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Currently on hiatus :-(
 S&W in German/auf DeutschGaia (my fantasy comic) Scarlet (my science fantasy comic) |
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![[0598] Toilet Humor](/comics/2014-07-14-0598-toilet-humor.png "[0598] Toilet Humor")
- Sign: CLOSED
- Cloud: Closed?
- Dorothy Cambridge: Yep! I’ve ordered the closure of all boy’s rooms!
- Cloud: WHAT!?
- Dorothy Cambridge: I can’t believe that there are still public institutions in which boys are allowed to expose their privates just inches away from members of the better sex!
- Dorothy Cambridge: It’s high time to put an end to these repulsive activities!
- Poster: REAL MEN DON’T PEE!
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Sandra and Woo by Oliver Knörzer is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. See the About page for details.
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@ Novil:
The big problem is that it appears that you are taking an advocacy group (feminists) for an oppressed population (women), and that you are selecting the members of the militant lunatic fringe, distorting them so that they are even more militant and lunatic, and putting them forward as representative of all feminists.
It’s very possible that you will mitigate this by showing the reaction of non-psychotic feminists to the abuses of Delores Cambridge in later strips, but for now it appears like you are tarring all feminists with the same brush, which some people are going to find legitimately grievous. As has been pointed out in the comments here, a large majority of the more populated forums and discussion groups on the internet are currently riddled with people who boisterously conflate feminists and misandrists, and to see you (who has made a point of including strong female characters) appear to be putting forth the same simplistic ideas is likely to be jarring and upsetting to many of your readers.
Perhaps it will all make sense in the context of a larger arc, but at this point it just feels like you jumped the rails.
Are you on crack? The school has shrubbery. SHRUBBERY! And poles! My gods and goddesses it has a plethora of poles of all sizes to suit the needs of males young and old, larger or small. Gifted or challenged.
Not to mention, it’s not hard to knock out a cat hole for more dire needs. It’s all a matter of perspective. You are all having a fit because you are to “citified”. This old fart wasn’t raised city as such and has lived half a year in the sticks at a time. Were I Cloud, I’d pee on her tires.
@ Helz’Bayne:
@ Thor:
While I see your point, we’ve barely even seen the character of Miss Cambridge established yet. I hardly think that Oliver is portraying “all” Feminists under this trope. I recognized the over-the-top satire immediately, and considering that he has, as you said, included so many strong female characters before, I’m disappointed at the reaction I’ve seen from the audience, at large, in immediately assuming that he’s taken a stance against strong women or of ridiculing gender-equality movements.
Personally, I’m content to just sit back and see where this goes. Considering the typical model of the comic, where an over-the-top overboard extremist of an ideology is presented in character format, and then set up to take a fall for their stupidity, I already think I have a good idea of where it’s going, and it would be a healthy exercise in criticism for a movement who has given their fringes way too much leeway to do as they please under the banner of the movement without criticism. As LaughGirl said, “The best way to save a movement is to ridicule and purge the extremists”.
@ Gargoil-Cat:
She knows. For her an people specifically like her oppressing those they protest against is the actual point. Seize power and give them a taste of their own medicine, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, etc. Ends up hurting the people technically on her side but no crazy and evil.
She’s Tumblr made flesh! …*shudder*
Thor wrote:
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see where Novil is in any way implying that this is representative of all feminism.
I´m losing braincells just watching a character like that …
@ PlutoniumBoss:
he’s not. his characters are perfect examples of what feminism aspired for women to be. strong, independent, and smart. while still being able to be mothers if they choose to be.
that’s no feminist, that’s a femiNAZI! big difference.
@ Novil:
Don’t feel bad—I’m sure lots of cartoonists/webcomic writers have run into that problem, too. I’m positive Bill Watterson has more than once.
That said, I don’t take as much issue with it as some of the other people are. I’m not interpreting the strip as a dig at feminism at all—we simply have a misandrist in our story line here.
@ Random lurker:
You DO realize she’s referring to the fact that the boys and girls rooms are normally next door to each other, right?
Umbridge-er-Cambridge seems to be towards an amusing series of events.
Still, she’s going to win. Women ALWAYS win over men, after all! ESPECIALLY in fiction!
@ Avian Mosquito:
She said ALL the boy’s room right? What about the boys change room for gym? Now imagine what Larisa would do to poor landon
@ Jon:
Ah, but those are children.Everyone knows hat children trump adults. :p
@ Iris:
Why is this directed at me?
Not extreme radical feminism anymore… This is straight up misandry. Besides she just said that penises were a social construct, so there’s nothing repulsive to expose.
@ ░▒▓█│Walkman│█▓▒░:
Feminism is not about equal rights, it’s about double standards. :/
It’s literally: “We want to be equal! But we want some privileges.”
And no, I’m not even a man talking bs about women, I’m a girl that understands that’s wrong, lol.
@ CDRom11_2007:
Those two months I spent working as a custodian I will disagree with you.
“Dat’s da joke.”
@ JustARandomPerson:
What a nice special snowflake.
The thing with that “Moral Police” story arc is that I have never seen people like that neither in person nor on the internet, but I have seen time and time again reasonable feminists being strawmaned like this. That is why I see it as a ridiculous attack on feminism rather than a mockery of some feminist extremists…
And seriously, that nazi reference in the first strip of the arc was bad taste…
It looks like you’ve turned over a rock and managed to stir up a bunch of misogynists. I am not exactly offended by the last few strips, but a little disappointed. For every Andrea Dworkin* in the world, there are a huge number of misogynists, many with far more power**. This is why I find this story line a bit distasteful.
Gotta admit, tho, the “social construct”line is sorta funny.
* I actually managed to get through a few pages of one of her books. Ugh!
**For instance, in Congress, the courts, broadcasting and marketing companies, and in pretty much every institution and place you look.
P.S. I’m not strong enough to wade through all the comments. I hope the few dozen I’ve read aren’t representative.
oxayotl wrote:
Then you obviously haven’t had the misfortune of venturing into one of the radical feminist echo-chambers. I’ve heard bad things about Tumblr (though I’ve never gone there), but have myself experienced some rather bad examples in some other places; one of the worst ones I’ve personally seen was Pharyngula, where PZ Myer’s cult-like following regularly hurls invectives and suggestions of where people can shove porcupines at anyone who isn’t part of their clique, and PZ is quite liberal and heavy-handed with the ban stick everywhere except on his foul supporters. It’s… pretty hard to read whenever the articles turn towards feminism, given the huge logical errors made there that go unchallenged simply because anyone not agreeing with the crowd often gets forcibly silenced.
You could also try searching for stuff like “penetrative intercourse is always rape”, which will turn up a number of sites with downright ludicrous arguments from radfems, some of which even make this comic arc seem rather tame by comparison.
@ Avian Mosquito:
Because you said ‘ continue’
@ JustARandomPerson:
that is what just about every movement is or becomes.
Why’s she so concerned about boys’ privates? Aren’t they just a social construct?
i’m expecting somethings gonna happen thats gonna traumatize this woman.
down with this feminazi
Yes, there’s a wall, but what if a girl has supervision?
@ Thor:
I do like the point you’re making… but considering many S&W background characters are eccentric (not to mention exaggerated), I don’t think Novil is attempting to use this character to make a point about feminism.
[…] Yyeaah this is a response to a webcomic that I read called “Sandra and Woo”. […]
Been reading Sandra and Woo for at least a year now, thoroughly enjoyed it, and what a crying shame this entire arc has been. Certainly there isn’t a problem in S&W getting political–getting to work with potentially controversial material is surely one of the greatest freedoms of working on a webcomic, and one Novii has been more than willing to use in the past–nor is there a problem with the author not sticking to a fully liberal perspective on all social matters. But even if you accept the idea of dealing with radical feminists as a potential topic (which I suppose it could be, if handled with tact, perspective and a clear point of view), S&W has always in the past held to a much higher standard than this sophomoric, depressing bashing of ‘misandrists’.
Even if it turns around at the last moment (such as turning out to be a dream sequence, the way some others have been suggesting), it still has major storytelling issues, just on the basis of not making the nature of the joke clear right off and making it look like it supported this garbage as a meaningful piece of commentary, however satirical, on the nature of feminism. I still hope it’s this latter possibility though, as at least then the creators would keep the results in the comments of this little experiment in mind when doing something like that again–growing as storytellers would be worth the trade-off, even of this.
@ m:
I’m not saying that he is presenting feminism this way, but that’s because I can step back to the larger context of reading the whole story. People who are new to the strip, or people who don’t hold the whole story in their head, are going to see only these couple of data points and from it extrapolate whatever curve seems to most easily fit. There’s no other data points nearby to help suggest what this storyline’s function is. It’s as if Novil was trying to describe the alphabet one letter at a time, and in this episode he’s given us “A” and “E”. From this it is no surprise that people would look at that and assume that the whole alphabet is made up of vowels.
@ Iris:
Ah, sorry, forgot about that.
@ myth buster:
My vote is that Cloud should just knock out the moral police and forcibly remove her from the premises.
Funny how many separate people are just now realizing that Ms. Cambridge is an Umbrige expy.
I think the big problem with tumblr-feminism is that tweenage girls are joining tumblr and being inundated with prepackaged feminist rhetoric before they can give any unique thought to the issue, and are bullied into taking the party line without questioning it first, and so start spitting the same rhetoric all the way until through to their (financially irresponsible, but that’s another story) women’s studies degrees, and still have no original thought to put to the matter. Modern feminism is mostly just a propaganda machine that it’s making no progress due to it’s lack of original thought.
You know, I don’t think this is even necessarily a comment about feminism, but about heavy handed government interference.
That was exactly what the Umbridge storyline was about in the potterverse, and that’s the same deal here.
@ Everybody:
See, as much as I’d LIKE this, I do hope he doesn’t DO it. For much the same reason that I’d LIKE to, say, strike her head from her shoulders before putting the sword to her henchmen, drive a spike through her heart, stick her head on top of it, pile the bodies of her henchmen over them and set the pile on fire with, I wouldn’t actually DO it, even if I was there. I would LIKE pain and death for them, but that wouldn’t make it right to actually DO it. And hopefully Cloud understands this as well as I do.
@ Hubris:
My “black panther” comparison pretty much summed all that up.
@ Lukador Bernstyle:
Learn to laugh at jokes man… It would really lower your stress levels.
I am really looking forward to what happens next.
Will the boys collectively claim female gender id and confuse poor Mr. Cambridge? Technically they would need the parents onboard and some sort of confirmation, but for the comical effect…. 😀
@ Nachtschattengewächs:
It wouldn’t confuse a radfem. Radfems are sexist, and as part of their sexism are anti-trans. They believe biological sex is your absolute identity. Not just gender identity, but your entire identity. She would still recognize them as boys, thus pure evil monsters in her eyes, even if they were *actually* trans-gendered, and take this as confirmation of her bigotry against both transgendered people and males.
I thought she said the penis is just a social construct? Therefore there are no privates to expose, so no problem. Right?
Although perhaps that means there is to be unisex bathrooms from now on?
Yeah… That’ll work well in grade school.
@ Avian Mosquito:
It could, As you said, radical feminists operate on the idea of two distinct sex classes, defined by their reproductive properties. Her claim that penises are mere social constructs defies this and actually points to her belonging to the other fraction.
Technically she shouldn’t be a radical feminist, and could very well be transgender-friendly.
@ Eric:
DUDE.
1. She wants boys to not pee AT ALL.
2. Unisex bathrooms are always not only acceptable, but beneficial. ESPECIALLY in grade school. If she actually went that route, that would be a GOOD thing, the only issue is she’s NOT going that way.
@ Nachtschattengewächs:
Or maybe, hear me out, she’s a sexist, brick-brained moron spewing rhetoric she doesn’t understand to cover for her own bigotry, like a very large minority of modern feminists and almost all radfems? That way she can still be everything we’ve seen of her, simultaneously, still call herself a feminist and would likely still be anti-trans.
@ Avian Mosquito:
Could be. I still think it would be funny. 🙂
@ SmartAlec105:
You of course realize that pink used to be a men’s color until Hitler used it to mark homosexuals in the concentration camps.
I’m sorry, What!?
@ Random lurker: Yes, but typically washrooms are butted against each other so that the high-flow water pipes can share one wall cavity. So, in a technical sense, a man standing at a urinal may be standing mere inches from a woman seated on a toilet…albeit with between four and eight inches of wall between them depending on building code.
Haven’t read all the comments, but I find it amusing that her “gender equality” posse wear distinctly men’s and women’s clothes (girl in a dress with a pom-pom on the top of the mask versus man in pants), as well as the levels of wrong in the poster.
@ ░▒▓█│Walkman│█▓▒░:
Unfortunately, while that’s how feminism started, and what it SHOULD be about, what it means to be feminist is dictated by the public perception of it. At this point, to identify as feminist is to identify as a supporter of the crass, rude, and extremist “members” of the movement who would rather see all men dead than be equal. You’d be much better off identifying as an egalitarian (explicitly, equality for everyone, regardless of race/gender/sexuality).
@ LR:
While I fully agree that there are plenty of misogynistic individuals out there, it doesn’t make the extremists (which seem to have been a good 30% of feminists that I have met) and less reprehensible. I wish people could just go for equality, instead of scapegoating one gender or the other.
@ Admiral Halsey:
The Pointy Haired Boss? I don’t think he holds any REAL authority, hehe!