So, can we talk about satire for a minute? Last week, we printed an opinion piece written by Bailey White, about a certain trend in Halloween costumes, and her purported moral outrage with it.
A few hours after the newspapers hit the stands on Tuesday morning, the letters started coming, letters that were, unfortunately, mostly vitriolic attacks on White as a person, and not on the actual content of the piece.
Missing from the discussion, which quickly moved online once the piece was posted to our website, was any kind of reasoned, respectful response. We’ve printed all of the letters we could in the opinion section this week, while the rest were either too long, or were directed personally at White.
One thing the homogeneity and amount of feedback did point out, though, was that most of the readership missed the point – the piece was a satire, albeit one that apparently could have been more adeptly executed.
But it was a satire nonetheless, the idea being to use irony and exaggerated humour to make a point. It’s a legitimate, time-tested way of advancing an argument.
Jonathan Swift didn’t really want to sell babies as food for the rich.
Stephen Colbert’s shtick doesn’t reflect the views of the real Colbert.
Sarah Silverman doesn’t really want to sell the Vatican (or at least she recognizes the absurdity of her proposal).
The funny thing is, it was, in part, a response to two columns written by Sarah Ratchford, the editor of The Brunswickan.
In the first of these two, Ratchford attempts to debunk feminist myths, at one point writing that women “… should be judged on our character and the way we treat others,” not on their looks.
The next week, Ratchford, in all seriousness, blasts what she describes as “the grotesqueness of skanky costumes.”
“Showing your butt and prancing around in a bra is not cool, and all it says about you is that you’re easy and relatively brainless. Not fabulous,” she wrote, referring Coco Chanel’s mantra that a woman should be two things – classy and fabulous.
Ratchford advises women to “…stop going out dressed like sluts if you want to be regarded as more than a pair of breasts and legs.”
Men, she states, “… want a partner you can bring home to mama,” the implication being that those women she’s labelled “skanks” and “sluts” aren’t to be brought home.
“If you want to tell people you’re a skank,” she wrote, “you might want to rethink your self perception.”
Like I said, these columns were written in all seriousness, and seem to have generated no response from the Bruns’ readership.
Yet a piece written, jokingly, in an attempt to subvert this kind of thinking, produced nothing but hate.
