{"id":5559,"date":"2008-11-25T00:03:23","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T07:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=5559"},"modified":"2021-03-09T13:56:13","modified_gmt":"2021-03-09T21:56:13","slug":"not-the-last-safe-target-not-the-last-acceptable-prejudice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=5559","title":{"rendered":"Not the last safe target, not the last acceptable prejudice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Moore criticizes<\/a> 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).<\/p>\n

(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?)<\/p>\n

But I do have one minor objection — a nit-pick, really, nothing more. Kevin writes:<\/p>\n

As my friend and political cartoonist Barry Deutsch has pointed out many times, fat people are easy targets, perhaps the last \u201csafe\u201d target (along with the mentally ill and poor Southern whites) for comedians and other humorists to treat as an \u201cother\u201d, that slightly less-than-human category of people who deviate from The Norm and thus deserve mockery and marginalization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m pretty sure I’ve never said that fat people are “the last safe target,” because I loathe that phrase.<\/p>\n

Everyone <\/em>thinks they’re the last safe target.<\/p>\n

Just last week, I read MRA Glenn Sacks<\/a> saying that “males are the only politically acceptable target.” ((By the way, referring to men and boys as “males” is something that, according to some MRAs, is a sign of misandry, when feminists do it.)) This right-wing blogger<\/a> claims that white people are the last “safe target.” That one<\/a> ((Phrase (c) 2008 John McCain.)) thinks Sarah Palin, as a white conservative woman, was the “safe target.” No, wait — “the only safe target is the straight male”!<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, it’s not just anti-feminists and right-wingers who use the phrase — plenty of my allies use it too. Fat people<\/a> are safe targets; the poor<\/a> are safe targets; trans women<\/a> are safe targets; undocumented immigrants<\/a> are safe targets; black women<\/a> are safe targets; and so on.<\/p>\n

And let’s not forget the “last acceptable prejudice” — a distinction shared by Mormons<\/a>, suburbanites<\/a>, children with Down syndrome<\/a>, Catholics<\/a>, women<\/a>, homosexuals<\/a>, elderly people<\/a>, rednecks<\/a>, and probably a hundred others.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,30,92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cartooning-comics","category-fat-fat-and-more-fat","category-whatever"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5559"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26000,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5559\/revisions\/26000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}