Kevin Moore criticizes a slew of hacktacular cartoons about obesity and health. Needless to say, I agree with Kevin — and would even if he hadn’t quoted me extensively. (ahem).
(You should go read the whole post, if only to check out the incredibly awful Batman cartoon. Base-jumping? What the heck does that mean? And how long did it take most readers to recognize that the thing he’s standing on is a scale?)
But I do have one minor objection — a nit-pick, really, nothing more. Kevin writes:
As my friend and political cartoonist Barry Deutsch has pointed out many times, fat people are easy targets, perhaps the last “safe” target (along with the mentally ill and poor Southern whites) for comedians and other humorists to treat as an “other”, that slightly less-than-human category of people who deviate from The Norm and thus deserve mockery and marginalization.
I’m pretty sure I’ve never said that fat people are “the last safe target,” because I loathe that phrase.
Everyone thinks they’re the last safe target.
Just last week, I read MRA Glenn Sacks saying that “males are the only politically acceptable target.”1 This right-wing blogger claims that white people are the last “safe target.” That one2 thinks Sarah Palin, as a white conservative woman, was the “safe target.” No, wait — “the only safe target is the straight male”!
Of course, it’s not just anti-feminists and right-wingers who use the phrase — plenty of my allies use it too. Fat people are safe targets; the poor are safe targets; trans women are safe targets; undocumented immigrants are safe targets; black women are safe targets; and so on.
And let’s not forget the “last acceptable prejudice” — a distinction shared by Mormons, suburbanites, children with Down syndrome, Catholics, women, homosexuals, elderly people, rednecks, and probably a hundred others.
I completely agree with the general points made by many of these folks (pretty much all the ones on the left), but can we please stop using the “only safe target” and “last acceptable prejudice” framings? Taken literally, these phrases positively scream “oppression olympics!”, and they’re virtually never accurate.
1) Kevin claims that the majority of the 476 Slate cartoons in the “health” category focus on obesity. I just read the first hundred of them (because I like cartoons! Not because I have nothing better to do! Really!) and only 13 of those focus on fat or poor diet. By far the most common topic was our lack of universal healthcare.
(And what is up with cartoons these days? I think some cartoonists (*cough*Ramirez*cough) keep a stack of drawings in their desk, and each day pull one out at random, write the name of the issue-of-the-day on the characters, and publish it. Case in point: did you know that universal healthcare is like a prostitute that the Democrats want to have sex with? It’s so true!)
2) Base jumping is the sport of parachuting off of cliffs, buildings, bridges, and the like. FYI. Not that that makes the Batman cartoon funny.
3) Of those thirteen cartoons about fat/diet, not one was focused on aggressive junk-food marketing, or the high cost of healthy food, or poor nutrition in school lunch programs, or the lack of safe places for kids (and adults!) to play outside, or the American tradition of driving everywhere and the resulting non-pedestrian-friendly cities. By far the most common joke was, “Ha ha, look at how much fat people eat, they just can’t stop themselves!!!”
4) Sort of off-topic, but since you saw fit to mention it: I’m not an MRA, but I’ve long thought the phrase “women and males” was a little demeaning. What, she’s a noun and I’m an adjective now?
5) Agreed about “the last safe target”.
Yeah, the “last safe target” meme is mostly rhetorical overload (at least on my part), and I appreciate your point about the “oppression olympics” implication, something that hadn’t occurred to me. So I’ll stand corrected. I think the main point is that so many humorists do it unthinkingly, holding an anti-fat bias common to the culture at large without critically engaging the kind of issues Bjartmarr mentions above in 3) or the body-neurotic assumptions of said culture-at-large.
Bjartmarr: I should have said that the majority of the cartoons directly addressing that particular study take the same clichéd approach. More “rhetorical overload” – mostly prompted by my continual disgust at the tendency of mainstream political cartoonists to kneejerk the hackneyed without any deeper insight to an issue. Take note that the Slate collection goes back in time so that other issues pop up along the way; and not always linearly, so that it isn’t always clear what point in history a cartoon is relevant to.
base-jumping is jumping with a parachute from a:
Building
Antenna
Span (Bridge)
or
Earth (Cliff)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE_jumping
BASE jumping–Buildings, Antennas, Spans, or Earth [cliffs].
Agreed about oppression olympics. But I also think that a lot of people have some sort of need for a scapegoat, and just use one that someone else has targeted. But some people don’t need a scapegoat, and think that we all need to work together to fix unfair situations.
One more safe target: teenagers.
And I don’t know if this counts as a separate category, but as I’ve hit my 50s, I’ve become aware of the casual denegration of women my age. If I never hear “not your grandmother’s X” again, it will be too soon.
Then there’s being a boomer. I’ve heard enough hatred of boomers that I begin to wonder if I’ll die of being lynched rather than something slower.
I cringed when I got my latest issue of the Advocate with an atrocious “last safe prejudice” cover: “Gay is the New Black: The Last Great Civil Rights Struggle.”
http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid65744.asp
I think “safe target” is okay. “Last safe target” is oppression olympics, but I don’t see how the phrase “safe target” is alone.
Another safe target: atheists.
Incidentally, I do agree that “males” can definitely be sexist in some contexts, mainly because of how creeped out I get when guys (typically in PUA threads/forums) start talking about women as “females”. It always sounds like they’re narrating a Discovery channel special: “The male approaches the female…”
It’s creepy because it’s dehumanizing; using language typically reserved for animals, as if to deny the personhood and agency of the PEOPLE you’re talking about.
So I suppose if “feminists” talk about men and boys the same way, it would also be sexist, although I don’t put a lot of stock in the self-reporting done by MRAs.
The Oppression Olympics grand champions are non-adults. In other words, “children”. Those who are under 18, or whatever the legal age of majority is, lack many rights that those who are legally adults possess.
Among the rights denied to minors:
1) They cannot vote.
2) They cannot sign legally binding contracts, and are restricted in their right to own property and earn income.
3) They cannot consent to sex, and are frequently prevented from accessing sexually explicit material that is available to adults.
4) They are required to undergo compulsory education, and they are severely restricted in their ability to control its form.
5) They can be legally subjected to punishments by private individuals that would be unconstitutional in the United States if imposed by a judge and which are illegal for one adult to force on another adult.
6) They cannot consume or purchase certain substances that adults can.
Of course, there are very good reasons for at least some of these restrictions, but they are, in fact, restrictions that, in general, would not be tolerated if imposed upon an adult.
Oppression of various groups has often been justified by equating members of those groups with children: that they lack the decision making capacity and moral agency of normal adults, so they must be guided and controlled by those that do.
With that out of the way… why do we care, again?
Okay, a post about how the oppression Olympics are irrational and counterproductive is not an appropriate place for people to compete in them.
Sorry.
Anyway, TV Tropes has the grand list of AcceptableTargets.
Agreed, bigtime, on the oppression of children. Some folks think that just because they are providing 3 hots and a cot, that gives them the right to do any darn thing they please to the kid. I can understand that kids can help out as needed around the house and so on, and they aren’t ready to vote or drive, but some of the stuff that happened to me, I wouldn’t wish on any creature above the level of bacteria. I will spare you the details. I wonder how many cases of elder abuse are actually long-awaited revenge? And no, I don’t condone that either.
Pointing out that there are several groups of people being dumped on these days does not automatically equal “oppression olympics”. There are a few times I have been criticized for being more interested in ideas and things than in people. That hurt, but it doesn’t happen all the time and I am a lot better able to defend myself than kids or old people in a home. My relatives know not to insult me now.
I, and you, can set an example by not dumping on any group, and by speaking up when you hear someone doing so, as I have been known to do. Other forms of activism await the courageous.
It does when you add “The Oppression Olympics grand champions are non-adults.”
(Though thanks, Doug, for your retraction. Don’t mean to keep poking at you. ;) )
Well, what I meant by my earlier post was, since we all know the winner (if we stop to think hard enough about it), there’s no need to take the time to run the race, if that makes any sense.
I tend to put my foot in my mouth sometimes, and it often takes a bit of “poking”, as you put it, before I realize it. I usually don’t mind, so feel free to poke all you want.
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