Recent Comments

1. over 14 years ago on For Better or For Worse

   Officecat, I’ve said this before, but feminist =/= hating men. I’m an feminist and I like men very much. :)

   I will say that I don’t think that Lynn is an feminist at all. She has Liz be an teacher which is typically an female-dominated job, and she had her first child very soon after marriage, which is very traditional. Out of all her friends, we see Candace the most as an adult, but we don’t even know if she did become an psychologist!

   For Deanna, Mike’s wife, she was an pharmacist, but she was never shown on the job, and she was always shown at home parenting and cleaning while Mike worked on his book. In addition to that, Lynn had Deanna quit her high-paying job and open an sewing school, which practically demands that Mike support her on his writing instead of the other way around, which would have made more sense. Mike was almost never shown doing any housework. He was there to be the fun parent, however. With the wife and girlfriend of Mike’s two friends, Tracey was an SAHM and Carleen worked for her boyfriend. No outside of the home stimulation for those two.

   Elly was an SAHM who ventured out sometimes to have an job. One was non-paying, and the other was the bookstore her husband bought for her. She was also always shown doing all of the housework, and instead of asking/making the others help her, she complains. With Elly’s friends, Annie was an stay at home mother who chose to stay with an cheating husband instead of divorcing him. Connie was an single mother and a radiologist, but never brought her work home with her. She never had any complaints/complements about people on the job or how she was being paid, etc. She was, however shown as a desperate man-chaser when the storyline focused on her. Otherwise she was only there to listen to Elly complain over coffee.

   Not to leave April out, but she, aside from Candace, probably has the least feminine job, but since she was still an teenager when the strip ended, we only have one line to support that. I will end this with the fact that the one female character who did have the drive to climb to the top was the ‘evil’ character, Anthony’s wife, Therese.

   Lynn had an exciting life (an cartoonist married to an flying dentist), she couldn’t let her female characters have some excitement too? I still think her worst mistake was making Liz move home from Mtigwaki, to an boring suburban life.

   I do think you are right though, Lynn doesn’t like men. She’s jealous of them, and hates them for the wrongs they have done to her, being cheated on twice will do that to someone, I guess.

2. over 14 years ago on For Better or For Worse

   I think the difference between the silent treatment and staying quiet so you don’t say things you’ll regret is the fact that an mature person would say, “I’m too angry to talk to you right now. I want to be left alone. We’ll talk about this later.” or something similar to that, instead of walking about in an huff, refusing to say a word. Not throwing anything would be a definite plus!

   I also agree, that while John screwed up big time, it wasn’t all on him to get his family out of it. If Elly had any suspicions about the hovel they stayed in not being Ted’s nice cabin, she would have taken some incentive and asked the store owner about it or asked to use his phone. But neither of them had any suspicions at all, preferring to make jokes at Ted’s expense.

   If I was writing this comic strip, I would have had Elly call Ted, and then when they got to the nice cabin, she tells John that it’s his turn to cook and clean and that she was going to get into the sauna. Or, they could have gone to the right cabin in the first place, and discovered that it had been flooded very recently. That would make sure there was a lot of wacky hijinks without the toxic family relationships.

3. over 14 years ago on For Better or For Worse

   I don’t blame John for coming up with that zinger…the silent treatment is something an grown up woman shouldn’t do. Throwing things too? How old is Elly supposed to be? She’s the only one who ever throws things in this strip as far as I can remember. If John threw something at Elly, it would be called abuse.

4. over 14 years ago on For Better or For Worse

   Oh please…this is nothing! I used to do this with my brother and friends all of the time when I was a kid, and we didn’t break anything. My mom was probably very happy that we could amuse ourselves very easily while she did other stuff she needed to do. Elly is such a lightweight!

   As for boys being boys and girls being girls…I was a well rounded girl. I liked to read and play barbies and in the mud, ride dirt bikes, play video games and do my hair and make up. I don’t see why little kids have to be shoved into his and hers boxes. It’s sad to see that there are people who think this should still happen. Let your kids be kids!

5. over 14 years ago on FoxTrot Classics

   I can’t do without my phone and texting. But I don’t have my phone attached to my hands 24/7. If I don’t want to be bothered at a certain time, I either don’t answer if it’s unimportant, or tell the person that I’m busy and will answer better later. Everyone I know respects that rule. It isn’t hard to enforce.

6. over 14 years ago on For Better or For Worse

   Thanks for the website, Hildi!

   I think one of the troubles with people being apathetic about women’s rights now is that they don’t realize what life really was like before women got the rights they have now, that there were so many small and large limitations on women. Like wearing pants or having your own credit card. Those two issues are such an non-issue now that it’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that they were very big issues only 50 years ago.

7. over 14 years ago on For Better or For Worse

   Lew, raising a child until they are old enough to go to school is not a “five year vacation”. You should know better than to say something like that.

   Some people want to work 100 hour weeks, others don’t. It’s never divided down gender lines.

   Thanks for backing me up, Celtic, Lindz and Teresa! You’re right, we have come a good ways since the 70s (I wasn’t even born yet) but still have a while to go, judging by some of the comments on here in 2010.

8. over 14 years ago on For Better or For Worse

   Okay…why are women accepting that the word “feminist” is now a dirty word? One that they won’t touch because they’re not one of THOSE…a man-hater. That really bothers me, especially in a world where every minority is taking back all of their identity-names that has become “dirty”, Black, Deaf, Brown, Gay…etc. Even the really dirty ones, like the N-word.

   Being a feminist never meant hating men, it meant equality…in all areas of life, for both men and women. And yes, I would like to see more women recruited for the military. It would bring more balance to military life.

9. over 14 years ago on For Better or For Worse

   I think this really means that John b-b-qs only once or twice a year, which is not often enough to improve his technique. This is pretty much like me and bowling. I go bowling once a year and have very dismal scores every time. So, John has to relearn every time, and that means the burgers go from hunks of charcoal to slightly overdone by the time John is finished, and since he is last, he gets the best burgers.

   I can get Mike’s complaints here. No one wants the burnt-to-a-crisp burgers so they get palmed off to the kids. Though in this case, they really should have gone to the dog, and the kids get the next batch of burgers which is slightly less worse.

10. over 14 years ago on Stone Soup International Sundays

    I’d rather her do it outside…it means less mess to clean up inside the house!