Monday's "Doonesbury"
As a left-wing, pro-choice First Amendment enthusiast, I gather I should be outraged that multiple newspapers have declined to run this week’s Doonesbury strips, which focus on Texas’ new law requiring women seeking an abortion to undergo a trans-vaginal sonogram. But I can’t say I’m particularly worked up about it, especially considering that one day’s strip apparently contains a graphic depiction of said sonogram. A Texas legislator appears in the exam room to ask, “Do your parents know you’re a slut?” and the doctor wielding the “10-inch shaming wand” intones, “By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape.”
My local paper chose to replace this week’s strips with Doonesbury “Flashbacks” (can we just say “recycled comics”?), which is understandable but not an ideal solution. I would rather see the strips run on the op-ed page, as the Los Angeles Times and several other papers are doing.explaining that “the story line was a little over the top for a comics page.” The opinion section “carries both op-eds and cartoons about controversial subjects, and this is a controversial subject.” (Jim Romenesko has a roundup of newspapers’ responses here.) I’d venture that Doonesbury fits better on the op-ed page any day, as it has more in common with satirical editorial cartoons than a lightly humorous comic strip, but making the move once the strip is an established part of the comics section tends to stir up reader resistance.
I’m definitely not opposed to discussing the issues raised in this week’s Doonesbury strips; in fact, the furor in Virginia over a similar ultrasound bill only demonstrated how easily such challenges to abortion rights fly under the radar. The Virginia controversy may have provoked scorn from late-night comedians and national politicians, but seven other states already mandate ultrasounds — and during the first trimester of pregnancy, that means an ultrasound conducted via Gary Trudeau’s “shaming wand.” I do, however, think there is a time and place to debate sensitive subjects, and the space between Garfield and Peanuts in the morning newspaper is perhaps not it. Saying that abortion and sex (and all that it involves) are not “appropriate” for the comics page should not be conflated with saying all public discourse over those issues is inappropriate. The people offended by billboards advertising the Vagina Monologues should find something better to worry about, and parents who rail against sex-ed in schools indeed perpetuate the notion that there is something shameful about sex and the human body.
At the same time, I don’t feel liberated by the race to the bottom (no pun intended) on prime-time television: When Zooey Deschanel makes vagina jokes on “The New Girl” or Sarah Silverman jokes about rape, no blows are being struck for gender equality. I’ve never found it empowering to “take back” racial slurs or words like “slut.” The message behind last year’s “slut walks” — that women be ashamed of or reduced to their sexuality — was good, but the term “slut walk” only further legitimizes an insult that shouldn’t be used in the first place. If it’s offensive when Rush Limbaugh says it, it’s offensive, period.
This isn’t exactly analogous to the Doonesbury story arc; Trudeau’s humor is not crude, and it illuminates social issues in a way that a crack to a widowed character that “your vagina didn’t die of a heart condition, too, did it?” does not. But given the composition of the average newspaper comics section, social issues are more at home among the op-eds than the funnies. Besides Doonesbury, the edgiest strip run by my local paper is “Close to Home.” Some papers that carry multiple controversial comics — “Mallard Fillmore,” “Prickly City,” “The Boondocks” (before it ended) — may find Doonesbury fits in perfectly on their comics page. But once you’ve made the decision to print a family-friendly collection of “Mutts”- and “Pickles”-type strips, the atmosphere should be consistent. (Again, that I don’t think second-graders need to read about the ins and outs of abortion is not to imply I think it’s wrong or shameful. Vaginas and pregnancy are not embarrassing, but that doesn’t mean they’re not private.)
What really makes me wary of politicizing the comics page, however, is how I would feel if the situation were reversed. I already roll my eyes at strips like “B.C.” that telegraph messages, both subtle and direct, about Christianity, God and the evils of evolution. If everyone shared my politics, maybe I’d be OK with seeing Doonesbury in the comics section. But I would be less than thrilled would if a conservative cartoon featured a cute, big-eyed fetus saying things like, “Why do you want to kill me?” or “I’m a person too!” The debate over “personhood” legislation, like that over mandated sonograms, is one we need to have, but I don’t want to have it on the comics page. If I expect an editor to balk at running a strip with a talking fetus, I should expect that editor to question a strip implying that Republicans are legislating rape. Whether or not you agree that transvaginal sonograms are “state-mandated rape,” it’s clear that not everyone shares that point of view, just like not everyone thinks abortion doctors are “baby-killers.” Controversy cuts both ways.
I generally feel that the job of a comics page cartoonist is to make people laugh, not to push ideology or use funny characters as Trojan horses for political messages. I love those cartoons — in the opinion section. But when I see them on the comics page, I feel a little used. The funnies should be a respite from the country’s increasingly hostile, polarized political dialogue, not an extension of it.
I’m all for Gary Trudeau pointing out the misogyny and paternalism of the pro-life movement. I don’t want him to stop dealing with controversial topics, or to self-censor. (For what it’s worth, people on the left crying “censorship!” need to reexamine the freedoms granted by the First Amendment, which guarantees a press free from government censorship but says nothing about newspaper corporations’ decisions on content.) But I’d rather see “Doonesbury” run alongside satirical cartoons by Mike Luckovitch (“I asked for the most effective contraceptive and got a Rush Limbaugh poster”) and columns by Dana Milbank (“The GOP’s Vagina Monologue). When you consider that half the artists on the comics page are either dead (Charles Schultz), retired (Lynn Johnston), or deathly boring (sorry, Jim Davis), Trudeau is probably in better company there anyway.
. . . So Well Read. . . 