Missed It: Purdue Cartoon Scandal

Alan Gardner caught this over at Daily Cartoonist, for which I'm glad because it totally escaped my attention: the Purdue University newspaper The Exponent ran a cartoon on September 17th in its "Sex Position Of The Week" feature that called for a male to switch with another male on the same female partner without her knowing. Sex without consent, of course, is the only definition of rape I've been taught and one that's shared by most people. While it's unclear if the cartoon actually advocated such a ruse or was simply using its lurid, forbidden nature as part of some wider point or joke, the newspaper was flooded with complaints that this wasn't funny no matter the intent. The editor apologized the week of the 20th, and the fast clip at which the entire process moved drew praise.

There's something remarkable about a story with a feature called "Sex Position Of The Week" at its core. You can't really blast a student body for being overly prudish when that's one of their weekly cartoon features. You also have to make the Yikes face (a smiley Yikes or frowny Yikes is up to you) a little more expressively when you realize that this is a joke that violated the good taste that everyone on that campus had come to expect from "Sex Position Of The Week." The closest we got to such a feature at my student newspaper a couple of decades back was the occasional story about student fees going up.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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