“Aack Cast” — named by the strip’s creator, Cathy Guisewite, herself — is a frustrated millennial’s journey to understanding, though not necessarily forgiving, the working white women of the “rightfully despised” Boomer generation and their second-wave feminist struggles.
How do you decide to dive so deeply into what might seem like random or perhaps un-zeitgeisty subject matters like Mensa, “Lolita” or “Cathy” comics.In “Aack Cast,” Cathy’s workplace and body-image episodes made me actually have sympathy for boomer women, which for a bitter millennial, is a real feat.Part of what’s so amazing about the “Cathy” strip is that it was a way of watching their story unfold in real time, and I wanted to talk to as many women as possible to track their version of that journey, from how second-wave feminism influenced or excluded them, to how it was replaced by consumption and apathy.
[“The Bechdel Cast,” which Loftus co-hosts, is an unscripted-conversation podcast about the portrayal of women in a different movie each week].
I felt myself being so unsympathetic to boomer women to the point that I was being deeply unsympathetic to my mom.I hate to endorse a boomer, but I hope to be like her someday?
The few critical messages from boomer women I’ve gotten can be best described as “gentle mothering.” They were very like, “Sweetheart, I love what you’re doing, but …”.But then there’s other stuff that I don’t know that this is going to change in their lifetimes, like women downplaying the workplace harassment they dealt with or even defending it.
I felt a connection to the women I spoke to, even when we disagreed