Boot

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More on the language of footwear, from this morning's Cathy:

For a real-world echo, see Bill Cunningham, "A story with legs", NYT, 10/23/2009.



13 Comments

  1. Morgan said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 9:13 am

    It seems that the author's intent with this strip was not to portray her own dilemmas as usual, but to mock people who wear the types of boots listed in inappropriate situations? At least, that seems to be the only way it would be funny…

  2. Chris said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 10:20 am

    It seems to me that what the saleslady understands in the first frame is that the description of product intended is insincere, and perhaps is some kind of self-justification to convince the boot shopper that she is not really blowing however many dollars on something impractical and cool (a behavior that of course both sexes are prone to, but the specifics of which impractical things they find cool are likely to be different).

    I think you could write a very similar strip about men and, say, power tools (buying some ridiculously over-elaborate tool or set of tools ostensibly to perform a simple job), but that's just not Cathy's beat.

  3. Bloix said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 11:38 am

    One of the three or four jokes in this strip is that Cathy's intentions are good but her will is weak.

  4. Amy Stoller said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 11:41 am

    I think you guys are all overthinking this strip. Women in American society are programmed to love shoes. This is mainly because we're also programmed to think we don't look good enough. (Good enough for what is a question for another forum.) So while we may indeed be completely sincere about intending to buy practical shoes, most of us can also be easily diverted from our purpose by anything we think will make us look better – in this case, cute shoes, fashionable shoes, trendy shoes. The mere act of shopping for clothes makes us vulnerable to our insecurities. It takes a strong woman to go shopping and come out of the store with what she came for, or with nothing if she couldn't find what she came for. The point of "Cathy" is not that it's always funny, but that many women recognize ourselves in her – even if we often wish we didn't. In other words, it's not about ha-ha, it's about a-ha.

  5. Alexandra said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 12:21 pm

    @ Amy Stoller: Speak for yourself!

    "It's not about ha-ha, it's about a-ha" is a great line, though.

  6. Nathan Myers said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 2:23 pm

    Cathy isn't about laughing, it's about grimacing. Americans seem to confuse the two. Earlier we had a report about the California governor sending a slightly veiled "fuck you" to a state legislator. The variety of experiences that people interpret into examples of humor boggles the mind. Different cultures confuse different things with humor, but generally they don't actually laugh at the things that aren't actually funny, they just say they're funny. However, I have observed a Bavarian laughing out loud at one after another Garfield strip.

    Amy: I welcome your "good enough for what?". My wife used to ask if various articles of clothing made her ahem "look too big", and all I could think was "too big for what?".

  7. Acilius said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 3:18 pm

    CATHY is one of the first features I search out in the newspaper every morning. I rarely read the text and have never laughed at the cartoon, but the visual style is among the most interesting in daily comics, up there with BLONDIE and FOR BETTER OR WORSE. I grant you the strip deals in stereotypes, the dialogue isn't funny, etc etc, but it's hardly worse on any of those scores than are most widely syndicated strips; not as bad as most, I'd say. Compared to BEETLE BAILEY, which is equally unfunny and infinitely less distinguished visually, CATHY is practically a Gender Studies seminar. Yet for every complaint about BEETLE BAILEY, it seems there are a hundred people who be hatin' on CATHY.

  8. Lazar said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 5:08 pm

    "I am woman. I speak 'boot'." strikes me as such an uninspired and disheartening punch line.

  9. Amy Stoller said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 5:09 pm

    @Alexandra: Well, perhaps I should have said "most women in America are programmed" or "women in American are programmed (not all successfully)" but I'm afraid I thought that was understood. My bad. Do you dispute my analysis if we remove the implication that it applies to all American women rather than one heck of a lot, probably most, possibly the vast majority? (Speaking entirely for myself, while I may regret the programming and fight against it, I can't claim to be wholly resistant to it.)

  10. Nathan Myers said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 6:51 pm

    Amy: Has there ever been any reason to program only women that way? Haven't "they" been trying to program men the same way, for about as long? Why hasn't it taken? I would hate to get on Professor Pullum's bad side, or yours. Some purported differences are noise ("happiness levels") and some are objectively defensible (primary and secondary sexual equippage, shoe size), but many are slipperier. Is a weakness for personal adornments (or for semi-practical field gadgetry) necessarily socially programmed? Does it count as programming if it happens: (1) As a consequence of direct gene expression (X vs Y)? (2) In response to hormone exposure during development, leading to differential growth? (3) In response to continued hormone exposure? Is it programming if everyone is exposed to a set of social cues, but one identifiable subset of the population responds to them, and the others are oblivious?

    There are always people insisting it's all social, and others insisting it's all innate, but it seems like a false dichotomy to me. There are so many modes and mechanisms involved.

  11. Robert E. Harris said,

    November 3, 2009 @ 11:40 pm

    I can't say much about women and shoes, as my wife rarely buys any, but I do own a hand-held circular saw and two power sanders that I've never used. (I do have a really big belt sander that I use now and then.)

  12. Alexandra said,

    November 5, 2009 @ 11:54 am

    @ Amy Stoller:

    You wrote: "Do you dispute my analysis if we remove the implication that it applies to all American women rather than one heck of a lot, probably most, possibly the vast majority?"

    Nope! Especially if we use the phrase "one heck of a lot," which is nice and vague. But your statement as a description of American women in general didn't ring true to me, since it does not apply to me nor to any of my female friends.

  13. mae said,

    November 6, 2009 @ 3:53 pm

    Related article in the New York Times dated Nov 5:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/business/economy/06shoes.html?em

    Relevant quote:
    Among the more curious explanations proffered for the relative strength of shoe sales is that women — who make up the lion’s share of the American shoe market — get an emotional lift from shoe shopping in a way they do not when trying on jeans and cocktail dresses.

    “Shoes democratize fashion,” said Kathryn Finney, who writes the Budget Fashionista blog. “You probably can’t buy a Zac Posen dress if you wear a size 14, but you can buy a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes.”

    Or, as Jennifer Black, president of research company Jennifer Black and Associates, put it: “It’s just fun to shop for shoes. Maybe part of the fun is you don’t feel fat. And you don’t get hot. It’s exhausting trying clothes on, especially the skinny jeans.”

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