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Another cartoon inspired by the current, infuriating moment. Hundreds of hundreds of conservatives (mostly, but not entirely, white men) have been asking this question. Including the President of the United States, in (of course) a tweet.
And the constant denial can hurt. Emily Dreyfuss in Wired:
When I read Trump’s tweet this morning, first I stopped breathing. When the most powerful person in the land denies your lived experience, it feels like someone punching you in the diaphragm.
Thousands of victims of sexual assault – mostly, but not entirely, women – have taken to Twitter to respond to Trump, using the #whyIdidn’treport hashtag.
The failure of empathy inherit in the “why didn’t she report it?” question – asked by so many even today, while Christine Blasey Ford’s character and safety are under constant attack – is staggering. A better question is, given how some people are punished for reporting being raped, why do any victims report?
Almost two years ago, Rachel Sklar – addressing the question of why Donald Trump’s accusers stayed silent for years – wrote:
All of this reinforces the prevailing power structures of rape culture and patriarchy: Men are to be respected, believed and obeyed. Women mess with that at their peril. Not only are women expected to receive and submit, but they are expected to laugh off behavior that is otherwise invasive and threatening, to “not make a big deal” about it. But that just shows the normalization of violence against women…
Elizabeth King summed it up well:
Which is why “Why didn’t she report?” is a nonsense question. It doesn’t even need to be asked because 1) survivors are allowed to deal with a traumatic event however they want to — nobody is required to report, and 2) we all already know why; some simply choose either not to listen, or to not believe. It’s another way to blame victims, who deserve better than to rehash their trauma for the benefit of others’ understanding.
So, anyhow… about the art:
I’ve been working long days on this cartoon since… well, since an hour after I completed my previous cartoon.
The art here will remind some of you of the “Brave Truth-Teller” cartoon I did quite recently, which featured a similar bird’s-eye-view-with-tons-of-characters panel. And I probably wouldn’t have drawn this cartoon in this way, without having drawn that other cartoon fist. With Brave-Truth-Teller, I expanded my cartoonist’s toolbox a tiny bit, and now that I have that tool I can use it again.
I will admit, however, I didn’t expect to be reusing this particular tool so soon.
One last side note: As I was writing this, my housemate Matt walked by, looked over my shoulder, and said “I like the perspective you used to draw Kevin there.” And I looked again, and omg – the jerk at the bottom of the page does look a lot like my friend Kevin Moore.
(Kevin, dude – that wasn’t on purpose, honest. I didn’t even notice until Matt pointed it out. So this is Matt’s fault, maybe?)
Let me hasten to add that Kevin is incredibly nice and empathetic and would never say what the dude here who looks like him is saying. And also, Kevin’s a terrific cartoonist himself – he even has a patreon.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has only one panel. The panel shows a crowd of people, looking down on them from above. A dark-haired woman in the middle of the crowd, wearing a red blouse and a blue skirt, looks frightened. Everyone else in the crowd is yelling at her, pointing at her, shaking fists at her, etc – it is not a friendly crowd.
A little removed from the mob, at the bottom of the cartoon, a blonde man wearing a blue turtleneck talks to a black-haired woman, raising his hands in a shrugging gesture.
MAN: If she was raped, why didn’t she say so sooner?
There’s also a #WhyDidntIReport hashtag, where this tweet has been at the top for a while:
When I added my own tweet, I mistyped and it went to this second hashtag instead of the original one that Amp linked to. There’s a lot more to why I didn’t report back then, but this is the kernel of it.
That we survivors need to keep explaining the phenomenon of delayed reporting–or of not reporting at all–is discouraging to say the least, especially given that so many reports turn out to be accurate and true. That, after so many instances of a perpetrator’s public denials turning out to be completely false, the general public doesn’t look at denials like Kavanaugh’s, or anyone’s in a similar situation, with at least as jaded an eye as it does delayed reporting makes me want to throw my hands up in disgust. This article, though, was a real bright spot:
Important message, timely done, well presented, etc.
Let’s talk logistics.
What a challenge for a static image: To depict someone who is surrounded. How to show that a person is exposed with no place to hide from the crowd–when, if this were true, every angle would be obscured to the viewer by the crowd? A top-down view is a clever solution. But, to pull this off, you have to forsake using a word bubble in the top of the cartoon, because it would otherwise block the reader’s view of the crowd. So the text has to be really spare, put only where you want the reader’s gaze to finally arrest.
And it works. As my eye pans down the image, it feels cinematographic, as if it were video. How cool.
Stylistically, this cartoon seems akin to the Brave Truth-Teller (BTT) cartoon, with its’ top-down perspective. BTT was even fun because it invites us to poke fun at his (and, heck, everyone’s) self-aggrandizing imagination, but also because it exploits the surrealism of the imagination. In contrast, this cartoon is very seriously not fun. It’s successfully creepy. And all the more clever because it doesn’t resort to surrealism; it succeeds even within the constraints of a more-or-less realistic perspective.
I can’t recall having seen this top-down perspective in political cartoons before (or in other cartoons, either, but I don’t read so many other cartoons, so I don’t have a huge repertoire to call on.)
The shading also shows up nicely in the colored panel. How did you choose to light the cartoon such that the speaker’s face ends up in shade? I like to imagine that I can understand the strategic choices that go into a cartoon’s lay-out, but this one seems counter-intuitive.
(When does anyone ever have a close, top-down perspective with slant lighting? It’s so rare that it’s evoking my 30-year-old memories of taking an early morning balloon ride with my girlfriend (now wife). Nice work.)
I think, maybe, Family Circus may have used a similar effect, but I have no idea how I’d even begin looking for it.
I thought Pres. Trump’s tweet on this was particularly tone-deaf and ignorant. There’s multiple reasons why a victim of sexual assault would not have reported it, especially at that time and at her age.