From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!houxm!ihnp4!ihldt!ll1!otuxa!we13!burl!rcj
Newsgroups: net.misc,net.politics
Title: Should we get rid of Miss Buxley in the Beetle Bailey comic strip?
Article-I.D.: burl.14
Posted: Tue Dec 21 14:08:10 1982
Received: Thu Dec 23 21:17:36 1982

There was an article by a staff writer in the Greensboro, NC Daily
News about Beetle Bailey recently.  Seems that for about a year now
Mort Walker (the author of the strip) has been getting protest/hate
mail from irate readers concerning the sexist attitude of his comic
strip with regards Miss Buxley, the buxom blonde secretary to General
Halftrack.  One newspaper in Wisconsin?Minnesota? (somewhere, I forget)
even went so far as to refuse to post the strip one day and tagged a
note instead telling readers that Beetle Bailey's subject matter was
too sexist to be published by their paper.  Most other papers, however,
have conducted polls and the response has been overwhelmingly in favor
of NOT removing Miss Buxley or the strip itself.  I tend to agree with
one reader who noted (I'm paraphrasing here because I do not have the
article here in front of me) that the tyranny you create (censorship)
is far worse than the tyranny you destroy (sexism).  Mort Walker has
written a book on the subject called, I believe, "Miss Buxley: Sexism
in Beetle Bailey?"  He seems to believe that he is simply portraying
life as it really is a lot of the time, and for family viewing reasons
he has set certain "rules" (i.e., General Halftrack never lays a hand
on Miss Buxley).

What's your view?

Curtis Jackson	(...!floyd!burl!rcj)

P.S.  Flame to somebody else; I didn't write it, I'm just the piano player