I go away for a few days, and look what you kids get into.

Ren has a response to some drama that, well, I should know better than to get into, really. I’ve got actual work to do.

But it’s so close to the subject we’ve been dealing with recently, that, well, I have to go there.

She links to a cartoon that the “Real Feminist” types seem to find really funny. (Belle posted it here.) See, a blonde woman who’s a stripper! She’s so deluded, she thinks she’s exploiting herself! Look at all those men drooling and giving her creepy looks!
Then look at the skin tone and hair color of all the men. Look at the exaggerated facial features.

The cartoon’s been defended by saying that the men are in the dark and that’s why they’re all darker-skinned. Sure, and that famous Obama ad where the skin tone was darkened was just an accident.

If you wanted to show a “range of ethnicities” you’d have made the skin tones different colors.

If you wanted to make the men look extra creepy without really thinking about the racial indicators (which honestly is what I think the cartoon was getting at) you’d make them darker than the woman.

The blonde, white woman is the victim as always. Check out the news when there’s a missing girl story. (oooh, thesis reference) She’s almost always blonde, very pretty, and absolutely always white. This goes at least two ways–the white woman is the victim we care about, because she’s pretty and we like to look at her. This cartoon gives visual pleasure in that way, too–the girl in the cartoon is quite pretty. But there’s also the fact that blonde, pretty, young girl signifies sex and sexuality, and quite often in the missing white girl narrative there’s the hint that the girl transgressed sexual boundaries and thus deserved what she got.

Remember Natalee Holloway, who went to Aruba and hung out with local men and then disappeared? See any similarities?

This, of course, is the narrative that this cartoon is going for. Even a single-panel comic tells a narrative story that goes in a sequence, and here we clearly see the girl and read her thoughts first, and then we read the men’s thoughts.

The narrative clearly asks us to believe that the girl is wrong and the men are right (So feminist!), that the girl is obviously deluded and the men are in power.

But beyond that, it taps into a deep-seated cultural myth of the pretty white woman as under attack by the dark-skinned male Other. The ‘feminists’ who are gleefully distributing this picture are on the one side of the narrative–they think the girl is getting what she deserves by being stupid enough to perform for men. Others may have the more altruistic of the two motives–the desire to help the girl and to feel bad for her.

Like the missing white girl stories on the news, though, this cartoon ignores the view of the girl. Though she gets to speak in a way that a missing girl can’t, her point of view is clearly ridiculed here. She’s deluded, right?

Ok, enough theory and such. What do I really think of this cartoon? Well, it’s hardly original. The artist is certainly talented, but she ain’t saying anything any deeper and more thought-provoking than, say, that New Yorker cover. I don’t think she did it intentionally, but I think she absolutely tapped into deep-seated race biases and fears and to pretend otherwise because you like the message of the cartoon is, well, blind.

And let’s call this what it is, shall we? Another example of the same kind of appearance-bashing that I’ve been blathering on about for over a week now. Blonde pretty woman HAS to be stupid and deluded, right? Especially if she’s a stripper.

(Just in case y’all come here and read this: Most stripper’s minds are not full of how empowered they are, just like most waitresses or CEO’s or freelance writers’. Mostly they’re thinking about getting through the shift, getting the work done, and maybe having a little fun while they’re at it, if they’re lucky. Why don’t you spend some time writing about how abused waitresses are for a change, you know, if you’re so concerned with women who get exploited?)