Not a Fan of Me? Blame Betty Boop and Olive Oyl

A visual obsession. A childhood imprint. A love letter to the erotic confusion of growing up.

When I was a kid in Vietnam, cartoons were rare and precious. We didn’t have streaming or choice — just whatever floated through the static of late-night television. And sometimes, in between anime reruns and dubbed soap operas, something would flicker across the screen that didn’t quite belong: Betty Boop, Olive Oyl, strange American relics from another era. I didn’t know their names then. I didn’t understand the jokes. But their bodies haunted me.

Betty with her impossible curves and eyelashes like commas. Olive, stretched tall and thin, yet clinging to a muscle-bound Popeye with a femininity so stark it bordered on satire. They weren’t pretty in any traditional sense — they were grotesque, erotic, commanding. They weren’t for children, and maybe that’s why I couldn’t look away.

In a culture that prizes modesty, these women were aliens. Too expressive, too exposed, too exaggerated. They were everything I wasn’t supposed to want to be — and so, of course, I did.

That’s probably why I kept drawing mermaids. Not the Disney kind, not demure or wide-eyed. Mine wore bras. Lots of them. Lace, leather, strappy, glittery — an entire taxonomy of imagined undergarments. I had a whole sketchbook dedicated to these creatures: women with fish tails and human breasts, mouths always parted, eyes always narrowed. Some had long hair that curled like smoke; some had short, chopped cuts like fashion dolls who’d seen too much.

I even asked my mother to help draw them — not because I wanted to share, but because she drew better curves. Her lines were smoother. Her breasts rounder. She gave my mermaids the kind of body I couldn’t quite manage yet. I collected those drawings in a battered notebook, pages full of sea women with impossible shapes, all wearing bras. Some were mine. Some were hers. I liked hers more.

I think I was trying to sketch what haunted me — the silhouette of the woman who was always too much. Too curved, too loud, too suggestive. Not beautiful by anyone’s rulebook, but magnetic in a way that felt dangerous. Like Betty. Like Olive. Like those strange American women who slipped past our censors and into my home — smuggled in on the static of late-night cartoons. They didn’t just appear. They lodged somewhere. Quiet and glowing, like a wound.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s not parody. It’s not a joke about feminism, or a brand of empowerment. It’s what happens when you grow up absorbing strange icons out of context, then try to make sense of them as an adult. It’s messy. It’s lopsided. It’s obsessed. It’s mine.

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