Cartoon: What Causes Rape?

Masheka and I have a new Steubenville-inspired cartoon for Women's eNews about what doesn't (and what DOES) cause rape. Click through thumbnail for the full cartoon:

And a tip of the pen to the always amazing Jaclyn Friedman (co-author of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape) for giving my sketch a quick peek to make sure it was on-point!

Cartoon: Hollywood's Glass Ceiling

Sorry, meant to post this a little while ago! What a nice surprise that such a well-made film by such a talented director actually won--I was really nervous it was going to be "Avatar" (or way worse yet, "The Blind Side").

Drawn for Women's eNews (temporary link here).

Cartoon: The He-Cession!

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Only 3% of Fortune 500 companies have women CEOs--clearly that's 3% too many!

Drawn for Women's eNews (temporary link here).

I'm in the L.A. Times Week in Review!

Check it out--my Women's eNews cartoon on abstinence-only education ran in the L.A. Times Toon-Op (their editorial cartoon week in review) today! Here's the text writeup.

Cartoon: Purity Ring Refunds

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Drawn for Women's eNews (temporary link here).

Is it just me, or am I drawing a lot of pregnancy-related cartoons lately?

Cartoon: More on Women in Haiti...

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More on the risks for pregnant Haitian women from Women's eNews.

And MADRE has more on the unique needs of women and children in Haiti in the aftermath here. An excerpt:

All Haitians are suffering right now. But, women are often hardest hit when disaster strikes because they were at a deficit even before the catastrophe. In Haiti, and in every country, women are the poorest of the poor and often have no safety net, leaving them most exposed to violence, homelessness and hunger in the wake of disasters. Women are also overwhelmingly responsible for other vulnerable people, including infants, children, the elderly, and people who are ill or disabled.

Because of their role as care-takers and because of the discrimination they face, women have a disproportionate need for assistance. Yet, they are often overlooked in large-scale aid operations. In the chaos that follows disasters, aid too often reaches those who yell the loudest or push their way to the front of the line. When aid is distributed through the "head of household" approach, women-headed families may not be recognized, and women within male-headed families may be marginalized when aid is controlled by male relatives.

It is not enough to ensure that women receive aid. Women in communities must also be integral to designing and carrying out relief efforts...

Update: The New York Times has more on this issue.

Cartoon for Women's eNews: Relief for Haitian Women

Haiti already had the highest maternal, infant and under-five mortality in the Western Hemisphere and the earthquake (and the collapse of hospitals, including an obstetrics hospital) certainly hasn't helped. In addition to more broad-based relief groups, please also consider giving to women's relief groups such as Madre that are dealing with women and girls' unique needs in the aftermath.

Here's the cartoon at Women's eNews, and below is a permalink (the eNews link expires in a week or so):

(click here to view)

Mikhaela Reid Metro Times (Detroit) Jan 21, 2010 EditorialCartoonists.com

I will add that I received a really disturbing bit of pro-rape (seriously!?) email from a Mr. John Napolitano in response to this cartoon this morning. An excerpt (warning--this is really horrible, so please don't read if it will upset you... it certainly upset me):

But do you understand that the rapist could be another (male) earthquake victim. pushed over the edge from being denied the aid they need?

But most women's advocacy is full of this sort of narrow short sightedness, which does nothing but make another part of the people feel less than equal. I sometimes wonder if this isn't the real aim.

The end result is the furthering of the "Women's Agenda at the expense of Humanity.....

No comment. That really soured my morning.

Cartoon: Roman Polanski's Get Away With Child Rape Kit

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Here's another from a few months ago, originally for Women's eNews (but that link no longer works for some reason).

Women's eNews Cartoon: Sotomayor

Last week's cartoon on Sotomayor here.

Domestic Violence is a Pre-Existing Condition?!

From Feministing.

Cartoon: Leave Caster Semenya Alone!

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Seriously, screw gender testing, and screw those IAAF jerks telling this world champion runner she's not a real woman. The only reason she was tested was because she didn't match some visual standard of European femininity. I'm not sure how much to trust the media on any of this, but I read reports today that she is "shattered" by the humiliation of the gender testing and possibly on suicide watch.

More reading and background on this:

• "An Intersex Perspective on Caster Semenya"
  
• Feministe: "Caster Semenya Case Opening Old Wounds"
  
• Feministe: Essentialism, gender and Caster Semenya
  
• The Root: "Caster Semenya's Race and Sex Struggle
  
• Feministing: South African Runner's Makeover
  

(Thanks to the Transadvocate feed for many of these links).

Cartoon for Women's eNews: Pre-Existing Condition

Starting this month, I'll be doing biweekly cartoons for the fabulous Women's eNews (which will also be debuting a fabulous new website design sometime soon). Here's the first one, "Pre-Existing Condition." For more on this topic, see "Reformers Say Maternity Benefits Make Dollar Sense" and "Push Is On to Cover Prenatal Care in Health Plan"

Your Yucky Body: Embrace Your Shape Edition!

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Seriously, even Vogue has an annual "Shape" issue where they patronizingly allow someone as (*GASP*) huge as Beyonce or Kate Winslet on the cover in addition to their usual sub-zero model roundup... then offer drastic dieting tips... all while mysteriously claiming to promote body acceptance: And don't miss the small print under the "LOVE YOUR BODY! headlines...

I threw in the "Lucy Loser" joke after being enraged by comments in an Entertainment Weekly piece (from the 7/31/09 issue) claiming that the proliferation of "inspiring" weight loss reality TV shows is a public good. Says the Style Network's Coleman Smith:

"Given what is going on with the country with obesity, I absolutely think weight loss is its own category. ... It's enabled us to stop thinking we live in a size 2 world by appropriately embracing real people." (emphasis mine)

Ah, I see. The only APPROPRIATE way to show non-size-2 bodies on TV is to show people trying to DIET DOWN to become a size 2! And this is about HEALTH, not HUMILIATION and RATINGS, right? That's body positivity we can all believe in! This cartoon is part of a series I've been doing for a while now. See also:

• "Your Yucky Body: A Repair Manual" (the original)
• "Summer Swimsuit Spectacular"
• "Designer Dieting"
• "Mommy Makeovers"

For more on fake body positivity, see...

• Marianne Kirby's Daily Beast piece "Really Big Love". (Kirby says of "More to Love": "It’s a one-two punch of acceptance followed by a knockout blow of shame" and that she's "tempted to make up a drinking game around how often the contestants and suitor on the show say 'voluptuous, curvy women.' It would be an easy way to get sloshed.")
• My pal Jenn Pozner, who is live-tweeting a host of reality TV horrors as she writes her book Reality Bites Back.

Update: I've been getting a lot of comments on this post I've had to reject. So FYI, if you are going to leave mean-spirited comments that refer to people as "blimps" or claiming that men only find skinny women attractive, I will reject them.

Toon: Movies for Ladies!

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Cause men! and women! are DIFFERENT! in HILARIOUS ways! More on this topic later.

Grading on the Condom Scale

Campus Progress has a piece grading some of Obama's budget initiatives on a condom scale drawn by yours truly.

Amazon reclassifies LGBT & other books as "adult"

WTF is up with Amazon hiding/unranking LGBT and feminist books as "adult" today? I learned about it via Twitter #amazonfail while in the midst of framing the BattleStar Galactica propaganda poster ("Mechanics! ... Those Vipers Won't Fix Themselves!") I got for Chanukah/Christmas last year.

According to one tweet I saw, affected books included such titles as The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.

Now I am just going to sit here and be embarrassed at how often I have shopped on Amazon.

At WAM! in Cambridge this weekend

This weekend I'll be at the amazing annual Women, Action & the Media! conference hosted by the Center for New Words at MIT's Stata Center in Cambridge, MA. I don't have new books to sell, but if you're going you can always just say hello or buy a signed copy of my first book! Jen Sorensen will also be in attendance. As always it should be good feminist fun (plus lots of strategizing over the catastrophic collapse of print media that seems to be underway).

My Dark Confession, brought to you by Bitch magazine

FYI, I've got a one-page color autobiographical piece in the new Noir issue of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture magazine, on newsstands now! I drew it for a special color comics section called "My Dark Confession," and it's about my struggles with OCD and such.

Toon: McCain on Women's Quote "Health"

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This cartoon is of course based on a real quote from John McCain during the last debate:

'Just again, the example of the eloquence of Sen. Obama. He's health for the mother. You know, that's been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything. That's the extreme pro-abortion position, quote, "health."'

We do not want to see a McCain Supreme Court, that's for sure. See my previous post for more details.

Toon: QwikBaby "Baby Plant" Seeds!

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For a country that trumpets its "family values," the U.S. comes up laughably short on parental leave. We've been the worst industrialized country in that department for a while, as this piece in USA Today detailed in 2005:

Out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United States in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

The pitiful Family and Medical Leave Act only guarantees 12 UNPAID weeks of leave (for workers at larger companies.)

Companies have discretion to offer more leave (and pay for leave) if they choose to—but fewer and fewer make that choice. A recent study by the Families and Work Institute found that "far fewer employers provide full pay during the period of maternity-related disability, today at 16%, down from 27% in 1998."

It's part of a national trend towards cost-cutting and crappier workplace benefits (of course, these things should be provided by the GOVERNMENT, but gosh, that might be too SOCIALIST). More details here and here:

"I had my son on Thursday and, on Monday, I had to go back to work," said Selena Allen, a 30-year-old mother who was working at a non-profit agency near Seattle when she had a baby five years ago.

No paid maternity leave for Allen meant leaving her premature son, Conor, in the hospital for weeks without being able to care for him.

"I was an emotional wreck, I was devastated, but in order to feed my family, I had no other option," Allen said.

P.S. On a feminist note, I of course support a good long period of paid parental leave for parents of any gender and sexual orientation (including adoptive parents!), not just maternity leave or leave for heterosexual couples. I certainly don't want to encourage any policy that implies childrearing should be women's work, or that only women should stay home with kids, etc. Just to be clear and all...

P.P.S. A reader on Flickr notes that my cartoon reminds him of a creepy-sounding Czech movie called Otesánek (Little Otik). Eeek! I'll have to check it out.