The subjects of Calfun Inc.’s ‘Fantazy Cards’ trading card series can be divided into three main categories:
- Girls pretending to own very expensive cars
- Girls laying awkwardly across very expensive cars
- DAMNED DIRTY LIARS
Even though I was born in the 1980s, I never really comprehended the idea that motor vehicles were somehow equivalent to, or an aid to, or were in any way related to, sex. At their best, cars are a necessary utility that you can festoon with Batman stickers so that you’re just a little less tempted to drive into that tree on the way to your thankless job. At their worst, cars are machines that will kill everything on Earth in one way or another, whether it’s directly beneath a tire or causing a toxic change in our atmosphere. Cars aren’t inherently sexy objects, but if humans as a species have one amazing power, it the ability to find sex in just about everything. Rule 34, my friends. Rule 34. As far as I’m concerned, you could pose these ladies with cuts of pork or folders containing the zoning regulations of Orlando and the effect would be exactly the same.
The set expresses an aggressively early-1990s type of eroticism; skimpy bathing suits, big hair, and body types that could just as easily be found in the pages of any 90s comic. Bright red cars, neon beach backgrounds that look like a porno directed by Lisa Frank, and even a Hulkster motorcycle; it’s all there in a perfect snapshot of the sexual preferences and mores of a very specific point in time. Like a 1912 nickelodeon film of a woman showing her upper calf, these represent the aspect of human sexuality that people were more or less comfortable acknowledging in print. Sure, there’s always darker and more intense stuff going on under the surface, but these are the things we’ve allowed to bubble to the top of the moral cesspool that we wade through daily.
Of course, the fantasy needs to be made real. How else will the hormonal audience of these cards know how to feel? Are they supposed to be attracted to these lovely ladies, or should they be fantasizing about tuning up the engine on that Nissan 300 ZX?
While I’m not saying that it’s impossible, or even unlikely, that a woman would own a fancy sportscar, the collection here seems statistically improbable, if not impossible. Despite this, the text of these cards feels that it’s necessary to convince the reader that these women own many of the pristine cars that they’re posing in studios with. Because I still don’t fully understand this unholy union of boobs and Corvettes, I can only assess one of two intentions from these elaborate descriptions of car ownership: these women are either meant to intimidate and challenge you, or to be your surrogate mommy.
It’s clear from these profiles that these women don’t need you. They have a lot of money, and they’re probably better than you in every way. Mallory, a skeet-shooter, may or may not make you her next target. Heidi PROBABLY won’t chop off your head, and Dina can fix her own damn car. So, you’re either getting a boner from risking your life with a violent partner or you’re getting a boner because you’ve found someone to take care of you. Either way, if you’re buying these cards unironically, you probably aren’t looking for your equal. You’re looking for a caretaker or an object.
When these ladies aren’t getting semi-nude on their cars, they’re getting semi-nude on someone else’s cars in the least comfortable manner humanly possible.
Maybe it’s because I have a healthy view of sexuality, but I’m again lost as to where the arousal should be coming from. It must be in there somewhere, or else they wouldn’t be doing it so much, right? If the average human can’t survive more than 5 minutes on your average futon without developing a lethal full-body cramp, spending 15 seconds laying across the windshield of a luxury automobile must be a spinal hellscape the likes that no average uggo has ever seen. If being fugly has one main benefit, its that no one will ever ask me to lay across the exterior of a car. Until they call me back for that centerfold in Balding Illustrators Monthly.
These ladies don’t always lay on their cars and motorcycles, though. Many just stare off into space or are creatively cropped, allowing their asses become their main identity.
And of course, there are the sweet, sweet lies.
I’m willing to believe that Toni is hanging out at the Skoal Bandit van at the monster truck rally. You’ve created a simple fantasy that isn’t completely unbelievable, but then, Fantazy Cards, you can’t keep your lies consistent. Is it Toni or Tanya? I understand if you ran out of rich, white women who own sports cars and couldn’t complete your card set, but at the very least, try to support your own erotic fiction.
If you buy enough cards, you might just win a full set of cards. In order to win this set of cards, you need to obtain a bonus card, randomly packed into a pack of cards. You also need to answer two trivia questions about these models’ personae, the answers to which are on two other cards you may or may not have from previous collecting. What do you do with the extra cards you have after collecting lots of randoms and you win a full set? I suggest that you leave them under the windshield wipers of cars that look especially lonely.
C. David is a writer and artist living in the Hudson Valley, NY. He loves pinball, Wazmo Nariz, Rem Lezar, MODOK, pogs, Ultra Monsters, 80s horror, and is secretly very enthusiastic about everything else not listed here.
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