Raging Pencils
The
web comic with good breeding, by Mike
Stanfill
New comics every Monday, Wednesday & Friday.
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Womb
With A View.
Years ago my then-teenaged nephew and I would hit the local multiplex on weekends
and skulk from theatre to theatre all day, watching whatever was convenient.
On one occasion we found ourselves literally the only two primates in possession
of their y-chromosomes in a room packed with teens, tweens, and all those in-between.
I have mercifully forgotten the title of this estrogen-laden epic but it involved
a high school student and her young hunk who unexpectedly found themselves WHOOPS!
pregnant. For the next eighty minutes everything that could go wrong in their
two little extremely photogenic lives, did.
There was hormonal distress, romantic betrayal, poverty, hunger and, worst of
all, homework. Each plot twist somehow got a little dumber than the last and
I began praying for a murder-suicide pact if only to somehow brighten this inanity.
Indeed, with just minutes to go such an ending seemed inevitable. There was much
rejoicing.
However, this movie turned out to be a wet dream of the religious Right, funneled
through the Hollywood propaganda machine, as just nanoseconds before the credits
rolled everything turned out hunky-dory. The nuclear family, such as it was,
prevailed. Happiness reigned.
Since then I've been keenly aware of a seemingly endless string of such
melodramatic swill celebrating similar episodes of reproductive lunacy,
not the least of which
is this new film, Juno. Its message of "Okay, white girls, and only white
girls, its FUN to have babies for rich, barren white women" has more than
a whiff of eugenics to it.
And lest you suspect I'm too cynical, please tell me the last time you saw the
cinematic antithesis of Juno--- a mainstream film featuring a young African-American
female enjoying a normal, healthy, vibrant sexual relationship, not ending up
pregnant and going on to lead a happy and productive life.
Where's the wish-fulfillment in that?
=mike=
PS: Cracked.com did a brilliantly,
snarkalicious take on the movie. Go read it here.
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Raging Pencils is a massive conceit courtesy
of:
Mike
Stanfill, Private Hand
Illustration • Animation • Web Design
www.privatehand.com
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