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1 Super Neat Way To Use A Misogynistic Cartoon

Published Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:44:36 -0500

Last updated Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:44:54 -0500

So there's this cartoon that's been doing the rounds. 5 Super Neat Ways To Use A Hooker from Oatmeal. A play on the 101 Uses For A Dead Cat, it's been sent from office to office to much hilarity. But I've got a problem.

Two panels in, I was presuming this was a joke about the dehumanisation of sex workers, how society sees them as nothing more than meat, how murders of prostitutes often don't count as real deaths when reported, that kind of thing. That there was a twist coming to put these in context.

And then I realised, that no, no there wasn't. It was doing all of that for a joke. And, you know, not a particularly funny one.

A lot of comedy I enjoy because of what it's commenting on – even if some of the audience isn't aware of that. From Death Us Do Part's bigotry, Al Murray's xenophobia, Alan Partridge's homophobia, Keith Knight's door-to-door polling, the wonderful nigger/retard/kike back-and-forth on the Daily Show the other night. Playing up on the stupidity of intolerance, while like shooting fish in a barrel, makes for an entertaining fish supper. But how much of that is from the shockingness of experiencing the forbidden in the safe comforting confines of wishy washy liberal irony?

And the comics, I'm a keen appreciator of Crossed, No Hero, Hack/Slash, Neonomicon, Preacher, Black Summer, The Punisher,The Boys, Kick Ass, Old Man Logan and more featuring some of the most extreme graphic imagery, a number of which also have accusations of misogyny placed against them. Ones that I've dismissed, because I've seen the accusations as misguided and lacking in context.

And yet here I am, making the self same accusations against something far less graphic. But much more, in my eyes, unpleasant. I seem to be able to take all sorts of offensive entertainment as long as there's a label at the end saying that it's naughty. Just like the eighteenth century audiences could enjoy Moll Flanders' laviciousness as long as she repented and was punished at the end. 5 Super Neat Ways doesn't have that get out clause, that sticky note at the end, that smiley that says "only joking!" and suddenly I come over all puritanical.

Am I a hypocrite? Any more than usual, I mean?