Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, March 1921 · page 32 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #18 — page 32: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a satirical essay (not a cartoon) from *Captain Billy's Whiz Bang*, a humor magazine popular in the 1920s-30s. It's a tongue-in-cheek commentary on male attitudes toward women. Andrews argues that women remain mysterious and unpredictable to men across all of history. He identifies two types of men: pessimists who've been hurt by women and became cynical, and self-righteous men who publicly disdain women's company while secretly being interested. The satire mocks men's pretensions—they think themselves more sophisticated than "cave men," yet remain just as baffled by female behavior. Andrews suggests male complaints about women often reveal past romantic failures rather than genuine moral superiority. The piece reflects 1920s gender dynamics when women's increasing independence and social freedoms were reshaping traditional male-female relationships, making the "mystery" of women a common theme in popular humor.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
30 Captain Billy's Whiz Bang ••“Wimmin” BY JACK ANDREWS. THE ever perplexing, never understanding, and most ancient of mysteries—Woman—is still with us. With but slight variations she is today the same enigma as were her predecessors running back to the beginning of time. The modern man starts out just about as the cave man did, only he believes he is more accomplished, and capable of penetrating the veil that men of vast experience in dealing with the “deadlier sex,” associate with the Unknown Origin. It is the incertitude of what Woman will do that brings out the gambling spirit in all of us, makes wise men of some of us, and pessimists of the rest of us. When you find this type of pessimist, a man who breaks out the hammer as the talk tends toward women—wild and otherwise—just jot it down in your little note book that at some time in his life a little bubble of conceit was pierced by a woman, and a man failed to measure up to the requirements. There is another class of supposedly male beings who continually rant about the women. They usually exhibit a holier-than-thou attitude when the pleasures of a woman’s society are mentioned, and denounce them