Nude woman nutcracker – amusing or not?

“Did you see the woman nutcracker?” my auction buddy Janet asked. I had gone through the tables at one of my favorite auction houses and had overlooked it.

So I followed Janet to a table near a back wall and there it lay: a lithe wooden nutcracker carved in the form of a reclining woman, her hands behind her head, her lower body wrapped just above the thighs and her chest exposed. A sunbathing pose. Her hair was carved as long loose strands, and her facial features were small. I was indifferent to her nakedness. It was wood, after all.

The wooden peg holding the left leg in place was missing, but it still worked. You opened her left leg out to the side, placed the nut in her crotch and brought the leg back to meet the right leg, cracking the nut. I’m sure the person who came up with this nutcracker – do you think it was a man or a woman? – got a big laugh out of it. 

I bidded on the nutcracker, expecting it to go for a couple bucks, but someone else wanted it, too. So I ended up paying $9. I wasn’t even sure what I’d do with it.

Once I got it home, I started to get an uneasy feeling about it; it seem a bit offensive. Making women sexual objects seems to come too easily and without much thought. I decided to see how common these lady nutcrackers were. I was also curious to see if there were comparable male nutcrackers – and not those of the famous holiday ballet: I came across not one via Google.

What I found almost suddenly was another female nutcracker from 2008. Someone apparently thought it was a good idea to make fun of one of the most powerful women in the world: Hillary Clinton. A company called Eagleview USA Inc. had turned her into the Hillary Nutcracker in a trademark pantsuit with steel teeth between her legs (“Get kinkier with each nut you crack,” the site intoned). I’m sure someone got a lot of guffaws and laughs off that one, too. Her cost: $17.95.

The company now sells a Bill Clinton corkscrew (the metal corkscrew projects from his crotch). I guess it was supposed to make the Hillary Nutcracker a little more palatable – or help the company make a quick $28.95 for the pair.

I found other women figurals: A black-on-bronze of the lower body of a nude woman. A woman carved of light wood (her lower body ended in a fish-like tail and her head was oversized to accommodate a nut in her mouth). Two silhouetted steel women, joined at the head, from France. (Click on the photo above for a full view.)

These are novelty items, many lacking in both artistry and skilled workmanship. They are no match for the real thing – which I found in my Google search. And my own home. Some years ago, I bought an Art Deco-type table top nutcracker: glass-tempered bowl, chrome and wood cracking mechanism. I don’t use it much, but it’d make a nice centerpiece.

I found some of the oldest and loveliest nutcrackers at the Leavenworth Nutcracker Museum site. Opened in 1995, the Leavenworth, Wash., museum holds the collection of Arlene and George Wagner, who have accumulated 6,000 nutcrackers. The site also offered tips on collecting them.

Man apparently has been cracking nuts for as long as he’s had teeth, and when the nuts got too hard, he used stones. According to the museum website, pitted stones for cracking nuts date back to 4,000 to 8,000 years ago. The Taranto Archaeological National Museum in Taranto, Italy, has the oldest known metal nutcracker – a pair of bronze and gold hands – from the fourth to early 3rd century B.C. The Leavenworth museum says it has a bronze Roman nutcracker from between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D.

Other sites stated that Aristotle reportedly owned a nutcracker around 330 B.C. Leonardo Da Vinci got in on it, too: He is said to have invented a machine to help make wooden figural nutcrackers.  In his book “Nutcrackers (2008),” author Robert Mills wrote that Da Vinci showed people of Florence with nuts attached to whips and mallets for cracking nuts.

One of the best parts of the Leavenworth museum site are photos of its collection of nutcrackers. One of its most recent acquisitions is a circa 1780 item from Italy carved from one piece of walnut. On one side is the head of a lion with a beard and the other, a Satyr mask with a beard of acanthus leaves, according to the website. You lift the chin of the mask, and the lion opens its mouth.

I wondered what nutcrackers I’d find with an African American motif. If the lady nutcracker was somewhat offensive, I was sure that I’d find some of the same ilk with black people as forms. I did not find much, though. I came across one described as a “Negro” head from the 1880s that was sold at auction in 2005.

Here are some from the Nutcrackers for Collectors website. They make the woman look crass and juvenile. Notice the 18^th-century brass male and female ones. And the blog inmamaskitchen noted others from the book “The Art & Character of Nutcrackers.”