The Fabulous Flavour of Female Force

Strong women, Sexual Confusion and Telephone Books

With the spread of sports and physical pastimes, around the 1890s circuses and music-hall encouraged and emphasized the ultimate erotic fascination for both sexes: strong women.
The most famous of them was without doubt Katie Brumbach from Austria who, capitalizing on her most celebrate male colleague, christened herself Sandwina with rounds of applause on stages and big tops of both emispheres.
Strong women continued to punctuate the live entertainments, even if the movies mythized them in more actual forms, from Russ Meyer's killer pussycats to George Romero's female chaingangs.

In the age of communication, technology changed undirectly the shape of the strong woman act. In fact, without the invention and the quick success of the telephone, we don't think would have been possible the invention of a rare sub-speciality: the queens of phone book tearing. This slow, sinuous and deep use of arms, hands and feminine fingers became the heaven of fantasy for the last circus and vaudeville goers.

Today's gallery glorifies the rare prominences and the gentle survivors of this ultimate celebration of female strenght.


In the picture, Katie Sandwina.

Sylvia Brumbach

We remember Miss Brumbach in the 80s as the brave target of one of the best knife-throwing act.
She recently turned herself into a "strong woman", regenerating a venerable and rare act: the telephone book tearing. She performs in British circuses.

As the careful reader can remark by her name, Miss Brumbach is likely the direct heir of Sandwina.

Johan Rhodes

Johan Rhodes, the perfect burlessque-age phonebook tearer from the 50s British music-hall era.

Joan giving the illusion of male domination few years before the new feminism spread.

Jeanin Lionett (with video)

The lady in this seductive posture, in front of her gentle servant, is Jeanin Lionett, from Denmark (and from the deepest of our archives). She emerged from a page of the Hansa-Theater (Hamburg) program of June 1986, when we saw her.
Hansa-Theatre was a deliciously decadent music-hall, changing program each month by more than a century, introducing aged ladies on trapeze, faded poodle trainers, obscure minor Moroccan gymnasts, out of fashion musical clowns or East German athletes on bicycles. The program with Mr.Lionett was the 893th edition of this monthly show: surely the oldest running on this and other planets. A live band was not missing.
We remember Miss Lionett's act (billed at "20.06 Uhr" on the program's timeline) punctuated in the half-empty audience by the gasps of aged German ladies of uncertain sexual identity.
Few years ago, we surprisingly discovered Miss Lionett still in activity, in the British TV show "Secret Cabaret", happy to see again her act unchanged in each detail (same obedient servant in tuxedo included), after almost twenty years.
More surprisingly, we recently discovered that somebody posted this on Youtube. And here it is (even if mispelled), for your delight and your darkest fantasies on the edges between female and masculine.