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Aack! A Millennial’s Audio Odyssey Through the ‘Cathy’ Comic Strip - The New York Times
Oct 18, 2021 1 min, 37 secs
The comedian Jamie Loftus returns with another limited-run podcast, this time exploring white boomer women through the lens of a much-maligned comic strip.

Her most recent podcast, “Aack Cast,” about the much-maligned “Cathy” comic strip that ran from 1976 to 2010, should quash any lingering concerns about typecasting.

“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

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