In olden days By Bos Bos reminisces about the past In olden days a glimpse of stocking Was looked on as something shocking. Now, heaven knows, Anything goes. Cole Porter I am not old enough to be of the glimpse-of-stocking generation -- except in the realm of mixed fighting. Once upon a time, believe it or not, images of woman beating men in fights were rare and difficult to come by. So, if you were a person of certain tastes, you ended up aggressively seeking out these images, even if you knew that what you found would be no more than the metaphorical glimpse of stocking. I can remember evenings spent at home in the 1960s -- with the television on all night -- so that I might catch every repetition of a COMMERCIAL for the Avengers. The SAME commercial. Times, as I say, were tough. A couple of years before that, in the summer of 1964, on a pre-college adventure, I hitchhiked from the Midwest to New York. New York had a pull in those days that it no longer has, and I just wanted to see it, for reasons having little to do with the subject of this piece. Wandering down 42nd Street, I came upon a store called Keystone. It was the size of a keyhole; couldn't have been 10 feet wide. Therein, I saw something I hadn't seen before: Comic books featuring -- to the exclusion of everything else -- pictures of women beating up men and other women. These weren't like regular comic books. They had no covers, and they had just a few frames per page. And they were wrapped in celophane, so that you could only see the front and back pages. And they were very thin. I couldn't believe my eyes. I thought my overheated teen-age mind was playing tricks on me. I simply could not have been so fortunate as to come upon this. I was looking for glimpses of stocking, and had stumbled upon what was, for me, the equivalent of Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Bridgette Bardot having every manner of sex. I would not have let myself dream that such a thing existed as Peerless, the outfit that printed these four-page folders of Stanton, Eneg and that generation of portrayers of fighting females. Each story sold for $5 in a time when $100 a week was a decent post-college starting salary. Or you could get five of the stories packaged for $20. Within a couple of days, I had bought so many that I had no choice but to leave for home immediately, having run out of money. To this day, I don't know how one learned about the world of Peerless and Stanton and all that if one did NOT stroll down 42nd Street. I never saw that sort of thing anyplace else. The Peerless publications did have a mailing address on them, but, I was still living with my parents and did not know about post office boxes (and probably was too young to get one). Anyway, I couldn't really afford the mail-order prices. But I could get to New York every year or so. People in my life thought I just had a thing about the place. Even by the time I had caught on to the idea of post office boxes, I could make little use of them. One 20-minute wrestling film (silent, of course) cost $50, more than a fourth of my monthly education stipend as a military veteran. So you picked your movies VERY carefully. It is apparently one of God's little jokes that the period in our lives when we are most in need of these sorts of things is the period when we have the least money for them. Anyway, there were very few suppliers to pick from, and the movies were generally awful. The girls were likely to be embarrassed, giggly, clueless, skill-less and muscle-less. And the guys were likely to fat and bald. So one turned to the mainstream media. A year after that trip to New York, I made a similar one to San Francisco, bumming. My fellow traveler and I we're walking around aimlessly, when I suddenly realized I had just seen something remarkable. Or at least I thought I had. I had this image in my head, and I thought it was of something I had just walked passed -- somewhere. It was, I thought, a printed ad for a movie, and it had lots of pictures. In my mind were images of women sword-fighting with men. Asian women in old-fashioned costumes. I thought the ad must have been posted on some sort of post or stand on the sidewalk. Now, you have to understand: I had no reason to be thinking about a poster of an Asian movie. This is was about seven years before the first spate of Hong Kong movies hit this country, during the Bruce Lee rage. I didn't even know there WAS such a thing as Chinese movies. So, as in New York, I questioned my sanity. Yeah, right, I said to me: a poster with a bunch of pictures of women swordfighting with men. Uh huh. I couldn't go looking for the poster, because I was at a total loss to explain to my companion why I would want to see it. I left San Francisco without ever finding the poster. 1969. The feminist movement hits, bam, just like that. Ms. Magazine is born. It prints a story about how women are often featured as fighters -- mainly swordfighters -- in Chinese movies. It prints a list of theatres in several Chinatowns in which these movies were then showing up, and it prints posters from a couple of movies. I suddenly knew what I had seen in San Francisco four years earlier: We had passed one of those theatres. I know which one, in fact: The Pagoda Palace, on Broadway, well down the hill from Chinatown. I developed a strong interest in living near San Francisco, Los Angeles or New York, the three cities listed as having several such theatres. I ended up spending large part of the early and mid 70s in California. I hadn't pursued the dream single-mindedly, but I damn sure hadn't forgotten it. In the mid-70s, I once saw a movie in San Francisco's Chinatown that, shall we say, got to me as nothing in a theatre had since Russ Meyer's "Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill" in the mid-'60s. (That one had me literally shaking as I left the theatre. You have to imagine its impact in 1965 or so. It portrayed a whole different kind of woman. It may even have shaken up normal guys.) The title of the Chinese movie was "The Female Chivalry," which doesn't quite make sense, but maybe does if you take off the word "The." It was a period piece. There was no skin. In fact, the female lead spent the whole movie masquerading as a man. It was one of those deals where nobody in the movie can tell the secret, but everybody in audience can. Most guys who are into mixed fighting wouldn't find this one very sexy. (Most guys who AREN'T into mixed wouldn't even see the movie as having anything to do with sex.) But I was blown away, because the heroine was totally scornful of her multitudinous male opponents. I just happen to love that. She would demolish them without seem to expend any more energy than if she were moving a folding chair. Their will had no more impact on her than the will of a folding chair. She seemed only dimly aware of their goals, and the only impact of their actions was to amuse her. It would have been a hundred percent better if she had flashed a little thigh here or there; a thousand percent better if the macho male characters had known that the smallish person who was casually beating them senseless was a woman. But, still, I was helpless. Though I lived and worked an hour from San Francisco, I went into town on two consecutive evenings to see the movie. Then I came in on Saturday. Everything was different on Saturday. The theatre, which was usually almost empty, was filled to the rafters. They even opened the balcony. The audience was mainly kids. Who laughed. And laughed. Every time the girl casually demolished one of the male warriors, so much laughter filled the place that the subsequent dialog was inaudible. Eventually, I realized: Omigod! It's a KIDS' movie! This thing that was filling my thoughts, disrupting my life, making me useless at work , this thing that I perceived as an unparalleled exercise in erotica, was designed only to make children giggle. I was starting to think I might be a little weird. Such, at any rate, were the indignities of the pre-VCR age. You would have to travel an hour to see what you wanted. You would see it only once in a night, or you would have to sit through another movie to catch it again. In those days, the other movie on the bill at a Chinese theatre was likely to be either a period operatta (in which the music is, for Western ears, I'm sorry, indistinguishable from the sound of fingernails on a blackboard) or a love-story melodrama in which women are crying for two-thirds of the movie. And we're talking about women who cry with phenomenal, sustained gusto. Most victims of mixed mania in those days were not getting their kicks in Chinatown theatres. (In fact, I don't know of anybody else who was.) A much more common venue was the drive-in theatre. Movies that are still today in the library of any serious collector -- the Ginger series, Policewomen, Delinquent Schoolgirls, Wonder Women (The Beautiful and the Deadly), Doll Squad (also known now by another name) -- were drive-in movies. They almost never showed up indoors. Which was fine. Drive-ins were better than theatres in at least two ways: (A) You had a little privacy, and (B) you could turn the sound off on the movie you weren't interested in. Or at least you can turn it down. (The volume in Chinese movies theatres -- especially those showing the operettas -- is, on the other hand, apparently designed to reach and irritate the dead.) Still, if you were in a northern clime, you might not enjoy sitting in you car killing time all evening. And drive-ins frequently showed three movies. If yours was showing first and fourth (which would be last), you had an awfully long wait. And, after all, you were frequently waiting for only a very few, very brief scenes (unlike the Chinese movies, in which the heroines generally spent more time fighting than not fighting). I happened to see the movie "Ilsa -- Harem Keeper to the Oil Sheiks" -- a drive-in movie, really -- in an indoor theatre on Market Street in San Francisco. The Strand? I think so. It was showing with two other movies in which I had no interest. But it had one scene in which I had an out-of-control and obviously unhealthy interest: these two topless black girls ostentatiously beat the holy hell out of a huge macho Arab, then ceremoniously relieved him of his manhood. So I watched the movie and sat through the next two because I wanted to see that one scene again. By the time I left the theatre, it was obvious that the staff had been talking about me and wondering if I was one of those guys who use a movie theatre as a temporary home, having no other. All eyes were on me. In drive-ins, one was, at least, spared this. These days I communicate occasionally over the Internet with guys who share my interest in mixed, and sometimes they complain about the lack of really good stuff, about how nothing has shown up at the video stores lately. But, much as I enjoy griping myself, I can't join in. This spring, one could comes across more mixed fighting on a single Monday night of television than one used to find in the mainstream media in an entire summer. There La Femme Nikita, on opposite Robin Hood (with a whole new interpretation of Maid Marion). Some fans of mixed fighting might find both of these shows to frequently be in the glimpse-of-stocking category. But each has had at least a couple of fight scenes along the way that are overtly sexy, meeting most of the old criteria -- skin, attitude, a degree of believability, even sometimes length. At any rate, the very fact of their being two shows on simultaneously which feature female fighters is just mind blowing for people from the sixties. We can remember entire seasons when there wasn't a single program. Beyond these two on Monday nights, there were this Spring two wrestling shows which toyed around the edges of mixed. One featured a beautiful, sexily dressed, muscular woman who attacked guys outside the ring. It wasn't EXACTLY a fight, but it was close enough for the aged. Then there was this new Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And for a few weeks there was also a series called Spy Game. I had some great stuff. Shoot, even Cybil had a neat, leggy little mixed fight scene this season. I have now failed to capture it on tape twice, because of VCR conflicts. Aside from Mondays, there is, of course, this matter of Xena and her various clones. Xena is, of course, the best show in the history of the world, from a certain perspective. But the best thing about is that it has made the producers of every other new adventure show include a female fighter. We have gotten to the point where NOT have a woman in the action is inviting a charge of political incorrectness. This, from the point of view of somebody who's fiftyish is, well, let me put it this way: Am I dreaming? Unmistakably, though, the best thing about the 90s is the VCR and, especially, the greatest of all inventions in the history of mankind, the fast-forward button. You can not only bring Ilsa and Ginger home; you can also skip the second and third movies on the bill; and you can skip all that stuff about plot and go right to the action. And -- thank God -- no more traditional Chinese music! But we haven't exhausted the ways in which today is better. There is, of course, the matter of price. A 20-minute, no-sound movie used to cost about $150 in today's money. Now you buy more for several times less, or you can rent, or, using the internet, you can trade. Meanwhile, you are much more likely to be able find stuff that suits your specific tastes. And, as to the Internet, even aside from trading, you can find folks who share your interests and who post information you find useful and never would have had before, information about where to find what you want. And then, of course, there are free pictures and stories, in incredible volume. That kind of thing used to be expensive AND fairly rare. We haven't even noted yet the advent of female bodybuilding and the prevalence of girl jocks generally. Cory Everson and Tina Lockwood are, literally, dreams come true. Stories were written imaging such women, but those stories were likely to set in the year 2350. One guy asked me recently on 'Net if I had ever had a girl friend who could wrestle and wanted to. The answer is "No; I'm from the 60s." Sixties girls thought wrestling and female muscles were icky. If you found one who COULD wrestle or WAS strong or HAD muscles, she'd be mortified to admit it. If you had told me 30 years ago that things would become this good by now, I would have thought you were talking millenial nonsense. I thought we might be flying to work by now and to go shopping. I certainly thought we'd be seeing each other during telephone calls. I thought we might have conquered heart disease and cancer. But this good? No way.