Stripped and whipped
or “Once upon a politically-correct witch hunt”
Confessions of a student journalist part 6
“All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors....”
—Oscar Wilde
preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
The whole regrettable incident would never have happened if I hadn’t fallen into cahoots with Jessica Clark, a wayward cartoonist who dabbled in fetish wear and sadomasochism. She and I collaborated on a naughty little comic called Black Betty, a femme fatale spy spoof crammed with kinky sex, kinky violence, and camp dialogue.
For fourteen weeks, Black Betty graced the pages of The Peak without incident. Which came as a bit of a surprise to us, because we thought Betty was reasonably edgy—certainly edgy enough to rile the more prudish elements on campus. For example, we expected a bit of an incident when we ran this:
But alas, there wasn’t a single prude on campus who was offended by two humans having sadomasochistic, banana-abusing bondage sex in a bathtub full of Shreddies. And we really expected an incident when we ran this:
But alas, not an eye was batted at our Dali-esque panoply of poly-phallic perversion.
But then, on the fifteenth week, there was an incident.
This was the comic that caused all the fuss. (Hit your ‘back’ button to come back when you’re done.)
* * *
Jessica and I didn’t expect an incident over this one—we thought we’d already got away with way naughtier stuff. A couple of our co-workers saw the storm coming, however.
The problem, as they saw it, was that our comic depicted Betty being stripped down to her underwear and bullwhipped. To avert an outcry, they asked us to make “changes” to the strip—they didn’t specify what those changes should be, but it was clear they involved Betty not being stripped down to her underwear and not bullwhipped.
Suffice to say, we thought these folks were a pair of panicky Chicken-Littles, and ignored their pleas. So we left the strip unchanged, our editors approved it, and it ran.
The piece hit the stands, and lo and behold, the shit hit the fan. A campus librarian sent in this letter:
I don’t spend a lot of time getting involved or complaining about the face of things, but this is one time that I find that I cannot keep still. This is the most vile, disgusting and degrading piece of trash that I have seen.
The Black Betty cartoon(?) is truly the most vile and disgusting waste of the printed page that one’s imagination can conceive. Who are the creators of this obscenity? I would like to meet them face to face so that I could study their faces to make sure that I am saved from ever being in their company for fear of what I might say to them.
What they do is definitely not Art.
This strip brought out so many vile images that I’m not sure which part sickens me most. The obvious violence, degradation and abuse of the female character, no matter who is doing the abuse, trivialize and dehumanize women and mankind....
Let me tell you, that’s quite a dose of criticism, especially coming from a paragon of tolerance such as a university librarian. And she wasn’t the only one on the warpath:
If you saw images of a woman in a skimpy costume who was chained up, whipped, stripped, and called a bitch, what would you call this? I call it violent and degrading; I call it pornography.
That describes this week’s cartoon, “Black Betty.” The fact that the comic depicts a woman abusing another woman does not detract from its sexualized character. This is communicated clearly by the “artists” by the women’s stereotypical dress, from bras to garter belts and fishnet stockings.
I remember reading an appeal for feedback about this cartoon. Here goes: it’s crap. The Peak editors should re-read the paper’s constitutional statement about not printing sexist and oppressive materials and can the “artists’” misogynist fantasies. I challenge you to give the space to a talented woman instead. If you claim you can’t find any, you’re not looking hard enough—or perhaps they don’t want to have anything to do with a paper which prints “comical” pornography.
Note that the above complainant, like most of Betty’s critics, incorrectly assumed that Black Betty was drawn by a male artist—a critical error, considering the identity politics of the day.
The SFU Women’s Centre also chimed in:
We would like to respond to the “Black Betty” cartoon which appeared in the June 19th issue of The Peak. We found it to be offensive and degrading to women, and we are disappointed that you approved it for publication. According to the statement of principles which appears inside the front cover of The Peak, your policy is to “oppose sexism...and other oppressive prejudices.”
This juvenile and misogynist comic is clearly out of place in a newspaper which is funded by, and aimed at, university students. How did you justify printing such a blatant depiction of sexualized violence against women? As a student-funded newspaper, we expect you to oppose the perpetuation of oppression through stereotypes and violence, rather than condoning it.
While some of your readers may have enjoyed the cheap titillation of seeing a chained woman stripped and beaten, the majority of us now have to work harder to combat oppression. We expect that in the future, when this trade-off arises, the editors of The Peak will make the right choice.
Sincerely,
SFU Women’s Centre Collective
It was official. Certain parties on campus had been whipped into a full-blown moral panic over this cartoon. They believed Black Betty had been sent up from Hell to oppress women, but, of course, they were majestically wrong.
How exactly does this over-the-top cartoon contribute to “violence against women”? I know very few women who have been non-consensually stripped and whipped, so that can’t be it. Nor can I see any relationship between the comic and the common forms of violence against women: that arising from war, poverty, religious oppression, acquaintance rape, and so on.
Call me naive, but I sincerely doubt that Betty’s whipping contributes in any real way to real violence against real women in the real world. Rather, it seems to me that campus reactionaries had simply found an easy target for their anger: slapping Black Betty around wouldn’t really help their cause, but shutting someone else up would make them feel better for a couple of minutes.
And so, The Peak found itself standing at a public-relations crossroads. Its next move would have far-reaching consequences in the hearts and minds of its readership.
What happened next, you ask? Well, why don’t you tell me? Drawing upon your personal knowledge of human nature, please answer the following multiple-choice question:
The Peak has just run a controversial comic, and precisely four (4) angry letters have been received from overbearing campus radicals. In response, the Peak staff...
(a) courageously stands up to the overbearing campus radicals and gives the comic’s creators and fans a chance to reply to the criticisms; or
(b) immediately shits themselves in fear, capitulates to the radicals and looks for a convenient scapegoat.
If you answered (b), then congratulations!
In the time it took to grind up an eye of newt, I found myself at the epicenter of a politically-correct witch hunt. It was a dark time. I was shocked at how quickly friendships ended, how many of my co-workers didn’t think twice about hanging me high in their scramble to dodge the charge of misogyny and demonstrate their innocence.
To make matters worse, I repeatedly refused to admit that the comic was sick and wrong. Instead, I stubbornly insisted it was an innocuous homage to camp S&M that offended only those with tragic hang-ups or axes to grind—and that I was perfectly comfortable with offending those sorts of people. In fact, I enjoyed offending those sorts of people.
Clearly, I was an incorrigible moral delinquent who deserved no mercy.
In the meantime, Jessica couldn’t help but notice that none of our co-workers were savaging her. When they spoke to her, their tone would usually shift to a noxious strain of patronizing pity, as if Betty’s whipping somehow weren’t her fault. This angered Jessica, who in fact bore more responsibility for the strip than me.
It was she who wanted an evil dominatrix and a whipping scene, and she drew the damn thing, so it’s fair to say that everything in the comic was ultimately her vision. But alas, Jessica was practically ignored as everyone assumed that Black Betty’s taint of “misogyny” must have come from me, the co-writer, the man.
It wasn’t long before certain parties were calling for Black Betty to be pulled from The Peak. Jessica and I felt that axing the strip without a fair trial would be more offensive than running it in the first place—The Peak would therefore lose on both fronts, having angered one camp by publishing the comic in the first place, and the other by censoring it. We even passed around the next week’s episode—which contained nothing particularly objectionable—to show that there was no need to immediately cancel the strip.
But all arguments were useless. The mob would not be satisfied until Betty burned. And so, a week and a half after the whipping episode hit the stands, the Peak Collective pulled Black Betty in a very emotional meeting.
Everyone seemed to have a different reason for supporting Betty’s demise, but for most, I suspect their true motivation was simple fear. Because of our comic, apathetic worker-bee Peakies—who just wanted to collect their paychecks and pad their resumes with as little fuss as possible—suddenly found themselves being criticized and bullied by campus blowhards. Their bureaucratic instinct was to capitulate immediately, purge the offending comic from the paper, and hope the storm would quickly blow over.
Of course, the storm didn’t blow over. Instead, it blew up. Unable to resist our big chance to make martyrs of ourselves, the next week Jessica and I went out in a blaze of indignant glory.
In a farewell editorial, Jessica denied that her strip degrades women, berated her critics for not bothering to find out that she was female, and expressed her disappointment with the Peak Collective for attacking me instead of her for the perceived problems with her comic.
In the meantime, I savaged The Peak for the cowardice and hypocrisy of its knee-jerk censorship, withdrew my horoscope column and resigned from my position as features editor in protest.
Our exit triggered a much larger outcry, this time wildly in our favour. As predicted, far more readers were enraged by The Peak’s censorship than by Betty’s whipping.
Although a few readers stuck to their guns and maintained that the comic was misogynist filth regardless of the artists’ genders or intentions, the vast majority (including several women) asserted that they enjoyed the comic and were not remotely degraded by it.
The final balance of public opinion was heavily pro-Betty, not that it mattered to the minions who shitcanned our comic. Betty was ousted, and she never returned to the pages of The Peak.
Looking back, I don’t deny that Black Betty was never that great. But so what? To me, shenanigans like Betty’s whipping are what the student press is all about.
Jessica and I were merely doing our duty as novice artists and entertainers: experimenting, pushing buttons, and letting the true colours of our readers shine in response to the provocative grenade we’d lobbed into the campus bosom.
But unfortunately, we also brought out the true colours of our co-workers. To this day, I still can’t believe that things got so nasty over something that should have been a trivial blip on The Peak’s public relations radar.
Instead, the Black Betty affair was a hard lesson in the urge to scapegoat, and a primer in how quickly friendships can evaporate when the skillet heats up.
It would be two and a half years before I would formally return to The Peak and relaunch my horoscope. As for Jessica, she is now a theatrical fencer and fight choreographer—a profession that routinely sees her bruised and beaten while wearing sexy costumes. If her critics are to be believed, this could only mean one thing: that woman must really hate herself. •
Completed in 2004 for inclusion in the Wasting My Youth book.
♦ ♦ ♦
Jessica Clark and Glen Callender UFA:
guardians of good taste.
♦ ♦ ♦