. That’s how they used to catch woolly mammoths after all. It seems an odd way to catch a guy, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me. I guess it might still be better than relying on your OK Cupid profile.
Often this kind of pulp cover is associated with some fairly poor fiction. But this story is actually by the great Jim Thompson. I’ve not read this particular novel, but he’s famous for such works as The Getaway, The Grifters and The Killer Inside Me. He also collaborated with Kubrick on The Killing and Paths of Glory (although didn’t receive proper credit). If you’re a fan of the pulp crime genre he’s definitely an author worth exploring.
The oldest trap is the vagina. Hence the myth of the vagina dentata.
“Vagina dentata (Latin for toothed vagina) describes a folk tale in which a woman’s vagina is said to contain teeth, with the associated implication that sexual intercourse might result in injury or castration for the man.”
There are a number of versions of this myth, and one or two modern commentators have picked up on the truths that it holds.
According to Camille Paglia, “The toothed vagina is no sexist hallucination: every penis is made less by every vagina, just as mankind, male and female, is devoured by mother nature.”
In his book, The Wimp Factor, Stephen J. Ducat expresses a similar view, that these myths express the threat sexual intercourse poses for men who, although entering triumphantly, always leave diminished.
(Thanks to Wikipedia for these).
It’s precisely because the vagina represents such a threat to men (as well as a promise) that there are cultures which actively promote its mutilation.
Submissive males should be congratulating themselves on being in the vanguard of those who seek to subvert this particularly nasty form of misogyny.
I’m going to still say that the branch covered pit is older than the fear of the vagina dentata. Although who knows what went on in the psychology of paleolithic man. š
In this particular case, having read a little bit of the background of the book, it sounds like sex was the lure and greed was actually the trap. I’d guess that greed also has a convincing case to also be the oldest form of trap.
-paltego