Comic for Wednesday, Oct 4, 2017
Commentary
Posted October 4, 2017 at 1:00 am
A few things before a wall of text:
- I wanted genuine diversity of appearances, not just the same body type with palette / hair / face swaps.
- Thinking about baseball doesn't work when you think the athletes are hot.
- "Football butts" for best line 2017.
- Those delivery guys are so gonna look like professional male athletes by the time they show up.
- No, I don't have dreamy athletic men on the brain! Unless I do.
And so it is revealed to have been a fantasy about selfish politicians changing their tune the moment the laws applied to them, and was written by Ashley. As fantasies commonly are, it is oversimplified and exaggerated in ways convenient to the fantasy.
At least, I’m assuming nobody has actually tried to outlaw coverage for birth control. That was at least supposed to be hyperbole.
A few readers didn’t want to wait to see what was actually going on, however, and there are a couple of things that came up that I will respond to... Wait for it... Now:
- “Many women are pro-life.”
I didn’t mention pro-anything, but yes, that’s true. Exact statistics fluctuate, but people average out to be nearly evenly split on that, and women are people.
On the subject of “I didn’t mention that”, there’s more to reproductive health and laws pertaining to it than that. One relatively tame example is what’s known as “the tampon tax”, which refers to feminine hygiene products not having tax exemption status in spite of being basic necessities. This is, at the time of writing this, currently an issue in 36 states.
- “Women can be just as bad about these things as men.”
Indeed! In that example I just gave, a wealthy politician of any sex or gender might consider those costs to the individual trivial, and support change based entirely on whether it would help them win local elections.
It is worth noting, however, that there are men in power who seem to lack a basic understanding of female anatomy, and it’s pretty natural to be doubly frustrated with laws one doesn’t like when those laws were written by people unaffected by them. There are understandable reasons not only for a fantasy like this to exist, but for a genuine desire for more women to be involved with the writing of such laws.
In any case, the fantasy presented in the comic is about self-serving politicians changing their tune the moment the laws would directly affect them. There are many things this could apply to, but the point was showing a fantasy of Ashley’s involving transforming people, so this was the subject matter chosen.
