kontextmaschine:

Sometimes I think about how detective (and spy) pulps were the same kind of mass-market eroticized fantasies for men that romance paperbacks were for women (consider James Bond in this light)

And how that makes the Chinatown “She’s my daughter! She’s my sister!” AND the L.A. Noire bit where late in the game your then-disgraced detective goes to interview a real estate magnate and totally ignores the 12yo in his bed, knowing there’s nothing he could do against someone so connected, into kind of elevations of a “taboo sex, isn’t this hot” tradition

like the shorthanding of detectives as “dicks” so that you could talk about “dick stories”, “dick mags”, etc. was totally self-aware as a pun