Cartoon of the Week | 07/23/2009 12:15 pm

Liza Donnelly's Cartoon of the Week: The Confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor

By Liza Donnelly

Liza Donnelly, noted cartoonist for The New Yorker, is also the editor, with her husband, Michael Maslin, of the book Cartoon Marriage: Adventures in Love and Matrimony by The New Yorker’s Cartooning Couple.

Liza Donnelly Cartoon Marriage.jpg

Click here for more cartoons from Cartoon Marriage.

Click here for more cartoons from Liza’s earlier book, Sex and Sensibility.

Click here for more of Liza Donnelly’s cartoons of the week.

Read more about: Cartoons, Humor, Liza Donnelly, Sonia Sotomayor, The New Yorker

24 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment

Brava, Liza, and I love the color…we do seem to have the bright lights on color these days, finally. As I read the caption, I was reminded of yesterday’s Kathleen Parker column: "Here’s what women hear when men ask a female candidate about her temperament: ‘Are you really the bitch everyone says you are?’ Men can be temperamental and still be great; women are merely impossible to deal with."

Sotomayor will be passionate, giving Scalia a run for his money. Thank you for sharing your creativity, Liz.

Peace and grace

By BethWillis on 07/23/2009 8:58 pm

Yes!!

By JHolmes on 07/23/2009 9:16 pm

As the father of a daughter, who now feels witty enough to refer to herself as a "sarcastic c**t", this is just depressing. My beautiful, intelligent and funny, seventeen year old daughter thinks it’s impressive to shock others with vulgarity and sees no harm in refering to herself as a c**t. This has truly become a graceless age.

By JayCheuvront on 07/24/2009 9:39 am

Thanks, all! Words change over time. The c word is one I am not remotely comfortable using…it has unclear connotations (to me) in a way that the b word does not. But then she is much younger than I, so I may not know the context of her generation. When women use these words, they can have different meanings, as with people of color using comparable words, I think.

By LizaDonnelly on 07/24/2009 10:14 am

Dear Liza: Your New Yorker colleague, Jeffrey Toobin, had a good piece on Sotomayer in the recent issue. As he said, "The best barometer of the current moment in law and politics, however, came not from the Judge’s answers but from the senator’s questions––the ones they chose not to ask as well as the ones they did." Words have impact–-in fact, the word, "stupidly" said by Obama regarding the policeman who shackled up poor Skip reverberated within hours like a balloon soaring into the skies. I’ve always thought the old nursery rhyme, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me," was absolutely wrong. Words do change in meaning over time, but for some of us that put a lot of stock in language it pains us, like the poster above, to see it being bandied about so indiscriminately. And nowadays a thumb on a little hand held machine pecks out messages that aren’t even in a language some of us would recognize.

P.S. Liked the cartoon, by the way.

By phyllisDoylePepe on 07/24/2009 6:47 pm

Thanks, Phyllis. I always enjoyed Toobin’s commentary during the election. He brings a non-dogmatic human side to things. And he was so right, her relative silence brought attention to their words…

By LizaDonnelly on 07/27/2009 9:42 am

I see it as that when a woman is either called a C or a B by a man, that means he lost the battle and has nothing left in his arsenal to throw at her. He has been reduced to name calling. Being called a B or C, to me, is the same thing. If you can use the B word in that fashion, you can use the C word the same way. Because the C word is the worst thing a man can use to verbally assault a woman, perhaps if we used it more in our own circles, it would take power out of it when men say it. The Vagina Monolouges have a skit discussing taking power out of this word.

By audb on 07/29/2009 8:12 am