A Step Backward

THANKS, Berke Breathed for your portrayal last Friday of a "radical feminist," as a monstrous man-hater guiltily lusting after Sly Stallone. Maybe next week, if we're lucky, we'll get to meet a real live Black person--who you'd no doubt have sporting numerous gold-chains and wielding a switch-blade. Or maybe you'll give us a puffed-chested hispanic showing off his new Cadillac.

Maybe we'll even get to see Opus meet up with some of those commies we've heard about. Like the ones we saw on the recent Wendy's ad where the participants in a Soviet fashion show march around with the same drab peasant attire passing for every look. Better yet, let the penguin take some lessons on open-mindedness from Rambo.

I know Berke, we feminists just can't take a joke. Can't laugh at ourselves. Just make a little crack and we get all huffy. Can't tease us for refusing your opened door, or insisting on splitting the check. A man's got to watch everything he says these days when one of those women is around.

Well, Berke, give me a lightbulb joke anytime, I'll laugh along with the rest of them. But spare me your gross prejudices, please. Save them for your beer buddies. Go ahead and give them all the best lines--about how women who call themselves feminists are really sexually frustrated, overweight, undesirables who speak about hating men because they can't get near them. About how Gloria Steinem would look a lot better if she smiled a little more, and maybe wore a little make-up. How the problem with women today is that they're all too bitchy--they've lost their softness, their femininity.

Have a few laughs, wipe your eyes and talk about the way women used to be in the good old days. When they wore skirts and shaved their legs, and smiled as they alerted you to your ring around the collar. When they brought you your slippers, your tie, your ego.

And then when you're through you can all go back to your offices and homes and feel secure writing off those feminists as frustrated hysterics. Don't take anything they say seriously, whether it be about equal pay, sexual harassment of abortion rights; it's all the same man-hating drivel.

Seriously, Berke, I expect more from you. What happened to the idealism of the Meadow Party convention. Cutter John would turn his his grave if he saw that strip, and Milo certainly wouldn't stand for it. Make fun of conservatives and progressives alike--that's great. But facile Cro-magnan stereotypes are not fun, they're offensive.

If I want prehistoric portrayals of women from comic strips. I'll turn to anthologies, to Dagwood and Blondie, and other concoctions of the '50s. They don't belong on my breakfast table in 1986. This kind of nonsense is enough to make me think that all men are loathsome...and I say that with a smile on my face.