#Cartoon essays

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Stephen Hillenburg R.I.P.

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The Intellectual Dark Web

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Johnny Bravo and the Pitfalls of Satire

One of my earliest blog posts was an essay defending Johnny Bravo from a feminist perspective.  In my defense of it, I mentioned in passing that one of the ways that the series still falls short of truly being a feminist show was that it potentially diminishes how detestable his behavior towards women is.

This post is partially a response to that one.  I grossly undercut how pernicious the show’s treatment of Johnny’s behavior towards women is.

One thing that is important to point out is that Johnny Bravo was a show that was created by and mostly if not entirely written and directed by men.  From the top of my head, the biggest names I can think of that been attached to the show are Van Partible, Butch Hartman, Seth MacFarlane, John McIntyre, Gene Grillo, Jed Spingarn, Russell Calabrese, Kirk Tingblad, and Craig Bartlett.  I also feel I should be clear about this as well.  If I haven’t mentioned this already, I absolutely love Johnny Bravo.  As a kid, it was my favorite Cartoon Cartoon after Ed, Edd n Eddy and as an adult it still remains a favorite of mine.  In my own circles, the only other animation fans I have talked to who were also fans of Johnny Bravo were other men.  I have plenty of female friends who are animation fans and grew up watching Cartoon Network in the early-mid ’00s and none of them I talked about Johnny Bravo with cared for it very much.  I know this is purely anecdotal, but I suspect that this example speaks to my female friends’ experiences with the subject matter Johnny Bravo’s central focus is on vs. mine and my other male friends’ experiences with it.

One way that I think Johnny Bravo falls short in this regard is that it frames all of the women Johnny makes a move on as interchangeable, in their personalities and their designs.  Most of them aren’t even given names.  I understand that this is a show framed strictly from Johnny’s perspective and I don’t doubt for a second that he sees all the women as interchangeable.  However, the show never challenges that framing, and this is a show that has no problem putting Johnny back in his place in every other regard.  Since the show was so focused on Johnny, viewers never got a good perspective of what those women go through in their lives (because Johnny’s not the only man who treats any of them like a piece of meat) with the exception of the season four episode “Witch-Ay Woman”.  I understand that doing this would have made Johnny Bravo a very different show, but as it is a shortcoming is still a shortcoming nonetheless.

This brings me to the other shortcoming of the show.  Even though Johnny Bravo was constructed to be a satirical takedown of meat-headed male chauvinists like our titular character, audiences have long been trained to sympathize with the protagonist in a given piece of media.  As an example, a few years back CNN caught flak for their coverage of the Steubenville rape case because their coverage centered around how devastated the rapists must have felt hearing the guilty verdict and only mentioned the rape victim in passing.  Getting back to Johnny Bravo, the quandary the creators found themselves in is that although they want to use the character to denounce male chauvinism, they can’t make him so reprehensible that nobody would have a good reason to watch (a good example of utterly deplorable characters making a satire unwatchable is the short-lived Lil’ Bush).  So they responded by making Johnny really funny, charismatic, and endearing in his stupidity and failures.  Problems arise because oftentimes the endearing aspects of characters like Johnny obfuscate whatever satirical critique they were supposed to represent (see Homer Simpson, Archie Bunker, Eric Cartman, Glen Quagmire, Rick from Rick & Morty, Tony Montana, Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street).  Since the audience is not granted as much exposure to all of the women Johnny makes moves on, it’s harder to empathize with them than with Johnny, even if it’s easy to understand why they all beat the crap out of him.

This brings me to a bigger quandary about satire that all satirists and aspiring satirists have to grapple with.  In short, doing effective satire is hard.  Really hard.  Effective satire has to carefully thread that fine line between authorial intent vs. death of the author with whatever statement the author intends to make intact and clear to the wider audience.  It is really easy for satire to fail somewhere and when satire fails, it inadvertently reinforces the idea it had attempted to take to task.

Speaking of a satirist often criticized for his portrayal of women, I think Robert Crumb is often a great case-study of satire that often fails.  There are definitely instances where his satire succeeds (this example is extremely graphic, so I’m only gonna share the first page of it, you can look up the rest yourself if you want to), but there are also many times where his satirical point is lost on me or on audiences in general.  The most infamous examples of this are his are “When the Niggers Take Over America” and “When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America”.  These examples are particularly infamous because white supremacist groups took these comics at face value and used them for recruitment.  I suspect that Crumb’s thought process behind these pieces are that the racism/antisemitism in them is so over-the-top that nobody could possibly believe this and that nobody could mistake him for being racist/antisemitic because his adoration for many African-American blues artists and marriage to a Jewish woman have long been public knowledge.

The problem is the first line of thinking is that Crumb naively underestimated how fanatically unhinged the beliefs of many racist/antisemitic people actually are.  The problem with the second line of thinking is that first of all, one can still perpetuate racism/antisemitism (intentionally or inadvertently) without explicitly holding those beliefs.  Second of all, the extent to which Crumb himself is not racist has never been clear to me.  I don’t think he necessarily believes all the stuff he portrayed in “When the Niggers Take Over America”, but I was never clear on what his point was with Angelfood McSpade and his constant portrayal of black people with sambo imagery in his older comix.  I’ve heard many times before that all that imagery was satirical but it never differentiated from intentionally racist imagery to me.  I suppose the sambo drawings are consistent with the 1920s aesthetic he drew his other characters with (Ku Klux Klan membership was at an all-time high in the 1920s), but that’s not a critique of racism.  I have always interpreted Crumb’s work as an expression of his id, unfiltered in its ugliness for all to see.  Just as Crumb has always been uncomfortably candid in sharing his sexual proclivities in his work (and in a way that is not at all flattering to himself), I always interpreted his sambo drawings as his own admission to his own latent racism (and his portrayals of women as his own latent misogyny).  It is what it is, but it ain’t a satire of racism.

To get back to Johnny Bravo, I stand by my assertion that its conception was an attempt of showing deference toward women and the advances they have made in society since the days of Pepe Le Pew.  But I’m more aware now of how it falls short than I was before and I thought it was important to be clear on that.

Further viewing:

Lindsay Ellis’ video essay discussing the very thin line Mel Brooks walked between satirizing and downplaying the crimes of the Nazis in The Producers.

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Greatest Hits!

I know I haven't written any essays in some time, but everything that has been on my mind, be it about our current political climate, corporate marketing, white supremacy, oligarchy, my frustration with liberals, my frustration with conservatives, my frustration with centrists, or how dumbed down our whole political discourse is with analysis of a cartoon like South Park, The Boondocks, The Simpsons, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Rugrats, Johnny Bravo, or Pole Position is used as jump-off point to that bigger discussion, are all things I feel like I've already written about before.  And I don't have anything more to add about any of that right now.

So I'll leave you with this today.  Enjoy!

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Sausage Party - Review

I'm a year late, but I finally watched the notorious adult animated feature Sausage Party.  It's the first American animated feature aimed at adults to achieve financial and critical success since South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut.  And here's my take on it:

*movie begins*

*gratuitous profanity*

*more gratuitous profanity*

*a teenage boy discovers a Richard Dawkins lecture on YouTube and realizes he may not believe in religion*

*gratuitous profanity*

*gratuitous profanity*

*food orgy*

*movie ends*

Y'know... CUZ ADULTHOOD!!1!!!1!

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Identity Politics

One of the big issues in our political discourse is around what are called “identity politics”.  To be short and blunt, the way we collectively discuss it is a total fucking trainwreck.

I’ve talked about this issue before in the recent past, but just to quickly recap it, a big point of friction in the Democratic Party primaries between opponents Fmr. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign was of the latter’s focus on economic issues and the former’s focus on issues related to race and gender.  After Clinton’s loss in the general election, there were several pundits, whose political views range as widely as conservative, liberal, and Marxist, who criticized her campaign’s failure to understand how much of an issue economic disenfranchisement really was for such a large part of the populace, vociferously criticizing its focus around so-called identity politics.

I’ve discussed at length my own major issues in how Hillary Clinton’s campaign discussed issues related to identity, and how it was the most major manifestation in how superficial our broader discourse around it really is.  However, the critics suggesting to abandon identity politics in general and focus on economics are just as hopelessly tone-deaf as the Clinton campaign/Democratic Party.

One of the biggest recurring questions in the wake of Clinton’s electoral defeat was “how did the Democrats lose so much of the white working class, especially when so many more of them voted for Barack Obama in past elections?”.  That’s a good question to ask, but what absolutely drove me crazy is that nobody seems to inquire at all about working class people of color.  True, voters of color went for Clinton over Trump in massive numbers, but those numbers are only among the pitifully small percentage of those populations that actually voted.  It’s a problem that nobody ever bothered to ask why so many working class people of color didn’t vote.  The only response Democrats seem to have towards non-voters, especially after 2000, is to disparage them as lazy, stupid, and in this past election, sexist, racist, or exhibiting their white privilege (how do all these political experts fail to understand that insulting people you want something from is a shit strategy?).

For critics on the left that criticize identity politics, their whole framing of it is all wrong.  Thea Riofrancos and Daniel Denvir have discussed how this divisive debate on the left is oversimplified to the detriment of all sides.  Leftist economic wonks, particularly Marxists and socialists, would do themselves some good to get a better understanding of how racial issues intertwine with economic issues if they hope to gain more support from people of color.  Another example of this disconnect was highlighted by Johns Hopkins University professor Lester Spence, whose book Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics criticized David Harvey’s seminal work A Brief History of Neoliberalism for its lack of analysis in regards to race in its critique of neoliberal economics.  Spence argues that the people subjugated in a society structured in white supremacy (he focuses on black people) are impacted even more by the effects of neoliberalism than white people.  Yet another example, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz discusses economics as they relate to Native Americans currently and historically in her books.  Any other critiques of identity politics on the left that aren’t grounded in an understanding of Marxist or socialist theory would do better to start reading up on Marxism and socialism.

Conservative critics of identity politics dismiss the concept of it off-hand as completely frivolous.  A distressing number of liberals adopt this critique in this exact same way too.  They’re all full of shit, especially the conservative critics.  Right-wing politics are just as wedded to identity as much as left-wing politics.  The only difference is that right-wing politics focuses on the identities of the dominant class; white, male, heterosexual, economically elite, and Christian.

In her seminal work The Second Sex, the thesis of Simone de Beauvoir’s argument of how women are oppressed is that our society has been structured with men as the norm and women as the deviation to the norm.  This analysis can be extended to other identities as well; whiteness is structured as the norm and all other races are a deviation, heterosexuality is structured as the norm and LGBT+ is a deviation (see the term “gay agenda”), Christianity is the norm and other religions are the deviation.  These identities as the norm have been so entrenched in our collective consciousness that we don’t even recognize or discuss them as identities.

The point of this blog has been to analyze portrayals related to identity in cartoons, which is only a small manifestation of how it plays out in society.  The two Disney films Tangled and Frozen were named that instead of Rapunzel and The Ice Queen because they thought the less gender-neutral names would not appeal to boys.  Disney films with more masculine titles like Aladdin, The Lion King, Tarzan, or Hercules are never assumed to be a turn off to girls in their audience.  There’s a long history of female characters having more passive roles in comparison to active male characters and existing in relation to those male characters.  Media starring white protagonists are viewed as universal while media with protagonists of color are viewed as “niche” or “political”.  Media where the main character is supposed to serve as the audience surrogate are almost always white men or white boys.

Gong back to how conservatives adhere to identity politics, another reason that their identity politics aren’t recognized as identity politics is because they have a long history of discussing it using euphemisms.  As Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained in a 1981 interview:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

As a result, policies that target black people for incarceration are called “tough on crime” or “law and order”.  Those black people being targeted are called “thugs” or “criminals” instead of “niggers”.  Latino immigrants are dehumanized through terms like “illegal aliens” instead of more direct slurs like “spic” or “wetback”.  Arabs and Muslims are dehumanized by the terms like “terrorist”.  Meddling and violent regime change in other countries is re-framed as “spreading democracy”.  Persecution of LGBT+ in society is re-framed as “religious liberty”.  This terminology is the legacy of the “Southern strategy” first adopted by Richard Nixon in order to win over white voters anxious about the demands for racial equality from activist groups, particularly Democratic voters disillusioned by Lyndon Johnson’s passage of the the Civil Rights Act.  This was decades before the term “political correctness” entered our political lexicon.

Long before the 1950s and 1960s, presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson spoke out against what they called “hyphenated Americans” as a way of pandering to xenophobic attitudes towards European immigrants (who were not considered “white” in the late 19th/early 20th century).  That same Woodrow Wilson screened Birth of a Nation at the White House when it premiered.  The characterization of the inhabitants of foreign countries as “backwards” and “savage” in 19th and 20th century literature from the likes of Rudyard Kipling or Ian Fleming were used to justify Western imperialism throughout Africa, Asia, and South America.

Hell, dominant identity politics goes all the way back to Christopher Columbus and Hernan Cortes.  Those damn sure weren’t other European Catholics they were conquering, raping, and pillaging in the Americas.

Folks on the left better get a better grasp of what identity politics actually is and how to discuss and advocate for it in a much more productive way because the right sure knows their way around it (no matter how much they deny it).  Dismissing it outright or perverting it to take marginalized groups for granted are not the ways to go if you are truly invested in dismantling structural oppression.

Further viewing:

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Happy New Year!

So 2017 has opened up with Soulja Boy wanting to fight Chris Brown, 50 Cent wanting to fight Riff Raff, and Kodak Black wanting to fight Lil Wayne.

All I’ve got to say is...

This is the reason The Boondocks exists.

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Aaron McGruder Presents: The 2016 Election (cont.)

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Aaron McGruder Presents: The 2016 Election

Enjoy the always hilarious and always on-point commentary from the infamous creator of The Boondocks!  Now if you excuse me,  I'm going to bed until about February or so.

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"Helloooooooo Nurse!"

I’ve written a lot of posts on this blog related to feminist issues or portrayals of women in media.  I’m not a scholar or an expert on this subject, but I try my best to do it justice.  But I have blind spots.  This isn’t an excuse I’m making; it’s self-awareness.  As a male, my upbringing and conditioning was totally different from girls and women and because of that, there are so many activities or points of view that I either take for granted or don’t even give a thought that girls and women can’t think or act the same way about.  In the city I went to college to, I constantly walked everywhere by myself.  I did so assured that the passersby wouldn’t catcall or harass me, or that someone who smiled at or said hello to me wasn’t trying to proposition me.  And that is just one example.

One of my earlier posts on this blog was a post about Johnny Bravo, which I defended from a feminist point of view (although I stopped far short of asserting it was a feminist cartoon).  Looking back at it, although I think the points I made about the influence that a post-Women’s Lib society had on its conception vs. let’s say a Pepe Le Pew cartoon are accurate, I may have been too generous to Johnny Bravo.  I mentioned in passing that there is a possibility that the show inadvertently glorifies the Johnny Bravo character despite its effort to ridicule him.  It’s a bit like how Norman Lear created the Archie Bunker character in All In the Family to be a takedown of that antiquated and reactionary conservative point of view he embodied but discovered that a large chunk of his audience agreed with him and sympathized with him constantly getting dogpiled by his liberal daughter and son-in-law.  Anecdotally, I’ve have noticed that all of my other friends that I have talked to about Johnny Bravo and really like it are men.  My female friends that I have talked about Johnny Bravo with don’t seem to like the show very much.  I don’t know their reasons, but I can imagine that a character like this may not look so hilarious to people whose reality is constantly getting hit on or harassed by real-life Johnny Bravos simply for stepping outside.

Finally, this brings me to the Animaniacs character Hello Nurse.

Just like its predecessor Tiny Toon Adventures and its prototype, Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, Animaniacs sought to reinvigorate the sensibilities and the spirit of animation’s golden age, particularly the Warner Bros. cartoons.  One of the very minor ways they did that was by providing an update on the sexy Tex Avery female character.

The function of these characters in the Tex Avery cartoons was nothing more than to make the male characters loony with lust.  Hello Nurse also served as stabilizing force between the rambunctious Warner Brothers (*Dot voice* and Warner Sister!) and the consternated Otto Scratchansniff.  It is also worth noting that in Wakko’s tribute song to her, most of praise he is showering on her is about her intellect, personality, and accomplishments.

From what I can tell, this is a take on the object of lust character with a more modern sensibility.  In the post-Women’s Lib society that was the 1990s, creating another female character that didn’t have anything going on besides making dudes hoot and holler when she walked into the room would have been, to put it lightly, a little gauche.  One of the things Wakko praised about Hello Nurse is that she’s politically correct!  How often do you here that used positively?

Nonetheless, there is still a major blind spot in this character’s conception.

This think-piece about Animaniacs by Charlene deGuzman still finds the handling of this character incredibly retrograde, and I see her point.  I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it shouldn’t be shown to children, but that point isn’t completely invalid and her reason for refusing to show it to her nephew is understandable.  The show never takes Yakko’s and Wakko’s behavior towards Hello Nurse to task.  At best, it says the behavior is somewhat annoying but largely harmless.  Dot’s typical eye-rolling response (“Boys…”) frames the behavior as a “boys will be boys” thing, which is a phrase that is trotted out as a defense to toxic masculinity.  You could say that Yakko and Wakko only behave this way because they’re only kids and don’t know any better.  Okay, but then couldn’t Hello Nurse or some other adult tell them that they’re behavior is inappropriate?  Or how about the fact that Hello Nurse isn’t even given an actual name?

Young boys like Yakko and Wakko need to learn early on that behavior like this is inappropriate.  If behavior like this is validated, it’s going to set the tone to how these boys interact with the opposite sex when they get older.  And very often, those interactions are a hell of a lot less cute or funny than two furry little kids jumping in a woman’s arms or even Johnny Bravo’s inept pick-up game.

P.S. Yeah yeah yeah, I know that Dot behaved the same way when some hunky dude walked into the room, so yay equality right?  Hell no.  All of the Warners’ behavior towards people they’re attracted to are all inappropriate, but Dot’s behavior doesn’t exist in a context in which men often can’t walk the street alone without getting propositioned or accosted by women or where men often get assaulted or killed by women for rejecting their advances.  However, I will say that Dot’s dreams about Newt Gingrich are both the most hilarious and stomach-turning thing in the world.

P.P.S. And as always, the comment section on Cartoon Brew doesn’t fail to be the absolute fucking worst when it comes to anything related to media theory.

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Disney Live Action Remakes!

So it’s looking like Disney is going to remake all of their animated masterpieces into live action iterations.  On the heels of the live action remake of The Jungle Book’s success, the Mouse Factory’s got more planned for the near future.

There’s a remake of Dumbo slated and I’ve heard they’re gonna give Cruella de Vil the Maleficent treatment starring Emma Stone.  Making a character that kills puppies for clothing sympathetic to the audience is one thing, but I think the more Herculean task is being able to top Glenn Close’s scenery-chewing interpretation of Cruella.

I’ll be looking forward to the live action iterations of The Little Mermaid, Hercules, Tarzan, The Lion King, and Pinocchio.  Mo’Nique might make for a fun Ursula!  Imagine how powerful the infamous wildebeest stampede would look in CG!  Or how frightening this jackass transformation would look with their VFX!  And perhaps the live action iterations of Atlantis and Treasure Planet will enjoy the commercial success the animated versions didn’t!

But I’m particularly excited about the live action remake of Mulan!  I heard they’re casting Scarlett Johansson for the lead!

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Powerpuff Girls “Equal Fights”

I found the clip of the rebooted Powerpuff Girls clip I discussed last week on the animation news site Cartoon Brew.  If you want to find a complete antithesis of everything this blog is about, take a look at most of the typical comments on their articles.  Typical comments on Cartoon Brew are often reactionary or aggressively apolitical.  For example, the type of comment you’ll run across is something to the effect of “It’s just a cartoon, who cares?”  I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but I shudder to think the fate of animation would be in the hands of such thoughtless and incurious thinking.

Readers of this blog, if there is anything I hope to have gotten across to you, it is that no type of media exists in a vacuum.  Everything has a quote-unquote “political agenda” whether it intends to have one or not or regardless of how much it tries not to have one.

This:

Is no less political than this.

One of the comments on the PPG reboot article took exception with the clip because he found the portrayal of the “Manboy” character as a villain didn’t so much as promote equality between boys and girls as it was shutting boys out and only talking to girls.  My first response is that if The Powerpuff Girls was in fact only targeting girls, it would be a drop in the bucket in comparison all of the cartoons that were only thinking of the boys in their audience.  Some of the cartoons that aired alongside The Powerpuff Girls on just the same network included this.  Second of all, whatever point this comment has about the girl-power “agenda” The Powerpuff Girls has that doesn’t seem terribly focused on the boys goes beyond their “Manboy as a villain” character.  It’s um…kind of inherent to the show.  The show in concept wanted sought out to create, to use the overused term, strong female characters as protagonists.  This criticism is kind of like complaining that Metroid is anti-male when you reached the end of it, especially when you have copies of Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Double Dragon on your shelf.

But yes, in a media landscape (especially in animation) where female protagonists that are as physically strong and autonomous as any brawny male power fantasy is a novel phenomenon, it’s hard for anyone to ignore the elephant with “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” painted on the side of it when it walks into the room.  So does The Powerpuff Girls truly assert the feminist agenda that this particular comment on Cartoon Brew is critical of (let’s be honest; that’s what it’s really taken exception to about that “Manboy” clip)?

Which brings me to the third season episode “Equal Fights”, in which the already on-the-surface feminist politics of the show are brought right to our protagonists’ faces by a Women’s Lib-inspired villain, Femme Fatale.

When I first watched this episode as a kid, my knowledge of feminism was pretty scant.  I knew who Susan B. Anthony was, I had a very basic understanding of women’s suffrage, and I may have known a tiny bit about Women’s Lib.  With that said, my understanding was that the Powerpuff Girls represented “true” feminism while Femme Fatale represented a perversion of it (or dare I say, the so-called “feminazi”).  Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup represented the fight for equality between women and men and Femme Fatale represented female supremacy.  Some ten-ish years later, when I heard Anita Sarkeesian speak negatively of this episode, I was confused.  I didn’t see the problem.  After a couple more years of learning a bit more about feminism, I get her criticisms.

What made the argument “Equal Fights” was asserting so convincing was in the way they framed Townsville in the beginning.  Before we are introduced to Femme Fatale up to no good, the Narrator takes us around the town, showing us how harmonious everything is and running into the ground how men and women are 100% equal.  It made sense to me, especially as a little boy who had no first-hand experience of gender discrimination to make me question their framing.  Once upon a time, women weren’t allowed to vote and now they can.  Once upon a time, women weren’t allowed in the workplace and now they are (heck, my mom was and still is a workaholic!).  What else is missing?

I came to learn that this is a false premise to build their argument from.  Sure, women have the right to vote and are allowed in the workplace, but many of the structures of patriarchy are still in place and we have a long way to go to dismantle all of them.

The pop artist Kesha began her ascent into pop stardom in the early ’10s, but her career trajectory has stalled in recent years.  The reason for that is that she has been trying to get out of her contract with her producer Dr. Luke, who she has accused of drugging and raping her, psychologically abusing her, and exacerbating her struggles with bulimia and high blood pressure.  She has taken her label Sony to court over the dispute, but the court has struck down her bid to get out of her contract.  So if Kesha wants to continue her music career, her contract and label are forcing her to continue to work with a man who has allegedly been physically and emotionally abusive to her for a long time.

Contrast the treatment Kesha has gotten with beloved NFL quarterback Peyton Manning.  It has recently be revealed that when Manning was attending college at the University of Tennessee in 1996, he sexually assaulted his director of health & wellness Jamie Naughright.  After Naughright filed charges, Manning, his father Archie, and the University of Tennessee have gone out of her way to disparage her character (Manning accused her of lying and being obscene, his father claimed she was sexually loose), disobeyed his gag order, and got her fired from her job at the University of Tennessee and another sport health & wellness job at Florida Southern College.  While Naughright’s livelihood in college athletics was being destroyed, Manning was building his football career as one of the highest profile quarterbacks in the league.  On top of his athletic prowess,  Manning concocted an image of himself as a squeaky clean, aw-shucks good ol’ boy who yuks it up with his brother on Saturday Night Live and hawks Papa John’s pizzas.  To this day, Manning has never owned up to his original assault in 1996.

Does a society in which Kesha and Dr. Naughright get abused with impunity by the men in their lives bear any resemblance to the world set up by Townsville in “Equal Fights”?  These are only two examples of inequality; I could be here all day listing examples.

What is more astonishing his that gender equality that the episode sets up is undermined within the episode itself.

This revelation about the inequality between female and male superheroes is the epiphany that sets the Powerpuff Girls down the path of anti-male extremism.  Even after the girls are straightened out and they put a stop to Femme Fatale, the episode never answered this question.  If everything is equal between men and women, why is there a dearth of female superheroes in comparison to males?  For some reason, the show doesn’t seem interested in answering that question.

I mentioned earlier in this post that the very concept of The Powerpuff Girls asserts an ideology that some may call feminist.  Unfortunately, “Equal Fights” comes off as an attempt to distance these characters from feminism.  As a matter of fact, the framing and argument of this episode is actually an argument often made by anti-feminist men.  They frame their arguments by suggesting there already is equality between men and women, so anymore feminist action is unnecessary.  Therefore, these current-day feminists are just looking for more rights than men (Femme Fatale’s crime spree with impunity) and want to persecute men (the hostility Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup showed toward various men and boys).  It’s precisely the mind state that misogynists like Rush Limbaugh (who coined the term “feminazi”) bases his gender politics on.

The Simpsons has a nasty habit of doing the same thing.  God forbid one of the only adult animated shows I can think that doesn’t have hostile or ass-backwards attitudes about women be mistaken for feminist, right?

Before I move on, let me just address a few common arguments against feminism.  The term “humanism” refers to spiritual/religious beliefs, not gender politics.  So-called “equalism” has never accomplished anything and “equalists” have never done anything in their lives except whine about feminism online.  And “feminazis”/female supremacy is as real a phenomenon as reverse racism, heterophobia and Loch Ness monsters.

Perhaps the anti-feminism of “Equal Fights” may not come as a surprise to some feminists considering that the whole cartoon was created by a bunch of men who may or may not consider themselves feminist allies, but what is even more surprising is that the episode was written by Lauren Faust.  For those that may not know, Lauren Faust the woman responsible for this.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic hit the cartoon landscape bringing in the same elephant in the room The Powerpuff Girls did.  And unlike “Equal Fights”, I never came across any moments in this series that tried to distance itself from its feminist credentials (though I could be wrong; I haven’t watched this series nearly as much as I watched PPG).  Then again, identifying as a feminist within the mainstream wasn’t as taboo when this how hit the scene as it was in the late ’90s/early ’00s.  So perhaps both shows are reflections of their times.  Or maybe Faust had a change of heart about feminism in between “Equal Fights” and My Little Pony.  Or maybe she didn’t realize how anti-feminist “Equal Fights” came off in the first place.  I didn’t at first.

[cartoonessays]

“A Product of Its Time”

Among the most infamous of the theatrical shorts released by Warner Bros. in the mid 20th Century are what have become known as “The Censored Eleven”.  When old theatrical cartoon series like Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry, or Popeye were syndicated for television, many of those cartoons censored lines or gags that had since fallen out of favor in a post-Civil Rights atmosphere.  For example:

This is Mammy Two-Shoes, who was Tom’s owner in multiple Tom & Jerry cartoons.  Now you can still see Tom & Jerry cartoons with this character air on television despite her given name and design, but in the very first Tom & Jerry cartoon “Puss Gets the Boot”, one of her lines “Now, understand this, Jasper: if you breaks one more thing, you is goin’ out, O-W-T, out!” was changed in syndication.

Going back to the Censored Eleven, this name referred to a series of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons that were so gratuitous in their ethnic stereotyping at the expense of African-Americans that they were withheld from syndication (and most of them have never been released on VHS or DVD).  The most famous (infamous) of these cartoons is “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs”, which was director Bob Clampett’s 1943 jazz-inspired all black parody of Snow White.  If the title itself wasn’t a dead giveaway for why this cartoon might have raised red flags, the rest of the cartoon speaks for itself.

When viewed in retrospect, media portrayals like the ones shown in this cartoon, the “jim crows” in Dumbo, Uncle Remus in Song of the South, the Siamese cats in Lady & the Tramp, the Native Americans in Peter Pan, etc., these are often referred to as “products of their time”, providing context to the worse status of race relations in the country at the time these films were released.  That’s not incorrect, but the thing that bothers me about this phrase is that it tacitly implies that we have gotten past this reductive view of ethnic minorities in our current socio-political landscape.  I would argue that we haven’t nearly progressed as far in this regard as we like to think we have.

As a measure of our progress since the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, one the recurring antagonists in the Disney series Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers were the Siamese Twin Gang, who were stereotypically Asian in their speech and mannerisms.  The only differences I can point out between these characters and the Siamese cats in Lady & the Tramp is that these characters are clothed and constantly speak with “purr” puns.  As a cartoon from the late ’80s/early ’90s, Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers was a product well after the Civil Rights era.

Apu from The Simpsons is another product from the early ’90s.  Even though his character was given depth over the course of the series (which is more characterization than stereotypical characters are usually given), he is nonetheless the stereotypical South Asian 7-Eleven store owner whose voice sounds less like any Indian I’ve ever heard speak and more like a white guy doing a phony-baloney Indian accent.  Not a good look for a show with a dearth of minority characters as it is.

The token minority character in late ’00s series Code Monkeys is Black Steve (yeah, that’s literally his name).  The basis of this character’s humor is that he’s loud, profane (I particularly remember him saying “bitch” and “motherfucker” a lot), hates white people, and is violent (a running gag is that he constantly points his gun at people).

And don’t get me started on Family Guy…

The common counter-argument to the assertions I’m making here is that all of these people are just kidding around, don’t mean any harm, and anyone taking issue with something like this is “political correctness gone mad”.  The diplomatic way that I can approach this argument is that it assumes that our society has made so much progress in regards to getting over racism that racist jokes and portrayals like these are funny because they’re so obviously wrong and over-the-top, one can’t help but laugh at how wrong and over-the-top they are.  Yyyyyyyeeeeeeeaaaahhhh, no…

Here’s what’s wrong with that argument.

American Sniper was one of the most critically and commercially successful films of 2015.  It was also unadulterated propaganda in which our hero is ordained by God and his country to enlist in the military and kill a bunch of Iraqis.  The movie (and the autobiography it’s based on) justifies the high Iraqi body count by dehumanizing them.  These details weren’t lost on fans of the film.

These portrayals that we see of ethnic minorities in media don’t exist divorced from ideas people already have about those minorities.  Black Steve pulling his gun out on people in Code Monkeys isn’t divorced from large sections of the population justifying the shootings of unarmed black males like Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Jordan Davis, or Michael Brown by disparaging them as “thugs” and “dangerous”.  All of the Asian jokes in Family Guy don’t exist divorced from perceptions of Asians as hopelessly exotic tech nerds that all look alike, are dangerous behind the wheel, and are sexually inadequate (in the case of Asian men).  None of these things exist in a vacuum.

Right now in the US, one of our leading presidential candidates is a game show host turned demagogue who began his campaign by referring to Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and has garnered support by proposing a ban on Muslim immigration into the country and surveillance of Muslims already in the country and their mosques.  This isn’t just bluster either.  Hate crimes against Muslims skyrocketed to an all-time high across the United States and Europe in 2015.   Look familiar?

Current polls have shown that the majority of Americans oppose accepting Syrian refugees into the country despite the fact that they are fleeing from terrorism themselves.  Around the time that cartoons like “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs” came out, a majority of Americans opposed accepting Jewish immigrants from Europe despite the fact that they were trying to flee extermination.  Anti-Muslim hysteria is so high right now that a considerable number of American voters are in support of bombing the fictional Aladdin setting Agrabah.  This sounds too made up to be real, but it is.

So if the Censored Eleven cartoons are “products of their time”, we are clearly still in that time.

[cartoonessays]

The Boondocks “A Date With the Health Inspector”

WARNING: This post contains explicit language and graphic discussion/depiction of rape.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?  Like, right now?”

This is a response that comedian Daniel Tosh had to a female heckler that took issue with his penchant for rape jokes at one of his comedy shows in 2012.  This little incident got Tosh a wave of backlash and he eventually apologized for making that joke.  But I would dare say that Tosh’s remark would not have caught so much flack if he had aimed this remark about a male heckler.

Now don’t take me as spouting some kind of petulant “women have it easier than men” rhetoric you might find on some “red pill” sub-reddit.  Rape culture is something that disproportionately affects women and one wave of backlash against one comedian that has joked about it more than once is a drop in the bucket compared to how it is perpetuated by the rest of society.  But what many people may not know is that rape culture affects men as well and I would like to take this time to discuss how.

Which brings me to the fifth episode of The Boondocks’ first season, “A Date With the Health Inspector”.

To begin, allow me to introduce you to the “health inspector”.

This scene is based off of the sarcastic warning men who go to prison are given, “don’t drop the soap”.  This phrase jokingly makes light of rape that occurs in prison, as does the previous clip.  Despite the nightmare scenario of the scene, it plays Tom Dubois’ potential rape for laughs.  The title of the episode sardonically downplays the act by referring to it as a “date” and milks more humor out of the brutality of the act by giving the audience a good look at the “health inspector’s” very long penis that hangs down to his knees.  Tom’s fear of being raped in prison would be a running gag throughout the series until he overcomes his fear in the third season episode “A Date With the Booty Warrior” (subtle name as you can see).  This episode is mostly one long rape joke.  Here’s a tiny glimpse of it.

Notice how Riley is giggling the whole time that convicts are talking.  His reaction is an encapsulation of how our society views rape in prison.  This attitude doesn’t exist in a vacuum or only in the world of The Boondocks.  Rape jokes are quite ubiquitous in adult animation (but it’s certainly not limited to older audiences).  There is occasionally controversy over them, but generally speaking rape jokes in which the victims are male go off without a hitch.  Look, I completely understand dark comedy and finding catharsis in something horrific, but it’s another story entirely when jokes like these are so common.

In the Sam Witwicky episode of the online series Folding Ideas, the host Dan Olson (as his avatar Foldy) talks about the ways in which our popular media and our reality intertwine, which is often the point of contention between two polarized sides in a debate about something considered controversial (examples include violent video games, gangsta rap, or *ding ding ding!* rape jokes).  Olson explains that the popular media is generally bad at influencing a person’s behavior, but decent at influencing the way they think about things, and good at changing their values.  In regards to this discussion, hearing a bunch of rape jokes is likely not going to make a person who has no interest in raping a man do it, but they have a pretty good potential of downplaying the severity of the act in the person’s mind by constantly framing it as something funny or not a big deal.  Which brings me back to the ubiquity of the phrase “don’t drop the soap”.  This phrase refers to the fact that rape in men’s prison is so common, but little to nothing is done about nor are there massive rallies calling to put a stop to it.  A big part is because we collectively see prison rape as a joke.  Another big part of it comes from the dehumanized way we view people locked in prison, especially in the US, where incarceration is treated as something more punitive than rehabilitating.  The attitude is that people in prison are bad people anyway, so fuck them (literally).  Except prison isn’t only filled with murderers and rapists, a high number of people are locked up for non-violent crimes.  And since the US prison system is privatized, there is a financial incentive to fill up their prisons so they collude with government officials in order to pass more punitive crime laws that makes it easier to lock up more people, keep people already locked up imprisoned longer, and get people that have already served prison sentences back in prison.  The cruel irony of all of this is that The Boondocks completely understands this.

So what does it say about The Boondocks when it chooses to be complicit in continuing the perpetuation of this perverse system while clearly knowing about the system and how it’s perpetuated?  Especially considering that The Boondocks has a reputation for being savvy towards African-American issues, in particular the disproportionate incarceration of black men (I hope y’all noticed that all of the convicts in these Boondocks clips have been black)?

Rape culture doesn’t just affect incarcerated men however.  It affects boys too and it’s not taken seriously when it happens to them either.  A running gag in the anime series Mahoromatic is that the teenage protagonist Suguru is constantly lusted after and sexually harassed by his teacher, Ms. Shikijo.  One of Ms. Shikijo’s earliest scenes in her premier episode was her fantasizing about Suguru sucking on her breasts.  Most physical gags between the two involve Ms. Shikijo plunging Suguru’s face into her cleavage.  Here’s one example:

The only person that takes issue with Ms. Shikijo’s behavior is Suguru’s maid/love interest Mahoro.  In other episodes, when other men see Suguru being harassed by Ms. Shikijo, they call him lucky.  Just like with the prison rape jokes in The Boondocks, this attitude doesn’t only exist in the world of Mahoromatic.  The overall sentiment is that an adult woman having a sexual relationship with an underage boy isn’t really rape because obviously, the boy wanted it (especially if the woman is seen as physically attractive).  To its credit, an episode of South Park called out the absurdity of this attitude in their episode “Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy”.  This episode is about the doomed sexual relationship between Kyle’s little brother Ike and his kindergarten teacher.  While the episode makes comedic fodder of this statutory rape by juxtaposing the highly sexual nature of the relationship with Ike’s infantile appearance and behavior, it also ridicules the permissive attitudes society has about relationships like this when Kyle’s attempts to tell authority figures about what’s going on between Ike and his teacher go nowhere when all they do is compliment Ike or complain that no teachers ever made passes at them when they were in school.

But alas, South Park is not above using rape as nothing more than a cheap gag.

In a society where men being raped in prison are openly ridiculed, boys being raped by grown women is envied or praised, and boys or men being raped in other situations are shamed into silence, perhaps once in a while we should take a higher priority than finding catharsis or engaging in dark comedy.