This is in relation to Tony Rab’s cartoon from last week. I agree with Tara Lydon, who wrote in to you earlier.

If the cartoon had any logical point, even one that was vulgar or (arguably) degrading to women (as in the suggestion of rape, or sexual predation by this apparently older guy with the creepy ’70s facial fungus), I wouldn’t be so offended by it.

Maybe I’m missing some very good comment in this cartoon, some context or argument, but I don’t see any. It presents a situation and then just lets it hang. Rape, sexual predation, sexual naivete, the flexibility of language (especially vulgarities), the sexual objectification of women – there were so many potential paths for this to take, and it simultaneously raises and ignores them all. Intellectual zero!

Unless . . . what is this, some Warholian found comic? Scrap of dialogue heard at a bar? Comment on the vacuity of undergrad party life? What would Margaret Mead have been without “Coming of Age in Samoa?”

A challenge to you and your cartoonists: Raise the standard. Sade, Paglia, Mapplethorpe, Catullus, Tis Pity She’s a Whore, hip-hop video vixens . . . there’s plenty of material, even if you just stay on this one subject.

And if you really want to say something intellectually viable, why not take on Catholic priests’ sexual abuse, or the Darfur obscenity or Aphra Behn’s “Sign of Angelica” or Lovecraft’s treatment of the mother in “The Dunwich Horror?”

Or speak to issues really relevant to college students beneath the party-hard veneer, like depression, suicide, criminality, job prospects, DeKalb politics, etc.?

Elizabeth Bowman
Graduate Student, English

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