Blame it on Andy Capp

Oct 31, 2008 Letters

Dear Editor,
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me: says the barman to Andy Capp, “I hear Flo hurt her back.” Andy replies, “Yeah, she was trying to move the couch near the television; in the end, I had to get off and move it myself.” Still, there are other much worse and disgusting incivilities to rile you up bitter-bitter.
I have pondered on the Andy Capp comic strip numberless times, and I keep reading it, even though I have long regarded it as neither funny nor amusing. For me, the Andy Capp comic is nothing more than a daily dosage of disparaging remarks that demoralize and demean women, reducing them to the status of mere fools and tools to be taken advantage of.
But I’m definitely dumbfounded that the Andy Capp strip has not been able to attract the attention of women’s rights organisation/groups. How could this callous bum, whose main target is his wife, be able to denigrate womanhood so persistently for so long without even a buzz from our leading women liberators?
It’s really amazing to me that, with all the shouting from the mountain top about domestic violence, spousal abuse, rape, murder of young women, Andy Capp is still seen only as amusing — providing stress relief.
He constantly makes a mock of Flo as a woman not worthy of any good, respect and commendation, except to slave like a mule. Andy never has any good advice for a young married man or one about to get married. Flo’s mother, like her, is forever insulted, with utter sarcasm and contempt whenever they meet, except when she makes a financial offer.
The pub, pools hall, horses and soccer are his foremost interest, and Flo’s purse takes top priority. Mr. Editor, all comic strips are not just simply comic stuff, they also infuse, induce and propagate healthy/unhealthy positive/negative responses, depending on their contents. There are many young men who read Andy Capp and are smitten by him. They take his words/doings as gospel, and this becomes harmful to their marriage or relations with other women.
They see the Andy behaviour as a way of asserting their manhood, being macho; a way of keeping the woman “in line.” What do you think of a young man’s reaction to this one: Andy says to Flo, “I think it’s silly the way we pay a window cleaner.
I am home all day doing nothing, so I’ll get the bucket and cloth ready for when you get home from work.”
Andy Capp is the unseen culprit in ways more than we want to imagine. So, when Geeta Singh wrote “The real problem is young men who do not treat women with respect” (SN, October 2, 08), she needs to understand that it goes beyond dressing up, wearing saris and make up; it is something that has been cultivated, perhaps unwittingly, through (in part) the daily dosage of a character like Andy Capp for decades.
Frank Fyffe

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