Chef Al is foul

Two Casco Bay Weekly cartoons incite backlash from the Portland community

By Noah Bruce

CBW: apologetic.

Nearly 40 people gathered outside the office of the Casco Bay Weekly March 14 to protest a pair of cartoons the paper ran in its February 22 and March 8 editions. The cartoon, by Martin Shields, is called “Chef Al’s Fowl” and depicts an apparently deranged man killing, boiling, and marinating a naked woman who responds by moaning with pleasure, “Ooooooooohhh Chef Al, This feels sooooooooo gooooooood.”

Protesters sang, made speeches, and carried signs with slogans like “Language precedes violence, misogyny hurts us all” and “There is no excuse for domestic violence.” Gina Dearani, an organizer of the protest, stressed the need for the community to express its anger. “As a concerned woman and as an advocate for women,” she says, “I was outraged by the comic, and I felt it was critical for the community to have a voice and to say how they feel.”

According to Shields, he designed “Chef Al’s Fowl” to provoke just such a response. “I’ve been doing comic strips for CBW since August of ’98,” says Shields, “and no one’s ever reacted to anything I’ve done, and no one’s ever written about it, written to the paper about it. It’s just sort of a like an unimportant little. . . it’s just sitting there on the editorial page. Maybe I could have gotten a reaction from people by doing something different than a woman being cut up and boiled. It’s just I felt like it was an easy way to get people all riled up.”

Shields harbors no regrets, saying, “I’m satisfied. I don’t feel bad about it.”

As for CBW’s decision to run the strips, USM professor William Coogan, lawyer and constitutional scholar, says that they undeniably had the First Amendment right. He says, according to the ruling in Near vs. Minnesota (1931), the law can only stop something from running before the fact “when there is a direct threat to national security, or violent upset of orderly government.” This has only been invoked one time, to his knowledge, when the government halted The Progressive from publishing instructions on manufacturing a hydrogen bomb.

Nor does the strip violate Portland’s anti-obscenity ordinance, says Coogan. The entire CBW would have to be devoid of “serious literary,

artistic, or scientific value,” as the ordinance applies to the work as a whole. “There’s no way it could fall under the city’s obscenity ordinance,” Coogan insists.

However, he says, “there are plenty of non-legal remedies for the publication of that cartoon. People can stop reading the paper . . . That was an outrage . . . The editorial decision was either immensely stupid, or, I don’t know what else it could have been.”

Legal though it may have been, the cartoon has hatched a controversy which is yet another example of the debate in the media and entertainment industries over the effect that media has on society. Some, like Shields, believe violence in the media — be it movies, music, or cartoons like “Chef Al’s Fowl” — has little effect on societal behavior.

“Its just so odd,” says Shields, “that they see images of violent acts being inflicted on women as going to provoke violence in the community. As if stimulation that people get in the media gives them ideas and sort of instructs them in how to behave. I don’t agree with that.”

On the other hand, some like Nancy Gish, a professor of English and Women’s Studies at USM, who studies the effects of images and words on people’s world views, believe the exact opposite.

“Anyone who is in advertising knows that images effect people,” she says. Gish argues that though one cartoon like Shields’s may not actually cause violence, over time the viewing of many images of the demeaning of women can cause negative stereotypes, and even violence, to be accepted as mainstream.

She says Chef Al’s Fowl “normalizes and naturalizes the notion that women are objects to be used and violated. . . We come to experience [the message of images] as normal, the way things are because that’s what we see all the time. It’s that normalcy that has been the weapon of anti-Semitism in Germany and Klan activity in the South. Eventually it works.”

THE COMMUNITY REACTS: protesters object to Casco Bay Weekly's decision to run Martin Shield's cartoon in its February 22 and March 8 editions.

Amy Therrienes, another protest organizer, echoes Gish. She says she “could not believe the paper would put something in that graphically depicts violence against women. . . The fact that it got past the editorial staff shows how mainstream violence against women is, and that pisses me off.”

Aly Colon, a member of the ethics committee at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school and ethics lab in Florida, says the comic was unethical in its depictions, according to guidelines his institute has established for journalistic ethics. Poynter has developed three basic guidelines: seek the truth and report it as fully as possible, act independently, and minimize harm. Colon says that the decision to run “Chef Al’s Fowl” clearly violated the third guideline as it incurred harm without reason.

“Obviously this shows no sense of compassion and no sense of respect,” says Colon of the comic. “I don’t know what the point is except as a number of readers indicated, for shock value. But the purpose of the shock remains unclear.”

In an editorial in the March 15 issue of the CBW, editor David Tyler apologized for the strip, agreeing with Colon that it was “too outrageous” and “that it made no valid point.”

Tyler was forthright in telling the Phoenix that he and his staff exercised poor judgment in running the cartoon. “We made a mistake,” says Tyler. “We give a wide latitude to our writers and our illustrators here and it’s a very open and provocative paper. And in this case we made a mistake, and the mistake was in the beginning of the process, and it should not have run in the first place.”

However, not everyone was assuaged by the apology. Some, like Renee Berry-Huffman, Maine’s state coordinator for the National Organization of Women (NOW), disagreed with the notion that the cartoon’s only liability was its lack of a point. “What David Tyler is saying is if it had had a valid point it would have been acceptable to run,” she says. Like Gish, Berry-Huffman believes images of a woman being mutilated can adversely affect society’s treatment of women.

Others simply found the cartoon so repugnant, they want more than an apology can give. In a letter addressed to CBW’s advertisers, Peg Coleman, associate director of Family Crisis Services, went so far as to request that the paper “sponsor and attend training that will provide education concerning the issue of violence against woman and the role and responsibility of the media.”

Lael Morgan, publisher of the paper, says she has not yet decided if the paper will take Coleman’s suggestion. “I had no idea that that suggestion was on the table till yesterday,” she said on March 15. “I’ve not had time to think about that.”

Finally, some CBW readers felt that Tyler’s apology was mitigated by Corey Pandolph’s cartoon, on the same page as Tyler’s apology, which made the point that “nobody gets hurt in cartoons.”

At a March 14 meeting of NOW attended by Morgan, Susan Ashley, who is not a member of the group but attended due to concerns about the comic, held up the CBW and pointing to the cartoon said “What struck me is that next to the apology is this, which says ‘I take it back.’ ”

Morgan told the Phoenix she understands some feel the comic devalues the apology. “I heard a lot of discussion on that and I think that’s really a matter of opinion,” she said. “Some people said yes [it devalued the apology.]” When asked what her opinion is, Morgan replied that “The apology was genuine.”

Tyler also believes “the apology is clear” and asserts that it is the paper’s official line, but maintains that CBW will continue to voice other opinions like the cartoon by Pandolph.

“Our cartoonists and our writers are still free to express their opinions,” says Tyler. “[The editorial] is the paper’s apology for what happened. The cartoonists have their own right to express an opinion, as do the letter writers, as do the essayists. The paper will continue to allow the expression of opinions; we’ll just be more careful in the future in how we assess what comes in.”

Noah Bruce can be reached at nbruce@phx.com.