The first law of Female Survival:          Don’t get sucked in.

The second law of Female Survival:     Chow down.

It makes me absolutely exasperated to hear people argue that I put it up because I’m a racist (or, as some have claimed, a sexist, because the comic makes the stripper look stupid). I know that we are all trying to figure out ways to have the voices of different oppressed groups heard, and I certainly do my best to check my own privileges and try to understand the viewpoints of other women, but I don’t see this one. And it isn’t because I’m “blinded” by white privilege. One has to be unwilling to acknolwedge their own privilege to be unable to see through it, and that is just not the case.

The men on my page keep bringing up Occam’s Razor to bolster their ludicrous EB/EP arguments (which have been destroyed by other commenters), saying that biology is the simplest explanation for male behavior. I think I’d like to ask them to apply Occam’s Razor to the cartoon. Is it, as they claim, a covert attempt to communicate some nebulous and unidentified set of racist and sexist notions, or does it mean what it means when taken at face value, that women who think they’re empowered by stripping are kidding themselves because the men still take a piggish attitude towards them?

Truer words were never spoken.   Such is the problem with the postmodern hell so many of the sex positive crowd choose to inhabit, where down is up and up is down and it’s all about what’s going on in my own head, as though everything we do doesn’t take place in a certain context and have ramifications for everybody else in the world.  It is like the outer limits of disconnection. 

I keep wondering what the world would be like if instead of sexist, misogynist cartoons being ubiquitous and inescapable, cartoons like this one were equally ubiquitous.  Maybe girls and women would think, “Wow, everybody else feels like I do about the way men and boys do this horrible thing.”  Maybe boys and men would think, “UGH.  Do not want.” 

The first time I recall recognizing what this cartoon depicts is when I was a really little girl, probably 7 or 8 in elementary school.  During recess we girls would  jump rope, a girl on each end of the rope.  One recess we were jumping roping to a certain rhyme, part of which went like this (I can’t remember the first part):

She can do the rhumba
She can do the twist
She can throw her dress up
Higher than her hips.

And of course in those days we all wore dresses. When you jump rope, you act out what you are saying, so you make a rhumba move and then a twist move, and then you throw your dress up, then it’s the next girl’s turn.  A huge line of boys assembled to watch us, all possessed of the very sort of vacant, mocking, contemptuous, vaguely violent leers the cartoon depicts so well, though in boy form.  Sadly for me, a mean teacher, Mrs. Warburton, saw what was happening when *I* was jumping rope and I got hauled to the principal’s office for the first and only time of my life.  The boys didn’t pay, the girls did. I did. Anyway, we’ve all, as women, seen this stuff. We recognize it. I think it’s good for men and boys to see the world from girls’ and women’s perspectives.  They rarely do or have to.

I’ve never seen this cartoon before, so thanks to Heart and Nine Deuce for posting it

At first, it became kind of a Hanel and Gretle type story, but when I had the witch flying through the air he just got hyper.  Telling a peaceful story got him to go right in the crate!  Even dogs respond well to fairy tales that don’t involve evil or witches or scary!

Mary Sunshine’s comments about breadcrumbs inspired me

And, you’ve been busy baking up a storm over there on your blog. I regularly stop in for a nice fresh buttered slice.

I agree.

The most valuable thing we can do, I think, is to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for the actual potential feminists to follow.

A few links, or something.

Then bug out for the sake of our own time & energy.