this is what concerns me

Sorry for the lack of updates. This past week I was lucky enough to tag along with my father on a trip to Israel where he was on a State Department-sponsored speaking tour. I’m slowly posting the photos on my Flickr, and will be putting up the juicy action-packed diary comics I drew there as soon as I slap on some watercolor. Plus! New weekly This is What Concerns Me’s are sitting on my drawing table waiting to be scanned. Soon this blog will look like a normal one, so please don’t unsubscribe just yet. At least wait until I offend your political notions.

You may have seen these in my Shared Items in the sidebar, but if not…

The nice folks at Vegansaurus loaned me their soapbox for a little bit of rant and a little bit of comics talk. And then the Daily Cross Hatch was kind enough to post my Open Letter to SPX, wherein I ask a lot of questions I heard in whispers over the weekend. So basically this post is to alert any of you in case my body washes up in the Bay soon. I’m writing my last will and testament. Who wants my cat?

This review is of the “Best American Comics 2008″ edition, which actually took chances on “up & coming” creators (that Eleanor Davis cover! my god!) as opposed to this year’s volume, which is about as recession-proof safe as one could imagine. My guess is they’ll sell as many(/few) of the boring as of the good ones, but try to convince some Houghton-Mifflin editor of such economic realities? Good fucking luck, he’s banking on modest Crumb-driven sales. (No, I cannot bring myself to blame guest editor Charles Burns.)

And I’m starting the year-end awards early, because really, there’s no way anything could top this.

Doree Shafrir wrote an interesting take on discrepancies between male and female wages over at Jezebel. She takes into consideration a lot of the outside factors often ignored in the 77-cents-on-the-dollar figure that’s normally thrown around in this debate, normalizing for different career choices and the like — though it turns out “there’s still a five percent wage gap for male and female college graduates, even after controlling for things like age, race and ethnicity, region, marital status, children, occupation, industry, and hours worked, according to testimony given in April to the United States Joint Economic Committee.”

Doree concludes that this is because women are less likely than men to negotiate their salaries, and I think she’s right to a certain degree. I know I was really freaked out by the prospect at first, and I’ve always been more willing and perhaps able to negotiate in jobs that I didn’t want as much as the ones I did.

But the thing is, I think Doree is ignoring the sociology behind negotiations. This argument presumes that women would be able to win those arguments were they even to bring it up; given she led with Peggy Olsen from Mad Men being snubbed when asking for a raise, this seems pretty funny to me. Women are not rewarded for being aggressive or going after what they want, and I’ve certainly gotten a toned-down Don Drapering myself sometimes when asking to be paid a fair wage for my work. I think it’s important  to encourage women to negotiate, but it’s unfair to put all the blame on them for not asking when there’s still the matter of someone — usually a man — with the real power.

Then again, more men have hired me than women, so fuck if I know what’s going on here, but it probably has something to do with my breasts.