Salon: Doonesbury: Jerked Off the Funny Pages

Hundreds of papers might be pulling this Sunday's strip for referring to the health benefits of masturbation. Garry Trudeau talks to Salon about his comic's 32-year history of controversy.

After commenting on almost every political and cultural controversy of the past three decades -- from Vietnam to Iraq, from revolutions sexual to Starbucksian -- Garry Trudeau is at it again. This Sunday, "Doonesbury," his popular and beloved comic strip, might be pulled from roughly half of the 1,400 newspapers that syndicate it.

Why the uproar? Because Trudeau has dared to address the ever-sensitive issue of getting off -- specifically, how getting off can keep you healthy. The strip is based on a recent study in the New Scientist that finds that frequent masturbation can help prevent prostate cancer. Despite the subject matter's rather heartwarming implications, 19 out of 34 editors polled by the Milwaukee Journal said they would not publish it.

Trudeau talked with Salon by e-mail, about the masturbation furor, "Doonesbury's" history of controversy, and which of his characters would be most likely to take the study about prostate cancer to, er, heart.

So it looks like you're the new Joycelyn Elders. What do you think it is about the M-word that has provoked such a strong response?

Well, there are certain words that trigger a response simply because they've never before appeared in a family-friendly context like the comics. "Masturbation" is obviously a loaded word, but as a descriptor, it's not actually vulgar or coarse, which is why I'm comfortable using it. And the strip in question isn't actually about masturbation or cancer, it's about the inability of two particular adults to find a mutual comfort zone to discuss a serious subject. Since the more traditional viewpoint (Boopsie's) is presented without mockery, conservative readers really shouldn't be offended.

Still, the syndicate and I understood that some papers would not be prepared to accommodate this little depiction of the shifting nature of taboos. After all, editors are still arguing over the acceptability of the word "suck." So we offered a substitute strip for editors who felt caught out of their comfort zones by the strip.

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http://salon.com/mwt/feature/2003/09/05/trudeau/index.html