The caveman at mid-century

The mid-century, it seems, was the heyday for advertising that traded on the trope of the caveman dragging off a mate by her locks. As eye-catching, evocative imagery, it was just too potent for ad men to resist -- especially when it could be presented with an anachronistic twist.

Thus, we have this 1949 Arrow ad which gives women the upper hand in the mating ritual, informing us that "A man hasn't a chance in an Arrow White Shirt."   

"Correct, young-man-about-to-live-in-a-cave!" the copy confirms, "Their handsome, perfect-fitting collars are irresistible." (And don't worry about their mismatched clothing. By the time she's finished dragging him home, that white shirt will be a memory, in dirty, ragged shreds.)

In 1956, the scenario again made an appearance, with men and women back in their traditional roles, this time to cast bone-ribbed girdles as something out the stone age ... or something very much like it.

"Come out of the bone age, darling ..." the ad implores, explaining that "Warners takes the cave-man manners out of old-fashioned girdles (poke, shove, groan), removes those long front bones that dig into your midriff."

(By the way, I don't know the reason for "darling" in the headline – it could just be to sound like one gal dishin' to another, but I'm reminded of ad man David Ogilvy appending it to a headline because of research that said the word "darling" provoked high emotional reactions.")

This last ad, from the Cigar Institute of America in 1959, is sure to provoke an emotional reaction of its own:

"A cigar brings out the Caveman in you," it insists, which would be enough to get the point across, but being a cigar ad, the copy inevitably adds a little innuendo, "There's a man-size feeling of power in smoking a cigar."

As our Paleolithic progenitors would say, "Ugh."

* * *

Let's note here that there's nothing in the (pre)historical record to indicate this primitive form of "wife capture" actually took place.

However, there was a literary precedent for this "caveman courtship" in turn-of-the-century fiction, though it was anything but romantic. By most accounts, the more comical interpretation – a caveman's club standing in for Cupid's bow-and-arrow – was popularized by the 1923 Buster Keaton film,  The Three Ages, one age of which had him competing for the hand – and hair – of a comely cavewoman:

(And if she later tells him, "Not tonight, I have a headache," I think we'll understand why.)