A cartoon is a highly condensed kind of message, which will fail if the

recipient doesn’t ‘get it’ at first glance. So it’s designed to get us to focus on
the central point, without being distracted by incidental background details.
One way to accomplish that is to depict something that’s instantly
recognizable because it matches our prototype for the relevant social setting
(be that a workplace, a restaurant, a classroom or a stone-age hunt). It’s not
that we can’t make sense of non-prototypical scenarios when we encounter
them in real life, but we process information faster when it doesn’t conflict
with our default expectations. So, messing with the prototype is something
that tends to happen only when the point is to challenge conventional
expectations. This is a common strategy in feminist cartoons, where the
point or joke is actually about gender or sexism. But in most cases gender is
just a background feature: if you treat it non-prototypically you risk pushing
it into the foreground and ruining the intended effect.
To keep the joke ‘clean’, you have to avoid distracting people with
unexpected background details, like a female placed without comment
in the slot for a generic category-member (a guard dog, a businesswolf,
a Scot, or whatever). But the result is that women are either absent
from cartoons which aren’t directly about women, or else they only
appear in very stereotypical roles where their presence is in line with
our expectations.
These are not overtly sexist cartoons. They aren’t making a point about
women, or male-female relations; the women (where there are any)
aren’t being mocked or belittled or objectified. Yet I’ve been arguing
that they are, in fact, examples of low-level sexism. What they
exemplify is the kind of pattern ethnomethodologists call ‘seen but
unnoticed’: like the background noise in a coffee shop, we tune it out
so we can concentrate on the important stuff in the foreground.
Social change only really succeeds when new ways of thinking,
speaking and acting become normalized, taken for granted and treated
as unremarkable. To put it another way, when the background changes.
When we stop needing extra time to process a sentence that refers to a
doctor or supervisor as ‘she’. When we don’t think ‘hey, a woman!’ if
it’s a female voice that addresses us from the flight-deck. When the
minor characters in stories and jokes—generic shopkeepers, guard
dogs, stone-age people or space aliens—are as likely to be female as
male, and no one thinks anything of it. When no one is a ‘non-man’—
or more importantly, a non-person.
Carlinhos Maia: “Meu casamento não é gay, é a união de Carlinhos e
Lucas”