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WWII Poster Project

I wanted to share a cool project I’ve been working on. The National Women’s Law Center has commissioned me to create a series of posters as part of their voter education drive. I’ve had fun learning a thing or two about vintage poster design.

You can share it on Facebook here.

And you can get a free printable version here.

The Life Cycle of a Slur

This week’s strip was inspired by the recent Samantha Bee controversy, in which the comedian referred to Ivanka Trump as a “feckless c-word” during a monologue about Trump’s treatment of undocumented immigrants. This came on the heels of Roseanne having her show canceled for making racist and anti-Semitic remarks on Twitter. Many on the right demanded similar consequences for Bee, who later apologized. But the two incidents were not the same. As I tweeted the other day:

Samantha Bee, a woman, calling a white supremacist wannabe-oligarch’s enabling daughter the c-word is punching up. A white person calling a black person an ape and spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is punching down, historical abomination-style.

When it comes to slurs, it’s not about the word itself — it’s about the context. The meaning changes depending on who’s using the word, and who they’re talking about. Samantha Bee is probably the most feminist personality on TV right now. When she drops a c-bomb in the service of criticizing a woman who is complicit in oppression, it may be a crude insult — but it’s not sexist.

That said, I try to avoid using language in this way in my own work, since there’s too much room for misinterpretation. And there are reasonable debates to be had about the merits of certain types of reclaiming; I’ve even drawn cartoons in the past about the dangers of embracing your opponents’ insults (“tree hugger” being one example that hasn’t helped reframe the debate, in my opinion). HOWEVER! I’m not “making excuses” for Sam Bee simply because I’m a fan. Had she said something genuinely supportive of patriarchy, I’d criticize it. I think Rebecca Traister gets it right here:

It is true that in her critique of Ivanka Trump, Bee used an expletive that is explicitly misogynistic; it is wholly reasonable to object to the word cunt for feminist reasons. It is also reasonable and worthwhile to consider why a term for female anatomy has become such a potent pejorative; why does a word that means vagina also mean “very bad person”? That’s a valid question, but it’s crucial to consider it in this context. Bee was not reinforcing or replicating the crude harm that “cunt” has been used to inflict historically: the patriarchal diminishment and vilification of women. In fact, Bee was using it to criticize a woman precisely because that woman is acting on behalf of that patriarchy, one that systematically diminishes women, destroys families, and hurts children.

Given that we can’t even pass the Equal Rights Amendment, it’s probably a stretch to expect that many people get these subtleties. But one thing that is clear: we can safely dismiss the performative outrage from those who never gave a damn about misogyny until now.

This Week’s Cartoon: Daddyshack

As upsetting as the “War on Women 2012” has been, I managed to keep my cool, I think, until last week or so. But at some point between the Masters Tournament at creepy Augusta National and the character assassination of Hilary Rosen (whose perfectly valid point was twisted wildly by everyone from the Romneys to the NYT’s clueless Frank Bruni), things hit critical mass, and I truly began to question the wisdom of being born female.

IBM is one of the top sponsors of the Masters Tournament. Its CEO has historically been granted membership at Augusta National, which is denoted by a highly-coveted, silly green jacket that evokes shades of Rodney Dangerfield-meets-Richie Rich. Well, what to do when the CEO is a lady? Because that’s what the current top dog at Big Blue, Virginia Rometty, happens to be. Apparently, if you’re Augusta, you still deny her membership, so that she’s forced to wear the crumpled pink jacket she brought balled-up in her roller luggage. (Just kidding; I’m sure her corporate jet has a very nice place to hang jackets!) Another day, another chick hits the Grass Ceiling.

I’m sure I’ll get some emails saying, “They’re a private club and they can do what they want!” While this may technically be true, it still doesn’t mean they’re not a bunch of retrograde douchesprockets.

The “politicization” game

As I noted a few weeks ago, Fox Propaganda accused CNN of advancing a “leftist agenda” for bringing up a possible connection between climate change and the freakish storm that hit Texas. Around that time I was also gobsmacked by a quote from the CEO of the Weather Channel:

“I believe in climate change, and I believe it’s man-made,” said Dave Shull, the company’s chief executive and a Republican, who spent much of Friday in the newsroom. “But I’m not a big fan of the term. It’s been politicized.”

Emphasis mine. The article explains how the Weather Channel is afraid of alienating its core audience by bringing up the subject. Hell, why bring up the weather at all, if you’re going to be that squeamish about science?

Republicans use the same tactic for shutting down discussion about gun control after mass shootings, claiming that would be “politicizing” a tragedy. Crying politicization in these contexts is not a valid argument; it’s simply a ploy to silence ideas that conflict with their agenda, and news outlets shouldn’t kowtow to it.

The NRA interviews Surgeon General Candidates

You know your country has gone off the deep end when a Surgeon General nominee encounters fierce political opposition because of this:

On the local level, the NRA has tried to bar pediatricians from counseling parents about the risks of keeping guns at home. The American Association of Pediatrics recommends that doctors begin to talk to parents about gun safety even before their baby is born and continue the conversation yearly, just as doctors talk to parents about the dangers of swimming pools and the importance of bicycle helmets. Florida passed a gag law in 2011; crafted by an NRA lobbyist, the bill forbids doctors from “making written inquiry or asking questions concerning the ownership of a firearm or ammunition by the patient or by a family member of the patient.” A district court ruled the following year that the law restricted physicians’ rights to free speech and the case is now in the appeals process. Murthy’s opposition to pediatrician gag laws was one of the reasons cited by the NRA and Rand Paul in their attempt to disqualify him.

Bio

“Among our most gifted lifters of political veils and pre­tenses” — New York Times

Photo credit: Lisa Nipp for the National Press Foundation

Jen Sorensen’s comics and illustrations have appeared in the The Nation, NPR.org, Ms. Magazine, The Progressive, Politico,  Daily Kos, Fusion, The Nib, AlterNet, Truthout, MAD, Nickelodeon, The Los Angeles Times, The Austin Chronicle, The Village Voice, In These Times, The Book of Jezebel, and dozens of other publications around the country. She has created commissioned long-form comics for the ACLU, NPR, Kaiser Health News, The Oregonian, and other clients.

Her work has won many accolades. She received the Berryman Award for Editorial Cartooning from the National Press Foundation in 2023, and was a Pulitzer Finalist in Editorial Cartooning in 2017. In 2014, she was awarded the Herblock Prize, an award endowed by the legendary Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block. In 2013, she was the recipient of a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and she also won the National Cartoonists Society Award for Best Editorial Cartoons. In 2015, Sorensen was given an Inkpot Award for career achievement in comic arts from the San Diego Comic-Con International.

Additionally, in 2012 she was named the Herblock Prize Finalist; received an Aronson Journalism Award from Hunter College in NYC in 2010; and in 2000 she won a Xeric grant to publish her first collection of strips. She has also won numerous awards from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, including First Place in the Cartoon category in 2014.

Sorensen has given presentations at the National Archives, the Ohio State University Library Festival of Cartoon Art, Netroots Nation, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Center for American Progress. In 2022, she served as a judge for the European Cartoon Award, part of the European Press Prize, and spoke at the award ceremony in Maastricht, Netherlands. In 2015, Sorensen was invited to represent the US as a juror at the Aydin Doğan International Cartoon Competition in Turkey. She also judged the New York Times Learning Network’s student editorial cartoon contest in 2015 and 2016.

Jen serves on the National Advisory Council of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University. She was President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists in 2021.

Jen grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and went on to attend the University of Virginia, where she studied cultural anthropology and drew cartoons for college publications. She started her weekly strip in 1998, which quickly became political as the 2000 election and 9/11 dominated the national conversation.

Additional fun facts: Jen was once clue “12 down” in the Time Out New York crossword puzzle and her work made cameos on the “Queer as Folk” television series.

Quackery Quotas

In reality, universities already contain a mixture of political views — you’ll find plenty of Republicans in business schools, economics departments, and law schools (see also: Frat Row). They also sit on boards of directors and comprise a large chunk of the donor class. But the right’s revolutionary project will not be satisfied until students stop learning facts that contradict the movement. Feminism, gender studies, the ugly parts of American history, climate science — it all must go! And so we get cries for “ideological diversity,” which sounds fair to well-meaning people who believe in good-faith debate as a way to arrive at the truth. But truth is not the goal here; the goal is power.

In Ron DeSantis’s Florida, new standards for teaching K-12 African-American history include a recommendation that the curriculum cover “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” As this excellent LA Times editorial points out, there is no reason for this other than to whitewash the horrors of slavery.

Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

Job Advice With Rand Paul

Recommended reading: this Ezra Klein post about the reality of unemployment in America today. The national average may be three job seekers for every job opening, but for many people it’s worse than that:

“Nationally, there are three job seekers for every one open position. But because unemployment is much higher in some cities than in others, the reality is that most people who’ve been unemployed for more than 26 weeks live in areas where there are four, five, six, seven and even eight job seekers for each open job. They’re not being held back by their unemployment checks. They’re being held back by mass unemployment.”

But apparently the facts on the ground don’t matter for someone with his head stuck in dense clouds of libertarian dogma.

Surveillance Bait

I find the NSA Prism program — what I know about it, anyway — to be problematic. But it does seem there’s a disconnect between public reaction to this particular scandal and our tolerance for the selling of highly-personalized data by tech companies in the private sector. I’ve read over the years about evolving technologies to offer individuals different prices and interest rates based on data collected through the internet; I have no idea how much this is actually happening, but the potential for abuse seems vast.

I’m not trying to suggest an either/or situation here in which government spying is OK and private sector data mining is not. The potential for abuse by the state is enormous and well-precedented.  But  Silicon Valley is no saint here; many tech libertarians seem to overlook this. Private data could be used to deny people health insurance and harm their credit — it goes beyond mere advertising. The arrangement with the Prism program just seems to me like foxes working with foxes guarding the henhouse.

Somewhat amusingly, while I was working on this very cartoon, I watched a music video on YouTube — The New Pornographers’ “Slow Descent into Alcoholism” — and immediately afterward was served Google ads for various detox programs. So there’s one particular data point on my record that might not be so accurate. At least, not currently.

Kwik Links

A couple interesting reads I’ve been meaning to share lately: The Oct. 25 issue of the New Yorker had a great article about one of my biggest pet peeves, leaf blowers.  (See related cartoon about blowers here; thanks to Matt for sharing his copy of the magazine with me, because he knows how much I hate them.) Only the abstract is freely available online, but if you have a digital subscription, you can find a link to the whole article here.

The gist of the story is how a well-to-do California town has become leaf blower hell, and how one couple’s efforts to do something about it has earned them the animosity of their libertarian neighbors. (Apparently the right to peace and quiet in your own home doesn’t count as a proper “freedom.”). After reading the article to Mr. Slowpoke, he immediately went outside and started raking leaves. With, you know, a good old-fashioned rake. These days, I’m very tempted to say “thank you” to people when I see them raking the neighborly way. Except they’d probably look at me like I was some kind of weirdo.

Also worth reading, apropos of Joe Miller’s defeat: this column on Alaska as welfare state.  Thanks to Adam D. for the link.

Who’s Going to Save Us?

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Joni Ernst said “I think this door of impeachable whatever has been opened… Joe Biden should be very careful what he’s asking for because, you know, we can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately, people, right the day after he would be elected would be saying, ‘Well, we’re going to impeach him.'” When asked what he would be impeached for, she replied “for being assigned to take on Ukrainian corruption yet turning a blind eye to Burisma because his son was on the board making over a million dollars a year.” As the article notes, this claim has been debunked. Since then, Ernst has tried to walk back her comments as “hypothetical,” but it’s clear that she believes in a conspiracy theory and her comments were threatening, whether she intended them to be or not.

Old Blog Archives

To read SlowpokeBlog posts prior to our switch to WordPress in April 2010, see the old blog home page at https://jensorensen.com/blog.html.